In this episode, I had the opportunity to chat with Matt Ryan of Rubicon Water on a tech transfer success story that is rippling through irrigation markets around the world.
Rubicon Water is an ASX listed company that started in 1995 following the consolidation of a number of Victorian rural water boards. Members of the departing staff identified inefficiencies in the movement of water from dam to crop and started to develop products and solutions to meet market needs for efficient water management.
Early trial work led by Matt in the Burdekin River Irrigation Area around Ayr in Far North Queensland gave confirmation of the market need and the testing of early product solutions. Rubicon’s market hypothesis in the late 1990s was that better scheduling and delivery of water from dam to farm would complement (then) application technologies. The value was apparent from the regular drought cycles that affect Australian agriculture. The product required to create value needed to better measure and manage the flows through irrigation channels to match supply with demand.
Matt explained that the Rubicon team didn’t have the internal capacity to undertake the product development R&D. He also shared that Rubicon had a hunch that the challenge could be solved with an electrical engineering, rather than (a more conventional) civil, agriculture or hydraulic engineering approach. This disruptive thinking led to a partnership with Professor Iven Mareels (then) at the University of Melbourne before his current roles as Non-Executive Director at Rubicon and Pro-Vice Chancellor at Federation University. Matt also shares a little of the Australian Research Council funding history that sat alongside the research collaborations.
The product, now referred to in the Industry as Total Channel Control (TCC) arising from the hunch was trialled in Far North Queensland and Matt shares with us some of the technical elements needed to bring the product together. This journey included new gate designs (inspired from the aviation sector), telemetry, scheduling software and distributed network control loops (noting that we are still in the late 90s). What was equally fascinating was the industry culture and the challenges in marketing, selling and implementing such a different product offering to market. Matt noted that “the hardest thing is the people”.
We conclude our discussion around the current opportunities for Rubicon, particularly as USA water markets are changing in Arizona and California. We also reflect on the broader set of stakeholders that are part of bringing the technology to market, not just in the USA, including urban and environmental water requirements and recognising the rights and needs of indigenous communities.
Transcript
CB: Hello everyone, and welcome to Tech Transfer Talk. My name is Cameron Begley, Managing Director of Spiegare. And joining me today is Matt Ryan, the General Manager of Tech Services at Rubicon Water. Rubicon Water actually came into orbit around Spiegare by way of the Agrifood Fund Conference, which Paul Jensz runs, and through a sequence of email exchanges and
conversations. Matt has been kind enough to join us today to tell us a little bit about a very positive tech transfer experience. Matt, welcome to the podcast.
MR: Thank you, Cameron. It’s great to be here and great to share the journey that we’ve been on at Rubicon.
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CB: When I first heard the story, I must admit I was really captivated because so often we hear in Australia lamentation about ‘Oh, tech transfer doesn’t work and we’re not good at getting our stuff out the door’ and all the rest of it. And here sits before us, I think, a really fascinating story about your collaboration with the University of Melbourne and the problem you were trying to solve. So, Matt, before we really kick off, I’m curious to hear a little bit more about Rubicon Water and also about your own journey to what you do as a general manager of tech services.
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MR: I’ve been at Rubicon since the company’s inception in 1995. Rubicon Water basically was established after the owners, the current owners of Rubicon Water, were all staff members at the Royal Water Corporation of Victoria. So, so in a sense, we, you know, we were part of that sort of government bureaucracy in running, you know, the rural water or being involved in the rural water scene in Victoria, in particular, mainly from the technical aspect. We’re all engineers. In 1995, the Rural Water Corporation, as it was then, was sort of broken up with a sort of technology aem. So, within the Rural Water Corp, we were known as the Water Management System Group. And this is where we sort of started on the journey of realising the, introducing information technology into running rural water. Really started around then with a bit of telemetry and data, but more so on automated planning. So, introducing software tools to help irrigation planners, you know, schedule the water down the canals. So, that was back in 1995.
So, roll forward to 2024, my role at Rubicon. I’ve had various stints there as a very young engineer, just, you know, implementing projects here and there around Victoria. But then I moved up to Townsville, actually, and after Rubicon was sort of, became Rubicon in 1995, we started to branch out into other irrigation authorities, and one was Sun Water. What is now called, now what is now called Sun Water. It was, it was under a different name back then. So, I was up there for about 4 or 5 years and really that’s where I cut my teeth. I’m a civil engineer by trade but always had a bit of an aptitude for the technology side of things. And, you know, bits and bytes and instrumentation and, you know, maybe I should have been a computer science engineer, but anyway, that’s neither here nor there. So, look, I had a really good grounding up in Townsville working for Rubicon Water, but pretty well doing everything. So, it was, yeah, data comms, telemetry, you know, irrigation gates, automatic control, etc. and dealing on the software side of things.
And that’s actually where we started the collaboration with Melbourne Uni, which we’ll get on to. There was actually the, some of the first experiments were conducted with me actually up in, up in Queensland in, in a town called Ayr. We continued to grow, we continued to develop our, our systems. We branched out in the State, into the States in about 2008, with a branch office over there in, Colorado. So, that was really our first sort of foray out into the globe. Fast forward to now, we IPO’d in 2021. We are global. We’ve transformed really our business from an Australian centric one…
CB: I get the sense Matt that, in 1995, you had a sense of what the problem was that you were going to go out and solve, because I’m assuming that there’s a bit of a history of being in the industry with the Rural Water Corporation. So, you what, whilst you’re in a state corporation, which may not give you the flexibility to actually go and solve problems, you probably had a sense of what those problems and opportunities might look like. And I’m interested, because I sense that’s the initial thesis for Rubicon Water, that there’s a problem that needs solving. And you guys were going to tool up and solve it. What was that problem that you identified in 95 and beyond?
MR: Well, you’re dead right. Look, it was mainly around the, I suppose, the inefficiency of moving it from dam to crop. So, we understood and recognised that moving a mega litre of water from Lake Eildon to a farm in Tongala. So, you know, there were lots of losses along the way. And, you know, most irrigation schemes operated manually like that, operate at about 50 to 60% efficiency, i.e. you know, what arrives at the root zone of a crop is, you know, about half what’s diverted. So, we recognised that ‘Look, we think this can be done better’. And how how would it be done better? It’s really around better scheduling of water application, better delivery of that water from dam to crop. And by replacing manually operated once-per-day, can control gates with automatic control gates, that operate frequently to match supply with the variable demand. Look, the application efficiency side of it is, sort of already a well-known problem, and somewhat solved through the application of drip and spray, in terms of an application efficiency method. So, you know, there are lots of plays in the drip and spray industry. And drip and spray is a very, very efficient way to apply water to a crop- that’s well understood. But I guess we were of the opinion that drip and spray is quite capital intensive and its quite operation, you know, carries a lot of opex because you have to pressurise everything. So, we were very much, a part of our DNA is, sort of what we call, you know, surface water, gravity irrigation. We felt that you could still get good application efficiencies through surface irrigation. And look, that was sort of developing as well with land forming, laser grading, better application techniques, high flow irrigation was an emerging sort of method of applying water to farms. Get the water on quick. Get it off quick. Rubicon is quite agnostic to the drip and spray industry, by the way, and we work closely with the industry players. As for these application techniques to work efficiently, accurate scheduling and on demand network is also crucial. So, we felt we had you know, we had big ideas and we felt we had something to offer in the whole dam-to crop sort of cycle because you know, in the bigger picture, % of the world’s fresh water is used by agriculture.
CB: Yeah. What’s interesting there, Matt, for me is that you you started out with that bigger picture of from dam-to-crop, but you had identified that that application efficiency market was well serviced. So, that was not the place that you went. You actually really went from the dam to the farm gate and then let other actors deal with the distribution of water from the farm gate onto the crop, because that was, that was already well taken care of.
