Friday, March 29, 2024

A new Vista for Ireland

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Ireland’s dairy and meat industries will benefit from research and extension work worth £40 million over six years to be spent by a new public-private partnership called Vista Milk.
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It will take on new projects along the supply chain from the soil to beef and milk, Teagasc research director Frank O’Mara said at the National Fieldays in the Enterprise Ireland exhibit.

Teagasc is the Irish Agriculture and Food Development Authority.

Vista Milk will begin in September with links between more than 100 researchers, academic and industry collaborators, having been renamed from Future Milk Centre when first announced late last year.

It will be a joint venture between agri-food and ICT institutes as well as leading companies in both sectors.

“We looked elsewhere before coming up with this concept but this will be a truly pastoral initiative, whereas comparable efforts are grain-fed or indoors,” O’Mara said.

“It is appropriate that I speak here in Hamilton because New Zealand and Ireland share the pastoral imperative and we already collaborate on much research.”

Ireland was using the Primary Growth Partnership approach favoured by NZ’s former National-led government for a decade, but now going out of favour with the Labour-led government.

Vista Milk was also going down the Agrigate platform approach of electronic service delivery pioneered by Fonterra over the past two years.

Ownership and control over agricultural data was one big issue to be tackled initially before expanding the digital toolbox.

The needs and working behaviours of farmers would be paramount in product development, Enterprise Ireland’s James Maloney said.

Nobody wanted to come up with over-engineered and complex applications that weren’t readily adopted.

Many existing products and services could be more efficiently delivered through electronic means.

Ireland has 1.4m dairy cows and 18,500 dairy farms, with an average herd size of 84 cows.

Farm aggregation had resulted in some much larger enterprises with 300-500 cows and the accompanying need for technological assistance, O’Mara said.

Vista Milk would be the biggest project under Teagasc oversight, he said.

The other collaborators include the Tyndall National Institute for microelectronics, the Telecommunications Software and Systems Group at the Waterford Institute of Technology and the Insight Centre for Data Analytics.

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