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DIGITAL TECHNOLOGY
As the AgTech bubble runs out of hot air, what have we learnt?
By Professor Andrew Robson
Is communication, or more specifically asking industry what they actually want, the main reason for the poor translation of the billions of dollars spent on the BigData, Drones, AgTech booms into on farm adoption and broad scale industry change?
University of New England (UNE). I have an associate degree, a bachelor’s degree and a PhD all majoring in remote sensing and Geographical Information Systems (GIS) and am currently the Director of UNE’s Applied Agricultural Remote Sensing Centre (AARSC), where we work across 20 industries globally. I am also an oyster farmer based on Moreton Island (Mulgumpin), Queensland, and President of the Queensland Oyster Growers Association. Back to the LinkedIn article. It showed the following animation and the heading: Ag thought of the week: Is low adoption of cer- tain AgTech solutions due to anx- iety and fear? As mentioned, this stirred a reaction. Being around to see the Big Data, Drone, AgTech, Ma-
When asked to put together an AgTech thought leadership arti- cle for The Australian Farmer I was a “on the fence”, as I am definitely not the best person to over promote the Agtech “uni- corn”, and the words “disrupt”, “agile” and “game-changer” do not readily inhabit my vocabu- lary (nor that of any farmer I know). Then inspiration came from a posted article on social media’s LinkedIn that provided a perfect narrative for this story. Before I get into this moment of enlightenment, you may ask “who am I?” and “what would I know?”. In response, I have worked within agricultural re- search for 30 years including ex- tended stints with both the New South Wales and Queensland De- partments of Primary Industries and for the last ten years with the
chine Learning /Artificial Intelli- gence and now RegenerativeAg booms, it astounds me (and surely fatigues all) that the same pattern occurs time and time again. A small whisper of these technological incarnations be- comes a roar of frothing excite- ment where billions of dollars are spent on good salesmanship and invention which ultimately fails to translate to comparable advancement on the ground. The tech, the analytics, the accessibility are all there, so where does it go wrong? I simply believe this failure is predomin- antly due to a lack of communi- cation between tech developers and industry need. Going back to our bird scen- ario. The Agtech perspective on
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