MR: Yep, to a point. Look, we are in the space now with our Farm Connect business, in that space as well, with products that do provide high flow irrigation and also have integration into the distribution network. And also, you know, using some better science to apply surface water for flood irrigation, using, you know, sensing where the waterfront is and doing soil moisture monitoring. And even on the demand prediction side of things, we’re also in that space now. So, we kind of had all these things that we thought were part of the picture. And demand forecasting is another one. So, you know, I guess that’s tech that we’re continuing to develop and that’s newer. But back in 1995, it was mainly about scheduling. And the two go hand-in-hand actually. And trying to reduce operational losses in irrigation canals when it’s, when it’s delivered.
So, I really, you know, we sort of approached it from a measurement perspective, but also having a good understanding of what the demands were and then understanding that a supply network and irrigation canal supply network has a finite ability to provide water. So, it is, so it is about scheduling, being able to move that around like most of the time you’ve got to order your water. So, about ‘When can I order it and how much?’ And back in the sort of old days and, you know, with some irrigation schemes now that are still run manually, there’s up to 72 hours lead time that a farmer has got to decide, you know, when to irrigate. And when you look at the science and you start to look at consumptive use of crops and trying to match the consumptive use of the crop as it’s growing with water application. I mean, that’s that’s the end game, really, in saving this water from dam to crop. So, you’ve got to be able to get it there efficiently without wasting the water. So, that means, you know, you’re stopping the water falling out of the system. You’re rather keeping it in the dam, you’re able to identify where your losses are. You’re able to prevent, seeps and leaks by measuring and doing remediation work where you need to. Yeah, stopping outfalls. Look, stopping outfalls is probably the biggest one. So, in order to provide that level of service to farmers, you know, irrigation authorities would tend to oversupply in order to keep the head in the canal. And, you know, have an abundance of water to enable this, you know, flexibility, if you like, that a crop might need, where, introducing our tech, you know, you could picture the irrigation scheme now running like a pipeline.
CB: Yeah. So, for those of our listening audience that don’t know what an outfall is, would you mind just quickly defining that term?
MR: Well, an outfall is called a relief, called a spill, in, depending what state in Australia are. It’s basically when you when you put water into a canal to, to deliver it to the farm gate. And this is the excess water that doesn’t get consumed at the farm gate and will generally fall out of the system mainly, you know, possibly, notionally into a drainage network that will ultimately find its way into a river somewhere.
CB: So, thank you for defining that firstly. But the thing that struck me as you were describing that was there was this subtle shift in your language where we started to talk about demand driven. So,
when does the crop need the water? Not so much when the irrigator can release it or, you know, so I sense there was a subtle shift somewhere in there between ‘Well, you’ll get the water when we can deliver it to you and be grateful you’ve got what you’ve got’, moving that mentality to one of demand driven. And, if that is so, I suspect there’s a bit of complexity lurking inside trying to do demand driven, water delivery to farmers because producers, will have different needs at different times. And you’re trying to move things and it’s, I guess it’s not in pipes, its in channels.
MR: Correct. Look, you ‘re dead right. And that’s part of the problem. So, if we could pipe everything, you could turn a tap on and you could more or less have water on demand. It’s quite you know, that’s a reasonably straightforward thing. That’s how urban water supply systems work. I don’t have to order water to take my shower. Look, it’s a different kettle of fish obviously, when you’ve got an open canal. There’s dynamics involved. there’s delay in moving water from A to B, there’s losses, and it’s quite dynamic depending on the sort of hydraulic state of the network. So ,it really makes sense to be able to have a demand driven type supply, i.e. I only put enough water in the system that the system needs and, you know, no more, no less. So, you know, really, we want to then put as much water that’s leaving the system into the system as closely as we possibly can. And there’s two, there’s two aspects there. There’s the amount. Because of the delay times involved moving water from point A to point B in an irrigation canal. There’s the latency, there’s the time delay. And, look on top of that there’s dynamics, there’s the irrigation canals. And, you got to be a bit careful about not responding to waves. So, it seems like a no brainer, right?
CB: But, so, you’ve got this terrific problem. So, Matt we’re now early 90s early noughties. You’ve got this problem that you’ve clearly defined. You’ve got a market that you think would get a benefit from delivering this solution. So, why did you need to collaborate with anyone to solve this problem?
