So I think we'll be coming for a while.

Hi, I'm Ben Martin.

I'm a PI at McGill at the Lady Davis Institute.

I just started a year ago.

I'm excited to be back here at the CERC meeting.

This is a meeting I've attended many times, first my PhD, and then my postdoc, and now as an assistant professor.

And it's really a fantastic meeting for science and hearing about chromatin and epigenetics research from around the country and internationally, and then also for the community aspect.

Would you recommend to anyone coming to the CHS?

I think it's a really good place to start too, is sort of just like, okay, you're making decisions ba-based on the data that you see, but how do you then know the data that you're not seeing? And how do you-- I guess, how do you drive curiosity from a VP at that level? 'Cause you mentioned that a VP even looking at your dashboard in the first place is like the holy grail situation, right? So how do you encourage curiosity, or how can someone who's in this more ops position kind of communicate the context of the dashboard a little bit better before it's used to make big decisions like this?

Yeah.

Um, yeah.

A-as with any tool, you know, a dashboard is just another tool that, that you're rolling out, another technological tool that you're rolling out from HR.

And, you know, the, the adoption, the change management around that tool is as important as the implementation itself, and you wanna make sure that you're not just turning something on and handing it over to someone without explaining to them how it works, what its limitations are.

Um, so that's, that's one piece.

I, I have questions about, um, how this dashboard was presented when it went live to customers like this VP.

Have you ever seen a situation where a system can capture more of that sort of, I guess, less official channel, capture that more le- le- less official channel without compromising the trust that people might have in those channels? Do you know what I mean? Like, if all of a sudden like a tool is reading your Slack and it, it might say, "Hey, it looks like there might be an issue between this employee 'cause I found this in Slack." Like, that also to me does not seem like the right way to do this, even though it would get that data into the dashboard.

They must be pretty tough things to move, right? Can you drop one?

Yeah.

Yeah.

One of the odd things I found is that I'd work a lot with our tooling engineers to design the transport fixtures.

They would design them.

I'd advise them on the transport side of maybe some limitations or provide recommendations.

Aerospace hardware in general, whether it's a rocket or a satellite or some other pieces specifically designed for aerospace, is designed to handle loads in a very specific direction, right? So you think about, use a rocket, for example, or a booster.

And I'm just curious, in your job, are you seeing any applications of artificial intelligence or see where you could use it? Or

From the flowering that we're seeing at the moment, are you able to determine when you might start picking?

Yeah, so we use a tool that was developed by CQ University.

So it's called a heat sum calculation.

So we've got temperature sensors throughout our blocks in various locations which measure the temperature down to 0.3 decimal places.

So it calculates the growing degree days from the minimum and maximum temperatures, takes that snapshot every 15 minutes of that temperature, And from there, it can actually predict when your harvest dates are.

It won't go down to the day, but it's within a couple of days.

So it's a pretty efficient tool to have set up on the farm here.

Looking at the flowers outside at the moment, what volume are you expecting?

What the hell happened here? How did courses run riot through the county? I mean, to be frank, is there a no shit moment? This was a big event and we

missed it? Or what happened there? Yes, being candid, of course there is.

This is a massive event in the community and the community felt it.

Did we do the best job we could know? It was a very busy day.

Resources were very stretched.

It's not to say we shouldn't have gone, of

Is this what they're all practising for at night? And then Ben's detectives found something else.

One of the people that we arrested, we searched their premises.

It's like, which one do I believe? Are they all the same thing? Like, where do I want to go? But what are your thoughts on that?

Yeah, I think you can tell when people have sold out as far as like sponsors, um, especially, and I'm not going to like name any names or like talk about any brands, but like You can tell when there's product placement, like in YouTube videos and things like that.

I think you lose your credibility as that, I guess, influencer or just whoever's giving that advice.

Once you lose that, it's gone forever.

That's something I've wanted to do with our business.

I've been super careful about that.

who we want to partner with and advertise for only that I actually believe in stuff that I've used for a long time.

But man, so before we wrap things up, what would you say, I guess, what are your goals this season? Like this

Mr Martin says improving profitability is also critical if the industry wants to attract the next generation into horticulture.

A lot of people you know when I travel around ask you know how do we get young people into horticulture and agriculture and I always look at it and to me it comes back to profitability.

Mum and dad are sitting there and just getting by and you know got the bank knocking on the door and they're doing it tough.

Unless they're stupid like me a kid isn't going to want to be involved in that but He says growers also need consumers to recognise the value of Australian produce.

So, you know, they may look at a mango and go, oh, gee, $3 a mango is way too expensive.

But if you actually break it down to a per kilo rate, it's actually really, really cheap compared to some of the other commodities that that gum buy.

Mr Martin believes restrictive market access protocols continue to hold growers back while export opportunities exist.

That's been a burden for industry for a number of years.

Yeah

... is the f- is the first step.

Then I would say you are starting to see people being able to focus on the work.

People say, like, strategic work, and there's questions around what is strategic work.

I think people will just focus on the work that they should be doing and that people have spent time training and developing and really building those skills.

So for me, I think the quality of work people do will improve, and yeah, it will, it will make everyone's jobs better.

In terms of the, the sort of wider benefits to the business that people work in, the organizations, they will see an improved relationship with legal teams.

So final question, what's one skill, mindset, or behavior you believe will separate tomorrow's leaders from everyone else?