Annual research showcase

Digital agriculture: Driving a $100 billion agriculture industry by 2030

Digital agriculture focuses on the knowledge underpinning, and research required, to deliver a functioning digitally-enabled production and supply chain for agricultural food and fibre.

The global mission over the next 10 years and beyond is to produce increased amounts of food and fibre more efficiently, in terms of the use of water, nutrients and physical inputs into the production process.

Digital agriculture presents a novel method to meet this global challenge.

It is an approach that brings to bear the power of digital and information technologies to the business of agriculture with great potential for success.

The introduction of digital agriculture is predicted to have an enormous impact to our economy, including an increase in the gross value of production across the Australia agricultural sector by 25%, and in some parts such as the grains industry, the increase is estimated to be as high as 51%. 

These figures ignore the enormous social and economic benefits that digital agriculture technologies can bring through embedding provenance, traceability and customer feedback in the supply chain of commodities such as wheat.

Our Digital agriculture theme within the Sydney Institute of Agriculture brings together researchers across the university with expertise and skills to realise these new opportunities.

This year's theme highlighted the advances in Digital agriculture at the University of Sydney and across Australia.

The Showcase included the following topic sessions:

• On-Farm Digital Sensing and Analytics
• On-Farm Digital Decision-Support Tools
• Digital Supply Chains

'180-Second Spiel' Thesis Challenge: in three minutes, postgraduate students present a compelling talk on their thesis and its significance to the agriculture sector.

Poster Competition: Postgraduate students display and summarise their research on a digital poster.