Australian Agrifood Data Exchange Phase 2: Experiment 3 - Benchmarking

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 at benchmarking to identify gaps and opportunities for improved performance pre harvest and will provide producers with contextualised recommendations to improve their outcomes around yield and profitability.

Objectives

The Grains Benchmarking experiment aimed at addressing challenges that currently exist around individualised benchmarking analysis at a paddock or farm level based on specific conditions such as rainfall bands, soil type variance, commodity and variety.

The objectives of the Grains Benchmarking experiment include:

• Undertake a voluntary data exchange experiment with growers from within the WA grain industry.
• Conduct benchmarking exercises with those growers
• Provide meaningful information back to growers
• Undertake the entire experiment with good data governance principles

Key findings

The key findings identified from this experiment for growers include:

• collaborate in a voluntary data driven benchmarking exercise
• retain ownership and control of their data whilst participating in this benchmarking exercise
• conduct their own on farm analysis
• gain insights and analysis from aggregated benchmarked data

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.