Owner/Manager, Halcyon Downs ESPERANCE WA
CATEGORY: PRODUCTIVITY
Mic Fels is an extraordinary farmer and innovator, creating a number of apps over the past decade to improve farm management, spraying, predicting yield and machinery use – all tried and tested in the real world by real farmers. Mic was nominated for his considerable skills in developing technologies that improve the productivity, sustainability and profitability of the farming community.
Mic, and his wife Marnie, bought their first property in the south east of Western Australia in 1992. Both Mic and Marnie started out their careers with Engineering degrees, but soon found themselves drawn to the exciting opportunities and challenges of a life in agriculture. Starting with a 900 ha crop, they now crop 10,000 ha each year to wheat, barley and canola in the Esperance and Three Springs districts of WA.
Within a year of the first iPad hitting the market, Mic had set up his own iPad based farm management system, to keep up with the organisation and coordination of their rapidly growing farm business. It proved valuable to the business, providing cost savings, massive efficiency gains and improved profits, so Mic took the next step and developed iPaddockSpray and iPaddockYield apps to help improve the efficiency and profitability of farm businesses across Australia. iPaddockYield went on to win the 2012 GRDC Grain Inventors Award.
Mic has gone on to develop and manufacture machinery, such as the iPaddock Unstacker, iPaddock Machinery, and the iPaddock Alpha Disc.