Digital agriculture
Overview
MLA’s digital agriculture sub-program focuses on connectivity and digital agriculture technologies on-farm. It involves a combination of initiatives and activities that:
- address the barriers to on-farm adoption of technologies and data analytics
- encourage innovation
- increase the potential for wide-scale impact beyond the farm gate.
The digital agriculture sub-program also focuses on co-funded partnership farm models to accelerate the adoption of more complex digital agriculture use cases, such as livestock and pasture management. This will be done through integrating multiple data sources to support decision making that impacts on-farm profitability, as well as demonstrating the impact of digital technologies on wider value chain transformation.
Strategic focus
The digital agriculture sub-program supports the MLA Strategic Plan 2025 focus areas of ‘Decisions informed through data and insights’ and ‘Targeted investment to address the industry’s, big, complex challenges’, which in turn aligns to Red Meat 2030 priority and success factors of ‘Our Systems’, ‘Our Livestock’, Our People’ and ‘Our Environment’.
Core activities
Digital agriculture tools and technology initiatives include:
- showcasing and improving connectivity options for optimal use of digital technologies in remote locations
- developing digital information products and dashboard decision tools/guidelines to provide informed and predictive management systems
- deploying autonomous ground and aerial platforms for data collection and livestock/pasture management to improve decisions, efficiency, animal welfare and safety on-farm
- establishing partnerships with enterprises wanting to test and adopt digital technology solutions on-farm and using these as case studies to drive further awareness and validate value propositions to stakeholders.
Benefits to industry
- Digital technologies, connectivity and automation improves on- and off-farm management and efficiency through improved productivity, cost savings and the capability to manage remote business areas. This, in turn, assists with land and livestock management.
- These R&D investments also help to reduce labour, operational costs and on-farm risks by providing real-time data that enhances decision making.
- Digital agriculture tools and resources help producers make more informed business decisions regarding their livestock management, the transfer of data between different sections of their enterprise and workplace health and safety initiatives.
