Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Justin Dickens is driving his truck along the edges of his farm outside the town of Orange in New South Wales. Lifting both hands off the wheel, he gestures to a group of calves in a field. They are going to make “good eating”, he says, checking their weight gain in an app on his phone.Dickens and his wife Amy, first-generation cattle farmers, rear Speckle Park cattle — a breed that produces fewer carbon emissions and less methane than rival breeds in Australia, they say. And now they have the data to prove it.Their farm is all about the numbers, Dickens says: they have installed Australian-made sensors across the farm that monitor how much each cow is eating, which pastures are more productive, whether a specific animal is struggling, whether anything unusual is going on with the water tanks. “If a cow is getting crook or has worms, we can see it in the tail,” he says — the tail belonging, in this instance, to the data rather than the animal.Agricultural technology — often called “ag-tech” — has been dubbed the new green revolution. Robotics and AI have made their presence felt in commercial greenhouses, potato fields and fruit farms; synthesised products such as dairy-free cheese and plant-based proteins and lab-grown meats have appeared on supermarket shelves. More than $200bn of investment has been poured into the sector globally in the past decade, according to AgFunder, a venture fund that compiles data on the food technology sector, funding attempts to grow crops, rear animals and create food more efficiently and sustainably — not to mention strengthen food security in a volatile geopolitical environment.While the US and China have been the biggest recipients of that investment, Australia is quietly becoming an ag-tech hotbed. Some of the innovations being trialled in the country — from platforms that track emissions data at farm level to experimental fungal spores that replenish exhausted soil — are not simply changing the way local farmers operate, but also attracting attention from international investors.A pragmatic, outback-hardened approach to research and development means that there is a culture of risk-taking among Australian farmers. According to a survey by research company Kynetech, its farmers are the world’s second-biggest adopters of technology after the US. “We attack it in a different way,” says Keryn McLean, head of digital farming at Bayer’s Australian crop science division. “We’re pushing the bar as far as we can. The rest of the world can learn from that.” We’re pushing the bar as far as we can. The rest of the world can learn from thatAccording to AgFunder’s most recent Asia-Pacific report, 85 deals were struck in Australia’s ag-tech sector in 2023 at a value of $253mn — less than a quarter of the $1.4bn raised in China that year, but ahead of Japan and South Korea. Data for 2024 showed a slowdown across the region but the report pointed to “renewed deal activity” in Australia. According to Deloitte, R&D investment in ag-tech in Australia increased to A$3bn ($1.9bn) in the fiscal year 2024, from $2.9bn a year earlier. Ag-tech funding “dropped sharply” last year, says Duncan Stewart, Deloitte’s director of research for the technology, media and telecommunications industry. “Globally, across multiple categories of private equity and venture capital investing, the first half of 2024 was abnormally low.”But amid this, Stewart adds, Australia has emerged as somewhere that could “punch above its weight”.Several factors combine to make Australia an ag-tech crucible. The country’s vast agricultural system is a vital part of the economy — Australia’s farming, forestries and fisheries are expected to be worth almost A$100bn this year, or around 3 per cent of GDP. Its position on the frontline of climate change has been an incentive for its agricultural sector to rethink its ways of doing things. And the country’s comparatively low level of subsidies — the equivalent of just 2 per cent of their farm receipts, compared with 10 in the US and 20 per cent in the EU — means that Australian farmers are always looking for ways to innovate and streamline.“Aussie farmers face challenges and their opportunities are hard-earned,” says Jonathon Quigley, who leads the SparkLabs Cultiv8 accelerator fund, which has helped support 50 agrifood start-ups since it launched in New South Wales in 2017. “This is genuine investment in technology where it makes sense.”Dimitri Kusnezov, who served as under secretary for science and technology at the US Department of Homeland Security under the Biden administration, says that Australia could serve as an “excellent test bed” for the rest of the world, particularly when it comes to food security. “Harnessing our collective expertise and data will not only help protect the economic interests of our agricultural sectors, but also prevent those with harmful intent from using food as a weapon,” he says. The centre of this burgeoning activity is Orange, four hours’ drive to the west of Sydney, a former gold mining town now known for its cool-weather vineyards. In the past five years, it has become a hub for dozens of small start-ups, research scientists and funds focusing on the intersection between farming and technology. In a laboratory some 50 miles from the Dickens’s farm, product development scientist Anders Claassens is peering at an iPhone rigged to the top of a microscope. The screen shows fungal spores that he and his team are developing into a supplement that will suck carbon into worn-out soil.The company he works for, Loam Bio, is among the most prominent of the area’s new-generation businesses. Founded in Orange in 2019, it now has operations in Calgary in Canada, São Paulo in Brazil and Minneapolis in the US, and has attracted A$150mn in investment from funds controlled by Salesforce’s Marc Benioff, Tobi Lütke of Shopify and Australian entrepreneur Mike Cannon-Brookes. The company says its spore supplement is now being tested across tens of thousands of hectares of land around the world.Claassens explains how the microbial spores, which have been adapted from various nutrient-scavenging