Everybody, meet Brad.

Brad Jones doesn't fit neatly into any one category. He is a large-scale commercial farmer, a precision agriculture pioneer, a volunteer firefighter, and now a Non-Executive Director of OKA Australia. That combination is not coincidental. It is exactly why he is here. Brad runs Bungulla Farming, an 11,500-hectare broadacre cropping operation near Tammin in the heart of Western Australia's central wheatbelt, growing wheat, barley, canola and lupins at a scale roughly three times the Australian farm average.

He didn't inherit a system and maintain it; Two decades ago, Bungulla ran much like many other farms: record-keeping on paper, decisions driven by gut instinct, long-term trends near impossible to track. Brad rebuilt it from the ground up. Today, more than 300 soil sampling sites are tested regularly, with results combined with NDVI imagery, yield data and soil analysis to refine inputs and maximise productivity. Crop rotations are planned up to three years in advance.

The results are hard to argue with. While the average ROI for Australian grain growers sits around 4.5%, Brad has largely sustained double-digit returns, a performance that earned him the 2016 Australian Cropping Farmer of the Year award By 2021, his ROI stood at 13.5%. That same analytical rigour drove him back into formal education. The changing landscape of agriculture motivated Brad to complete a Masters of Business Administration at Curtin University, skills he applies directly to Bungulla's operations today. He has served as a grower director at Australian Grains Champion, and is Non-Executive Chair and shareholder of Origo AgTech , a precision agriculture technology company whose systems are deployed across the wheatbelt.

His standing in the broader agricultural industry speaks for itself. Bungulla Farm has served as a field tour site for the Australian Precision Agriculture Symposium, and Brad has appeared alongside executives from Airbus, Rabobank and CBH Group in national conversations about sustainable aviation fuel and the future of Australian grain supply chains.

But it is what Brad does during harvest that matters most to OKA.

He is Deputy Fire Chief of the Tammin Volunteer Fire Brigade, coordinating more than 20 farmers on call throughout harvest season to protect crops, infrastructure and rural communities across the shire. This past season, his crew responded to more than a dozen fires. One of them was on his own property, and it came close to threatening the town. The financial cost to Bungulla alone was over $300,000 in crop lost to dry lightning strikes.

Brad knows, in the most direct terms possible, what it means when the equipment cannot reach an ignition point in time. He also knows what a vehicle needs to do the rest of the year to justify its place on a working farm. That understanding is not theoretical. It is the product of farming at scale through a changing climate, in terrain that tests both equipment and judgement.

Bungulla Farm became FOKA's first real-world proving ground because Brad's operation represents exactly the environment OKA is built for. And his seat on OKA's board ensures that the people making decisions about this vehicle have a direct line to the people who will depend on it.

OKA builds vehicles for operators like Brad. Having Brad in the room is how we make sure we keep getting that right.

Update — 17 March 2026

Since publishing this piece, Brad has been featured in today's edition of The Australian as part of national coverage on the diesel supply crisis threatening to derail Australia's winter grain planting season. Speaking to rural correspondent Matthew Denholm, Brad described the situation on the ground near Tammin — fuel shortages, decimated crop programs, and the very real prospect of farmers being unable to plant. The story has moved from wheatbelt concern to front-page national conversation. It confirms exactly why OKA sought out someone with Brad's standing.

Read article here