MR: Probably because we’re only about, when we started Rubicon, we there was 20 people, so we had a bit to do.
CB: So, in a way it wasn’t, it wasn’t necessarily your inability to solve, but it was the capacity within the organisation to solve it.
MR: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, Rubicon, if you like, think of it, as after the break up of the RWC and the current owners mortgaged their houses and said, ‘Hey, you know, we think we can continue with this’, but we’re more or less a startup. With great ideas, lots of things that we wanted to to do, because it’s not just the control, there are other aspects to it. There’s the whole demand scheduling side of it and the, you know, producing actually a gate or a regulator device that was up to the task of doing this. So, there are a whole bunch of things that we knew we sort of needed to solve. And this one was, we didn’t really have a great control cap…well, we didn’t have any control capability within the company, to be honest. Actually, all civil engineers, ag engineers and some software guys. So, the whole control side of things, we knew there was an answer, but we certainly knew we couldn’t solve it, so…
CB: It’s interesting, Matt, then that., so, you sort of knew the technical elements you needed, but you collaborated with the university instead of, say, another private company, like there’s lots of control system company or when there are today, there certainly were in the 90s, as I recall. So, I’m fascinated in the decision to work with a university, in contrast to maybe going to the private sector, you know, some other SMEs or whomever, and saying, ‘Listen, let’s just put all this together amongst ourselves’.
MR: Look, I suppose that that could have been one way. And look, back in 1997, I was probably not at the forefront in terms of making that decision. But I do know that to date, this downstream control, demand driven control paradigm was in the, sort of space of the civil engineering world. By applying, applying hydraulic equations, Saint Bernard equation, and, you know, using some well known hydraulic equations to sort of, almost open loop control, this sort of, sort of thing, like we can model a canal, so therefore we know how much to put into it and how long it’ll take to get there, etc., etc.. That approach had been tried for some time and with limited success. So, we had a hunch that we think that more classical electrical engineering control techniques would work here. But back control using filtering, you know, this sort of stuff. And so, that was unique in that sense, in that no one else was doing it.
CB: Yeah. Yeah. It’s interesting. Yeah. It’s interesting. At this point, we look, you look like, ‘Oh, well, that was entirely obvious’, but it wasn’t entirely obvious in 1997. You were actually disrupting with a different way of solving the problem.
MR: Correct. And there, look, there are companies out there today who still say, ‘Oh, no, no, Rubicon is wrong. This is the way to do it’ but…We just get on with it and, you know. But yeah, you’re right. We parted from the norm, in that respect. So, look, the whole thing actually started up at ANU because we…
CB: Oh, interesting. Okay. My next question was how did you get to UMelb? So, you start at ANU.
MR: Yeah. So, a bloke called Dave Orton, he somehow got, tknew that there was some expertise, you know, up in, particularly in control. And maybe they were looking at it too. Maybe it was sparked from an idea there. But look, that’s where our association with a, with a guy called Professor Iven Mareels started. And Iven went on to be the Dean of Electrical Engineering at Melbourne. He’s won a bunch of academic awards. He’s now actually working at IBM, and actually, believe or not, he’s on the board at Rubicon now. And so, Ivens’s been on the journey with us. But basically we followed Iven to Melbourne. He left, he left ANU and went to Melbourne.
CB: That’s the connector. So, you follow the relationship, not the institution.
