Australian Agrifood Data Exchange Phase 2: Experiment 1- Compliance

Summary

The Australian Agrifood Data Exchange is a multi-stakeholder project that aims to address the significant issue for agricultural industries and government, where although the use of data and analytics is becoming more widespread, the sectors are held back by the lack of a consolidated data exchange that combines multiple data sets from multiple data sources in real time. This program looked to address challenges for industry while also collaborating with the Research, Industry, Commercial and Government sectors to leverage solutions, tools and techniques being developed across Agriculture Research, reducing duplication, and providing access to additional whole of agriculture funds.

This project looked to address the cumulative burden of compliance for producers through to processors operating in Victoria and New South Wales to enable producers to collate data for compliance purposes and share permissioned data with the relevant compliance programs in the required format.

Objectives

This research was one of four experiments carried out to assess the technical feasibility, issues and concerns, and business benefits of an AgriFood data exchange. It seeks to address the cumulative burden of compliance for producers through to processors operating in the VIC and NSW sheep sector (meat and wool). The results of the research will be used to identify practical solutions for sheep producers, industry compliance bodies and the supply chain, while informing the later phases of the Australian AgriFood Data Exchange programme.

Key findings

The experiment activities and the industry demonstration day showed that it was technically feasible to apply a data exchange platform to address the compliance needs of producers, auditors, and compliance bodies.

Some of the key outcomes from this experiment include:

- There is general support from producers, auditors, processors, and retailers for the adoption of structured and unstructured digital evidence for compliance and certification.
- Applications which collect data on-farm can streamline producer record-keeping, preparation for audits and the auditing process itself.
- Data collected on-farm or from industry systems can be leveraged to support deeper analysis and to validate provenance and credence claims.
- Producer control of data and the ability to permission data for specific purposes is essential to support reuse of data for multiple purposes.

Benefits to industry

The benefits from this multi-phase program of work seeks to create a data highway for obtaining data for decision making, and improving the functionality and analytical potential of data, ultimately leading to valuable time saving realisations not only within the red meat industry but across the Australian agrifood sector.
So far, the Australian Agrifood Data Exchange has highlighted some practical ways the program will seek to benefit the agricultural industry.

This includes:
- Centralising data (e.g., certifications) to ensure compliance with industry requirements can be proven and fast checked in an easy manner
- Merging data sources to enable the source of any contamination or the presence of pests to be rapidly identified
- Enabling the benchmarking of data to be shared with any required parties in the industry for comparison and decision making
- Providing data to illustrate the journey of the produce from the producer to the consumer, including details from each point in the supply chain (e.g., the product’s certifications, origins or exposure to chemicals).

MLA action

MLA/ ISC will continue to act as a lead role in the Australian Agrifood Data Exchange program into phase 3.

Future research

Phase 3 of the program will be to run experiments on each of the four agreed use cases as well as determine the operating model and governance structure for the exchange.