Blue sky thinking pinpoints futuristic ag innovations

AgriFutures Australia supports Australian agriculture by anticipating novel developments and tracking long term trends that may impact rural industries. While no forecast can be guaranteed to be perfect, there is an increasing need to connect and analyse many different sources of information.

The Queensland University of Technology (QUT) horizon scanning method used in this report is a powerful combination of interdisciplinary expertise, data mining and visualisation. Expert elicitation and synthesis are used to identify high probability signals, which are explored through data mining. Once emerging trends are refined, visualisation is used to understand and evaluate their progress and enable stakeholders to explore the results. With time, this process will give us the capacity not only to identify strong signals, but also to identify weak signals that have the potential to become strong. This method also enables the analysis of sentiment attached to particular trends.

Australian agriculture is being transformed by technologies that have the capacity to make the entire supply chain more precise, profitable and sustainable.

The project – the second Horizon Scan document –  scans for high impact technologies overseas and in other sectors of the Australian economy that will likely disrupt the agricultural chain.

The five technology innovations with the potential to shape Australia’s rural industries in this research are digital twin, LoRaWAN, human-machine interfaces, solar retransmission and personal analytics.

This report is the third in a series of reports targeting the early detection, analysis and forecasting of issues and opportunities that might impact Australian rural industries.

Objectives for this report included to expand the information sources used to discover emerging technologies, and to strengthen evaluation and analysis of findings.

The result of this has been the identification and communication of emerging technologies spanning domains as diverse as genomics, nanotechnology, robotics, artificial intelligence, and material science.

Analysis of the technologies has assisted with identifying innovation trends, as well as the extrapolation of findings to communicate the potential impact of these technologies for Australian rural industries.

Horizon Scan 4 is the final horizon scan report for the Agrifutures Australia and QUT project, Detecting Opportunities and Challenges for Australian Rural Industries. Therefore, the technologies presented in this report finalise a watchlist of emerging technologies that have potential impact for Australian rural industries. As with previous horizon scan reports, the identified technologies represent innovation in a broad range of domains and highlight the diverse areas within the Australian rural industries that can be enhanced by technology change.

Horizon Scan 5 is the fifth in a series of reports that contribute to the watchlist of emerging technologies compiled during the completed Detecting opportunities and Challenges for Australian Rural Industries project. In addition, the technologies in this Horizon Scan have also been selected based on their potential to facilitate new technology based agriculture industries.

Given this, eight emerging technologies have been identified and are outlined in this report. They span several domains, including additive manufacturing, neuroscience, tissue engineering and cellular biology, data analytics, behavioural psychology and robotics.

Horizon Scan 6 is the second and final of the two Horizon Scans conducted for the Predicting New and Emerging Industries for the Australian Agricultural Sector project. These two Horizon Scans have expanded on the watchlist of emerging technologies compiled during the Detecting opportunities and Challenges for Australian Rural Industries project.

The technologies presented in this Horizon Scan report have also been selected based on their potential to contribute to the development of emerging agriculture industries. Seven emerging technologies have been identified and are outlined in this report. The domains they span are diverse, including information and communications, data analytics, renewable energy, urban informatics and computation.

Emerging technologies and new industries have the potential to transform Australian agriculture and will be a key contributor in growing the sector towards becoming Australia’s next $100 billion industry. AgriFutures Australia plays an important role in identifying these opportunities early and developing an ecosystem for technology development and adoption as well as supporting emerging industries to prosper and grow.

This report is the culmination of two years’ work by the Queensland University of Technology, uncovering 39 unique emerging technologies with potential for game-changing impact on Australia’s rural industries. Many of the emerging technologies showcased have been identified by industry experts as having significant commercial impact and transferability from overseas or non-agricultural domains for use on Australian farms or within the agricultural value chain. AgriFutures Australia is pleased to demonstrate, through this report, the diverse and significant opportunities for developing and integrating emerging technologies into the agriculture sector.