MR: Correct. The hunch to the ‘Let’s develop some experiments’ to ‘Hey, this thing’s got legs’, you know, happened, happened pretty quickly. It probably, you know, we first this, this sort of kick off with ANU and, you know, started in about 97 after Rubicon became Rubicon in 95. So, you know, two years later we started, I suppose, on this journey of driven control. See when I was up in Townsville as a young engineer was where we first started doing some experiments on, you know, validating some, some, some hunches. And I was the guy and I was Johnny-on-the-spot up there involved with re programming the PLCs and the gates to, you know, implement the new controllers with, with the chap from Melbourne Uni and another professor called Professor Eric Weyer, who we still collaborate with to this day. So, you know, that goes back also a while, that would be the, you know, the guy facilitating if you like, hosting in getting, make, talking to the water authority and you know, ‘Hey can we experiment on your system’ and stuff like that. So, really quickly we realised that, ‘Hey, this is, our hunch is right’. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We obviously tweaked it a bit, you know, because we were the practical engineers on the ground running irrigation water, so not everything works. So, we obviously tweaked it. Brought to it some other ideas with how the controller should run and stuff like that, and realised pretty quickly too, that it, you, when you run this demand-driven system that demand management is a part of it. You can’t really provide water on demand to everyone because there’s a finite capacity of the canal network. So, then it comes down to, you know, scheduling and being, making sure that the system that you’re working with can deliver comfortably, I suppose, the water, the thing that’s being asked for.
So, you know, in terms of the classical engine, electrical engineering side of things, we, you know, we, terms, like system identification. So, doing system identification tests whether the first one, developing, you know, validating and developing, and validating some reasonably simple models to understand how irrigation canals actually did work from a more classical system identification perspective. And then, of course, the control problem just falls out of that. Once you understand the understand the system, the control problem. It’s not trivial, but it’s, that’s really half of it understanding how the system works.
CB: It becomes addressable.
MR: Correct. But look, part of it was, you know, really, a network control view as well. So, it wasn’t just action in, in the one irrigation pool. So, you know, the way irrigation works, you generally have, you know, two, two regulating devices between an irrigation pool or an irrigation reach, you know, understand. Is that clear what I mean by an irrigation pool?
CB: It might be good to explain what an irrigation pool is, again, because, like output, not everyone will know what that is. They may be thinking of 50 metres by eight lanes at this point.
MR: Well, you could think of it like that. Often that’s the global metric. It’s not a mega litre. It’s an Olympic sized swimming pool. You know, that’s the metric that we often use. So, irrigation canals are not per se like rivers. They are staggered, they are terraced, if you like, because we, each irrigation segment which is separated generally by two regulating gates, one at the top, one at the bottom right, and t that’s what we refer to as a pool. So, generally, you want to hold the water at a certain height within that pool such that it can via gravity, you know, feed the farm. So, so you’ve got to maintain a certain water level so that, if you just picture it, you could picture it like 50 swimming pools all joined together, but each at a different level.
CB: So, the mental image I have, Matt, the locks and canals of England and France.
MR: Yes, yes. Correct.
CB: Just to give a mental image to those thinking differently.
MR: So you got to, you got to hold the water up at a certain elevation, a certain energy level, so that it can, indeed, you know, travel via gravity onto the farm.
CB: You’ve now identified the problem. So, the hunch is proving to be right and things are looking very promising. The early tests are looking promising, but to go from that point, you ultimately have to create a product that you can sell to producers, to irrigation system owners, to whomever it is. I’m interested in the journey from research output to product. That translation phase. What did that journey look like? I appreciate you need to do a trial and go, ‘Gee, this looks really promising’, but that’s typically the beginning of the journey, yeah.
MR: Yep. So, the initial trials were on an existing automated system using gates that, you know, Rubicon now produce their own regulating devices. Our gates, our slip meters. So, this is a product range that we have. But the initial experiments that we did, certainly up in North Queensland, 1997-98, they were on a, just an automated, what we call a lay flat door. So that the irrigation gate, if you think of it, is like a weir and to let more water go, it just opens up and pivots on a hinge and the water flows over the top. So, the more we lower the gate, the more water goes over. So, we were using, so Sun Water at that point, we’re actually using a US company, US based company to basically via what we call SATA. So, they drive those gates up and down to where they thought they needed to be. And we started to then introduce this automatic feedback control using those gates. But we quickly realised and we, look, we knew this anyway that, really those gates weren’t up to it from a perspective of being able to measure flow accurately. That’s key. So, that’s what we did discover as part of these tests, you really need to have very good flow measurement in order to control all these irrigation pools. Kind of makes sense if you think about it, that if we, you know, make a control action, we want to measure that and see what does need it to be very, quite high duty cycle.
