Friday, March 29, 2024

More digital farm Input welcomed

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Agritech leaders have welcomed AgResearch’s intention to initiate a major programme to prepare farming for a new era of digital agriculture.
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The research institute’s programme intended to identify barriers to uptake of digital technology and to build a technology roadmap to support transition to digitised farming systems.

AgResearch research director Greg Murison said it was critical New Zealand stayed ahead of the game as an agricultural exporter and he believed the programme was the first of its kind where a system-wide analysis of digital ag had been done in NZ.

Rezare managing director and founder Andrew Cooke said while a lot of industry projects had been occurring regardless of AgResearch, having such a significant, overarching research group involved in the fast moving area would be welcome.

“AgResearch has vast farm systems experience and lots of people with experience in a number of areas.

“That experience includes being the founder of Farmax software as a farm system modelling tool and obviously Overseer too.”

Cooke said despite the industry’s best efforts to date the area of digital agriculture remained quite a scattered landscape and the industry was very much still in its early stages of maturity.

Farmax chief executive Gavin McEwen said he welcomed any thought leadership AgResearch could provide to what he described as a big space.

“There are so many different tools out there that are only one part of the entire process and the challenge is how do we get all this stuff melded together to deliver value to farmers? If, by being involved, AgResearch can do that, then great.”

He acknowledged AgResearch had a breadth of experts from across disciplines as varied as social science and soil science, which would do much to bring the diverse elements of digital technology down to farm systems relevance.

“And I think as more technology becomes available there will only be more and more data and this can distract farmers somewhat.

“They need smart tools to make sense of it all and to deliver information for better decision-making.”

McEwen noted the digital chasm many small tech firms fell into when developing software applications for the relatively small NZ farming market but he doubted AgResearch would help firms bridge that commercially.

Murison said AgResearch’s role was looking at the big picture of adoption across NZ and how best to measure and interpret the data essential to the operation of the tools.

It would, however, be trialling new technologies as they became available to see how they could be integrated into farming systems and what value they brought.

AgResearch owned a low-profile research farm south of Te Awamutu in Waikato. It was already collecting data for specific projects, including digitally tracking cow movements.

The research body had also been heavily engaged in research on virtual fencing and its application in NZ.

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