Dynamic agri-tech industry highlighted

Words by Alex Tomkins and Brooke Maddison

Brooke Maddison (left), assistant innovation specialist at Zespri International (Bachelor of AgriCommerce) and Alex Tomkins (right), graduate at Southern Cross Horticulture (Bachelor of AgriCommerce)

As two young professionals starting our careers in the horticulture industry, attending the MobileTech Ag Conference was a great experience and exposed us to the dynamic agritech industry.

After attending the conference, we took away three key insights:

1:

The potential for New Zealand to leverage more value from agri-tech as an export industry.

The conference centred around discussions on the ability of technology to create value within the agri-food supply chain. We are incredibly grateful to Horticulture New Zealand for the opportunity to attend the conference through scholarship tickets.

2:

The significant challenge that the talent pipeline presents for the technology sector.

3:

The opportunity for technology to help solve industry wide problems with data collection and analysis as a tool to help drive more informed decision making.

$1.4 Billion

The agri-tech sector is currently worth 1.4 billion in export revenue and is set for further growth.

As an industry currently worth $1.4 billion in export revenue already, the agri-tech sector is set for yet further growth. The innovative nature of New Zealanders with ‘number eight wire’ mentality to solve problems, puts the country in a strong position to take our agri-tech products to the world.

New Zealand already has a strong reputation for agri-food products, so why not extend this to agri-tech products? This puts us in a strong position to help solve global food and horticultural production problems, while generating export returns.

Agri-tech has the ability to solve industry wide problems, and optimisation and analysis of data has the ability to help growers make more informed decisions

The technology sector in New Zealand faces a significant talent pipeline and people development challenge. This ranges from encouraging technology careers at the school level to addressing declining student numbers in NCEA (National Certificate of Educational Achievement) technology subjects, to developing technology graduates at a university level. A survey asking primary students ‘what they want to do when they grow up’ found 0.5% of students answered a career in Information Technology (IT) and programming, while being a grower or farmer didn’t even feature. As the skillset required of growers is expanding, growers are having to become horticultural technologists. Therefore, developing strong people capability within the agri-tech sector will become increasingly crucial. This starts with inspiring the next generation about agri-tech from a primary school level. The conference highlighted the importance of developing strong talent pipelines within the agri-tech sector to develop future leaders. Agri-tech has the ability to solve industry wide problems, and optimisation and analysis of data has the ability to help growers make more informed decisions. There is significant value in systems that allow for amalgamation of data, and are easy and time efficient for the end user. If growers have more oversight over their operations and a clear picture of what is happening on their land in real time, they can begin to make decisions based on this data, resulting in more accurate decision making. This has the potential to save resources, increase productivity and solve succession planning problems.

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