So, the classic, you know, control problem is, you know, you want to be able to operate your control device, you know, as fast as, operates if you like. So, believe it or not, you’re going to need to move around quite a bit in order to achieve this on demand supply whilst keeping that water head in the channel stable. Because I’ve probably mentioned that that’s also quite key. So, you know, one of the hard things to do, apart from letting water fall out the bottom of the canal, which we’re trying to solve, you’ve got to keep that water level more or less constant in that pool. You know, there’s the two, sort of sometimes they’re competing objectives because again, the propensity is to put more water in the system, keep the canals high. I suppose our flagship product called the Flume Gate was born. So, the collaboration with MU didn’t produce the Flume Gate, but certainly what we needed for the control device emerged from that research. So, we went away actually and develop that in-house. Using some pretty innovative techniques, we built the gate out of aluminium, which, using sandwich panel construction, typically cast iron stainless, were the previous status quo in gate manufacture. We sort of leveraged off the aviation industry. We had an engineer working for us who used to work for Boeing. In fact, sorry, he was a contractor that did work and still works for Boeing, I believe. He came in and assisted us with this composite material construction to build this thing called the Flume Gate. The Flume Gate has a unique design that measures flow quite precisely. It does this because the, because of precision in its manufacture and also the instrumentation we use on the gate. So, we won’t dive too much technical side of things there. But the point is that when we when we drive that gate up and down, we can position the gate within about a millimetre of where we think it needs to be. And we can measure flow within about 2.5% of the actual flow. And that’s unique for an irrigation gate to be able to do that. Sort of made from scalable components. It was lightweight. It was able to be driven by solar power. So, 100-watt motors, 12-volt, 12 volts, you know, very, very small motors because you’ve only got a limited solar budget, of course.
So, all that was, you know, sort of fell out of that requirement, I suppose, to, you know, we understand the control problem. We understand what the controllers need to do. We now need to go and build a product. We ended up producing, a software solution that, if you like, was a specifically built for the irrigation industry that more or less managed that water from dam-to-crop. So, you know, we realised that farmers need to order their water. So, the system was integrated to have the farmers order their water. So, we understood what the demand was in any part of the network. We, indeed, use that demand information to help the controllers out. That demand information is an input into the into the control so that we understand how much water the system is demanding versus what the system should be demanding, like. So, that was important that we integrated the demand side of things into our, if you like, our enterprise software solution that involved irrigation gates, controllers, wide area data communications networks, and also demand scheduling. I suppose the guts of it.
CB: The question that strikes me, though, is that you’ve just described how you’ve had to re-engineer and redesign the mechanical system, the Flume Gates. You’ve got a software piece that’s coming together, and you’re actually having to bring a software hardware and probably a bit of a knowhow solution together in order to implement. Because taking, coming back to a remark you made earlier, Matt, you said that, you know, there are people out there that still don’t believe that what you do actually works. And the, if I can say old school, you’ve then not only got the kit and the software and all the telemetry and things to to deal with, but you’ve got a practice change and almost a culture change to deal with, amongst all that. Are you still, you know, moving into 2024? Is there still the culture change piece that needs to be done? I can imagine that when you started, of course, because you, as you said yourself, you were disrupting. But in 2024, is the culture change knowhow a piece still really important in the delivery of a product?
MR: Absolutely, yes. I often remarked to our sales guys, the hardest things, the people, the tech is now proven, was interesting. We had a really good… last year. Actually, the guy from Murrumbidgee Irrigation actually travelled to the States. You know, he was invited to a conference over there to talk about modernisation. Look, Australia, in terms of how it’s progressed in transforming the irrigation industries, is the shining light globally. You know, the amount of delegations that Goulburn Murray Water, Murrumbidgee Irrigation will have through. I mean, they’ve been really good actually. They’ve facilitated, but they’re happy to tell the story themselves. That change culture is still there, not too much in Australia, I think Australia is done. That ship has sailed. We’re pretty bullish on the USA at the moment, particularly with what’s going on in southern Colorado River basin. They’re going through their millennium drought, right now. We’re starting to see an uptick in the value of water there, like we did in Australia. So, the USA, you know, we’re seeing the same thing in the USA with regards to the value of water. They measure in acre feet over there.
