With just one week to go, it’s great to be preparing to attend a 120,000 in-person event! To our followers outside New Zealand, this is the expected attendance at the 4-day National Fieldays 2021 event at Mystery Creek in 7 days time.
Fieldays is the largest agricultural event of its kind in the Southern Hemisphere. It presents New Zealand’s agricultural and primary sectors with an international marketplace to advance agriculture, while honouring its three pillars – innovation, education, globalisation.
The one thing sadly missing this year of course will be the traditional delegations of international attendees. COVID and strict border controls mean that few folk will be traveling to Mystery Creek from overseas, bar a few welcome guests from across the Tasman. It’s therefore a particular honour this year to be directly involved in one of the truly ‘global’ sessions taking place next week.
On Thursday morning, I’ll be joining Laura Clarke, the UK High Commissioner to New Zealand, and a group of international panellists, to talk about Climate, CO26 and the role of Agritech. As co-host of the AgriFoodTech Climate Summit at COP26 in November, this promises to be an interesting session. It will provide a platform to talk about the scheduled event and also provide the opportunity to announce something much closer to home.
Climate, Agritech and Cleantech are three words I expect to hear a lot of next week. With the Climate Change Commission’s final report being published by the government today, reducing greenhouse gas emissions from agricultural production and the wider agrifood supply chain will become high priorities for farmers and growers alike. Regulation can only do so much. What farmers and growers need is the technology and the tools necessary to enable them to meet new targets.
That will be the key theme of my presentation next Thursday. The need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is completely understood. So is the investment into accelerating our research capability to make this happen.
Last week, I hosted the ‘Australian Agritech Ecosystem’ virtual event at e Tipu 2021 – The BOMA Agri Summit. I was joined by;
Andrew Coppin, Chair, Australian Agritech Association
John Harvey, Managing Director, AgriFutures Australia
Dr Penny Schultz, Chair, SA Cattle Industry Fund Board; immediate past vice president, Livestock SA
Professor Bob Furbank, Director, ANU ARC Centre of Excellence for Translational Photosynthesis
It was great to have a panel that represented four distinct Australian stakeholder groups; industry, government, producers & research. We talked about the current Australian agritech landscape and what opportunities might exist for real and impactful trans-Tasman agritech collaboration.
Building a collaborative trans-Tasman agritech ecosystem is important for both New Zealand and Australia. Over the years, I have actively supported such a move through my work with the Australia New Zealand Agritech Council, AgriFutures Australia’s evokeAG & growAG steering committees and more recently, the Australian Agritech Association. As the founding Executive Director of Agritech New Zealand, I have been able to share some of the lessons and challenges that building an inclusive ecosystem can bring.
You can view last week’s online presentation below:
UPDATED: 14 October 2021; Following the postponement of the the original AdvanceAg conference in July because of COVID, I’m delighted that it has been rescheduled to take place on Monday. I had planned to deliver the keynote in person, but will now be dialing in from New Zealand.
With almost 500 delegates attending the Adelaide Convention Centre in-person, it will be a great opportunity to share some of the collaborative opportunities that exist in the trans-Tasman partnership. Monday offers a fantastic opportunity to share this with an important group of South Australian agritech stakeholders.
The original post that was published on 3 May below:
I was delighted to receive an invitation from the Hon David Basham, the South Australian Minister for Primary Industries and Regional Development, to keynote at the upcoming AdvanceAg Conference in Adelaide. You can learn more about the conference here.
Back in October 2020, the Government of South Australia released the ‘South Australia AgTech Strategic Plan’. It’s a significant piece of work and a number of its recommendations resonated. I recognised that it had brought together different stakeholders including producers, government, research, industry and startups. The AdvanceAg conference is an important part of this Plan.
It’s interesting to see how the landscape in Australia (Federal v States) is taking shape. From an agritech rather than agricultural production perspective, the states seem to be accelerating activity and planning in this space. Much of the Federal focus appears to be on the performance of the Research & Development Corporations (RDCs). GrowAG (I sat on its Establishment Steering Committee) is one manifestation of that focus. As many of us know however, innovation and technology advancement is not only to be found in the publicly-funded research domain. Building a cohort of agritech businesses capable of scaling and creating impact is very often a private sector endeavour. Those businesses require the ongoing support of the wider agritech ecosystem – agribusinesses, government, investors, incubators, accelerators, as well as research. It’s building that broader ‘coalition of the willing’ that I recognised in South Australia’s AgTech Strategic Plan.
For anyone familiar with my work in New Zealand over the past 6 years, building collaborative agritech frameworks and partnerships has been a key focus. Today, that model has taken on a global lens. The Government of South Australia recognises the advances made in New Zealand and my quest is to identify opportunities for increased collaboration between the two respective sectors. AdvanceAg provides the platform to discuss this.
Over the past three years, through my various roles at Agritech New Zealand, the Australia New Zealand Agritech Council and most recently, the Australian Agritech Association, I have been a very strong advocate for building an active and effective trans-Tasman collaborative agritech framework. The region provides an exciting global hub for agri-focused scientific research, a thriving agritech sector and increasing pools of investor capital. As both countries open up a mutual quarantine travel bubble, the rest of the world is looking closely at developments in our corner of the world. Building on that interest, learning more about the Australian agritech landscape and promoting the trans-Tasman region as a leading global agritech hub is front and centre for this virtual session.
I’m being joined by four great Australian panelists:
Andrew Coppin is the Chair, Australian Agritech Association. Andrew is also the Chair and Managing Director of Farmbot Monitoring Solutions, a rapidly growing early stage agritech company that focuses on remote water monitoring, controls and data.
John Harvey is Managing Director of AgiFutures Australia, a Rural Research & Development Corporation. I’ve been honoured to sit on two AgriFutures Australia steering committees; evokeAG & growAG.
Professor Owen Atkin is Director of CEAT; the Centre for Entrepreneurial Agri-Technology. The Centre is a joint collaboration between the Australian National University & CSIRO, creating an agritech innovation precinct at the University campus in Canberra.
Dr Penny Schultz runs a family cattle and sheep operation at Field in South Australia’s Coorong region and is Chair of Limestone Coast Landscape. Penny is the immediate past Vice President of Livestock SA and Chair of the SA Cattle Industry Fund Board.
The panel brings together industry, research and government. It’s this unique combination which reflects New Zealand’s own collaborative model, best illustrated during the development of New Zealand’s Agritech Industry Transformation Plan.
During this virtual session, I’ll be seeking to get a better understanding of the current Australian agritech landscape and hopefully identify some of the opportunities to scale up increased trans-Tasman collaboration. As the world looks at us for post-COVID inspiration, I believe that this session will uncover some of the amazing opportunities that lie ahead.
As a member of the growAG steering committee, it’s great to see the hard work that has been undertaken by the team at AgriFutures over the past 18 months, finally come to fruition. The portal provides global agribusinesses, researchers, innovators and investors with a detailed view of the extensive agricultural research being undertaken by the 15 Australian RDCs (Rural Research & Development Corporations).
As a platform that provides external parties with unrivaled access to real-time commercial and collaborative research opportunity, I believe that growAG has hit the mark. For me, the experience has provided an invaluable opportunity to gain both an understanding and an insight into the Australian agrifood research and innovation landscape.
For everyone involved in this project, the next few months will demonstrate just how effective this model is for providing commercialisation input into the research process. If you want to learn more about growAG and the opportunity it is creating, check out the short video below:
