May 2026, AU: New South Wales grower Katrina Swift outlined key insights about artificial intelligence at the 2026 GRDC Grains Research Updates.
New South Wales grower Katrina (Treen) Swift believes artificial intelligence will be transformative for the Australian grains industry, but there are challenges to be navigated.
At GRDC’s Grains Research Updates, she shared key insights from her 2024 GrainCorp Nuffield Scholarship after travelling to 24 countries to study the use of AI.
The 44-year-old farms 4,200 ha south of Parkes with husband Mark (a member of GRDC’s Northern Panel), brother Bruce, sister-in-law Karina and parents Jim and Janelle Watson.
Large language models
Treen said AI came to the fore in 2022, with the rise of powerful large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT.
“AI was one of the fastest-adopted global innovations, compared with electricity and the telephone, which took 50 years to reach rural areas,” she said.
“ChatGPT reached 100 million users in 2 months. AI education is now mandatory in all Chinese primary and secondary schools.”
AI security
At the Mississippi State University 2025 AI in Ag Conference and a follow-up meeting in Washington, DC, data scientist Ezekiel McReynolds highlighted the risks growers faced against hackers and ransomware. He discussed botnets: malware-infected devices that remain dormant on web-connected systems until sold on the dark web.
“Imagine losing control of your irrigation systems in a week of extreme temperatures, or somebody moves your virtual fence to incorporate the local highway,” Treen said.
“It could be as simple as changing one code in an algorithm from true to false, and crops rather than weeds could be sprayed.”
She said small swarms of drones may one day be used for green-on-green weed spraying. Alternatively, these could be weaponised.
Treen urged the grains industry and potentially the government to work together to develop lower-cost cybersecurity plans for growers.
Technology developments
Globally, she said, autonomous transport was almost a reality.
“One day, this might mean asking the car to travel 4 hours to pick up spare parts.”
At the One Crop Health Project in Denmark, Australian scientist Dr Guy Coleman championed open-source (freely available) data.
Dr Coleman continues to work on the Open Weed Locator (OWL), enabling autonomous weed spraying using components that growers could source and repair themselves.
Treen said she supported open-source platforms for sharing data, but noted a potential threat that data could be captured, repackaged, and sold back to growers using a proprietary algorithm.
“And data must be exportable if growers want to move to another provider.”
Value to growers
A low-cost autonomous tractor she saw in the US was developed by Kingman Ag Founder and Chief Executive Officer Connor Kingman, whom she met with in California.
“He uses off-the-shelf components for autonomous tractors that cost about the same as a cabin. He has also built a proprietary antenna that enables connectivity almost anywhere, ensuring remote monitoring. There is no additional cost to the farmer from removing redundant cab engineering and replacing it with autonomy.”
She said the meeting was a eureka moment: “Claude can code, Gemini can provide the instructions, Alibaba and Amazon have the parts, and a 3D printer could join in. This will enable more farm-made equipment and solutions.”
New developments
Treen highlighted a recent development called OpenClaw, an open-source AI agent framework that does not require user interaction between AI agents.
Rather than asking a standard AI assistant for daily grain prices, she said growers could automate through a personalised GPT (generative pre-trained transformer, a type of LLM) that would provide alerts and receive notifications of significant market changes.
She encouraged growers and advisers to join GRDC’s Grain Automate Farmers’ Yarn on Facebook – a space to connect, share and learn about autonomy and smart farming.
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