CB: Yes, they do don’t they, God bless them.
MR: It’s more or less doubled in probably the last 3 or 4 years. It’s $840 per acre feet. It will be interesting for us. And this is the Colorado River pact is about to be renegotiated in 19, in 2026, 100 years after it was first done in 1926.
CB: I had heard that, yes.
MR: That will be a very interesting time in that southern Colorado basin with regards to who are the people who are, you know, a bit gung-ho, and who are the people who are looking to reduce these outfalls to get more efficient, to implement modern practices. So, whilst we fire the flag and we do have, you know, we have a good business in the States and we have people over there who are, sometimes it’s hard for an Aussie to go over there and tell them what to do, but look, it’s coming.
CB: It’d be an interesting sort of experiment in human behaviour, in a way it sounds, Matt. There’ll be those that will hang on to the old ways and and tradition, and this is how we’ve always done it. And then there will be those that see the opportunity, look to what’s happened in Australia and other pockets of the world, and seize that opportunity with you and get on with it. That’ll be an interesting study in industry cultural change, I suspect, over the coming years with the southern Colorado.
MR: And also depending on where you are with your rights. So, if you’re a primary, secondary, third, fourth, fifth, fifth user. It tends to be the guys down the bottom. And one of them is Metropolitan Water, which buys LA and San Diego who are very interested in saving water.
CB: Yes, I suspect they are. Yeah, yeah. Although the majority of their stuff is in pipes, I would imagine, rather than in open channels?
MR: Correct. But they still divert from the Colorado from, primary users of the Colorado use what they want and put it back. So, if they can buy water from those guys by saving water, they get water.
CB: Yes. There’ll be some very interesting partnership opportunities I suspect through that for Rubicon.
MR: Yeah, absolutely. And you know, another one out of left field is actually the indigenous tribes. So, who weren’t so much at the table.
CB: Of course they weren’t at the table in 1926. That’s just not how things were done then.
MR: But, you know, as custodians of water, the indigenous people.
CB: Matt, you’re painting a very interesting picture, not only of the market dynamics, but also of how the technology that you’ve developed over this journey is going to create value in different ways. So, you know, whilst we, the majority of, if not all of our conversations been about agricultural irrigation, there are these other stakeholders and markets that are now going to be party to the implementation of your technology, or be it cultural reasons, if I can broadly use that for the indigenous peoples of those lands, but the urban populations who actually don’t want to run out of water when they want to have their shower,
MR: It’s super important. Just on the Southern California scene, where we’re implementing our Farm Connect technology, where, you know, precision surface irrigation using better scheduling, measurement and control of water distribution from dam-to-crop also leads to better environmental outcomes. With more reliable water sources in upstream storages, controlled water flows into the environment and reduced nutrient runoff from farms and lower soil salinity. Stress groundwater aquifers benefit as more surface water is conserved, leading to less land subsidence and, believe it or not, increasing land values with more reliable water sources. You know, we’re seeing that they’re using half the water on these, on these farms that have implemented that technology. So, that application rate is getting close to dripping spray. And indeed, we’re stealing some jobs from the dripping spray industry now.
CB: Ah okay. So, going back to that earlier concept where you picked where you wanted to play, and then you noted you’re expanding into that drip and sprayer application efficiency market. You’re now actually building into that as a natural adjacency to where you built your strength.
MR: Exactly right. And the main driver there is economics. It costs much less. And you’d have to pump it. Of course, key is, you need the distribution system to feed it. That is flexible. So, it all you can see where it all does tie in.
CB: Yeah. Absolutely, absolutely. The thing I wanted to draw things to a close about was what have been the key characteristics of the partnership with UMelbourne? You touched on the longevity of the relationship. And clearly, Iven has moved from primary investigator through a long relationship onto the board of of Rubicon Water. But I’m interested in the institutional relationships in a way as much as the personal ones. But at the University of Melbourne.
MR: Interestingly enough, Rubicon initial funding came from an Aus Industry startup grant from the federal government. This is pretty important because the grants were awarded to small and medium enterprises and not universities, and as part of the collaborative research. The government reckoned that SMEs were the biggest generators of export income. Our first two grants under this programme became the background research or original building blocks for the follow up research under the ARC grants. So, obviously Rubicon would supply, you know, in-kind stuff and also some cash and in-kind. And we jointly work on these projects and we have agreements around joint IP, commercial arrangements around that joint IP, which are quite friendly. I mean, the basics of it are that we’re obviously involved in a certain sector of the market, but, you know, Melbourne Uni can teach it. They can see if it can apply to other aspects of the market. And indeed, they do. They, I know, there’s parts of their courses now where they touch on the stuff that we do. We, I think we have, you know, it’s a breeding ground for our, particularly our control engineers. We’ve got one, two, three. We’ve got at least 4 or 5 control engineers. Some are PhDs who are now staff at Rubicon. And that’s been really good too, because that that continues to foster that very close relationship. So, you know, I’ve, I’ve met some of these kids, I might say, who are, you know, I’ve come through the ranks and now they work for me.
CB: Yeah. Fantastic. So, it’s quite a dynamic relationship. And what I’m fascinated by there is the ARC grant system was the catalyst for driving the relationship along, ultimately from a resources perspective, because you need money to pump prime these things, pun intended, by the way.
MR: And look, we actually do collaborate beyond. So, we’ve got some on farm research projects going on at the moment with Uni Milan. And also the University of Girona, in where, we have an office actually. So, in Spain. And look, we work pretty closely with UC Davis. We’re actually participating in a, an industry white paper at present specifically to address the US market. But we’re sort of relying on some UC Davis and some academics around, you know, co-author, if you like, with us and the US Conference of Irrigation and Drainage is actually on in Sacramento first week of October. And I’ll be there, not delivering it, but one of our guys will be delivering a paper about what we’re doing and the importance of scheduling control and player measurement and what we do.
CB: This has been a terrific conversation, and such a pleasing example of how a relationship and how innovation has just generated so much opportunity and not just returned to, you know, the growers, to Rubicon Water, but also, you know, those water savings can be deployed to either grow more food and fibre or to be put back into environmental flows. There’s just so many benefits that that arise from what ostensibly was a bit of a disruptive idea that you went off and tested with the university. I guess, in closing, Matt, what was the best bit of the journey over the 30 years when it comes to this innovation and tech transfer space? What was the the best or most exciting part of that journey for you?
MR: Rubicon Water continue with an active R&D program to improve our technology in the areas of control engineering, software, gate and metering products, and water data communications. We drive this program through our Technology Leadership Group, which consists of our senior management team and product specialists. We still have big ideas for our industry as we continue to pursue our vision to conserve water, to sustain our growing population.
CB: And Matt, for you personally?
MR: For me personally, it’s the satisfaction of, you know, being involved in a natural resource and, and making a difference. You know, I feel like I am making a difference in, on the planet in a very practical engineering sense. Basically, making sure that water is is properly managed, even has a, even rules, has got a paper that says actually there is no water crisis in the world. There’s an abundance of water. It’s just management. It’s moving it from point A to point B and, you know, to the right places. But we’ve actually, you know, planet Earth actually got plenty of water.
CB: It’s an interesting note to finish on, because it has also been said that there’s not actually a lack of food, it’s a distribution problem, and I sense that there are some eerie parallels between the distribution issues that you’ve shared with us around water and the solutions you’ve come up with. And perhaps, more broadly, the distribution of food and fibre around the world, which is the bit that comes out of the water that you guys are involved with moving around the planet. Matt, it’s been terrific having you on the podcast. Thank you so much for sharing a really positive story about innovation and collaboration, and the significant difference that it’s made to water and food and fibre production around the world.
MR: Thank you, Cameron and listeners.