fungi, work. By restoring fungal networks to soil, carbon capture and storage can be improved and the plants’ nutrient uptake increased. For Claassens, it is about restoring the symbiotic relationship between the organisms. “The fungi are in it for themselves and the plants are in it for themselves; it’s a market function,” he says with a laugh. “They’re insider trading.” For Robert Oppenheimer, Loam Bio’s head of research, what they’re doing here could help reverse the effects of intensive farming, not just in Australia but in many other places too. “Eighty years of pesticides has really had a negative impact on the soil and the fungal population,” he says. Loam Bio has ambitions to turn its fungi into a product that can be purchased off the shelf, alongside more traditional fertilisers and weed killers. To boost its international reach, the company has recently hired the former head of computational biology at Swiss ag-tech giant Syngenta to lead its research in the US. Also part of the Orange cluster are Cauldron, a “precision fermentation” start-up attempting to create everything from food additives to alternatives to plastic, which received funding worth $6.25mn last year in a round led by Horizon Ventures; and ExoFlare, which specialises in biosecurity data and whose platform has been used to track Australian bird flu outbreaks. Businesses from overseas are also flocking to the region. Arugga AI Farming, an Israeli agricultural robotics start-up founded in 2017, came to Orange in 2020 with the aid of the SparkLabs incubator to test its so-called “robotic bee” — a large autonomous device used to pollinate tomato plants in the absence of insects. “Australia presented a great challenge for pollination,” says Arugga’s founder Iddo Geltner, explaining that, because of biosecurity regulations, the country does not use imported European bumblebees to pollinate tomatoes, as is the case in most countries. That made it an ideal test environment.Israel is another global ag-tech centre, with expertise in greenhouses “out of necessity” owing to the country’s shortage of water, but has seen relatively little deployment of agricultural automation and robotics, Geltner says. Australia, however, was open to adopting his “bees” — robots that trundle between rows of plants, using cameras and AI to spot disease, identify which flowers are ready, then use blasts of air to pollinate them. “It weighs 300 kilos. That would be quite a sting,” says Tal Kanety, agronomy manager at Costa Group, one of Australia’s largest tomato growers, which now has 27 robotic pollinators operating across its tomato farms, increasing yields and profitability. They have since been deployed by Thanet Earth in Kent, one of the UK’s largest tomato producers. Kanety says that the adoption of the robots had a significant impact on Costa’s productivity. “This is the holy grail of sustainability — to produce more within the same space,” he says. Agriculture has long been seen as a valuable asset class by big investors. The Sydney-based asset manager Macquarie has amassed a huge stake in farming — its Paraway Pastoral Company now owns a portfolio of 4.5mn hectares, as well as being one of the country’s largest cotton producers and owning a majority stake in one of Australia’s biggest fruit suppliers.Tech has a strong role to play in delivering Australia’s agricultural potential, says Elizabeth O’Leary, who has run Macquarie’s agricultural operations since 2013. “We’re already seeing efficiency and productivity benefits of these types of innovative ag-technologies right across our portfolio,” she says. Smaller, more focused investors are piling into Australian ag-tech too, including climate, investment and agricultural-focused funds such as the local division of SparkLabs Group as well as Australia-based companies Mandalay Venture Partners and Main Sequence. The venture capital arms of large-cap companies such as Woolworths, GrainCorp and Telstra have also become involved.Adrian Turner, ExoFlare’s co-founder and chief executive, argues that Australia leads the world when it comes to biosecurity, which positions the country well to develop technology that can help to secure supply chains. “Food is going to be the next contested domain after communications and IT systems,” he says, pointing to the disruption to the grain and fertiliser sectors after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.Over the last couple of years, the ag-tech sector has experienced what some have called a “great reset”, as money has become harder to raise and speculative technologies such as alternative meat and novel farming methods have struggled to deliver returns. In 2023, according to AgFunder, overall ag-tech investment fell to a six-year low as venture capital funds pulled in their horns. Malcolm Nutt, a partner at Cultiv8 Funds Management, says that Australia’s burgeoning ag-tech sector has benefited from a flight of hot money out of what he calls “trendy” investments in areas like vertical farming and alternative proteins — technologies that have sucked up a huge amount of capital but haven’t yet paid off. Shares in high-profile products including Beyond Meat and Oatly have crashed due to slow adoption by consumers. AgFunder’s report showed that global ag-tech funding dropped almost 50 per cent in 2023 as “jaundiced” investors struck fewer and smaller deals, with the US sector’s share of investments dropping from 40 per cent to 30 per cent. “Australia didn’t ride on the back of that hype,” Nutt says. “We’ve focused on more practical solutions for our farmers, based on efficiency and the environment. Things they are prepared to use.” Stewart at Deloitte agrees: “Probably the most important driver of ag-tech is farmers saying, ‘I’m spending too much money on fertiliser and water and energy. If I buy this thing that costs money, I will be able to use less of that.’ There is an actual economic rationale.”In order to expand further, Australian ag-tech — like the country’s agricultural industry, which exports 75 per cent of its produce — needs to head overseas, says David Lord, a manager at AgriFutures Australia, the federal government’s research and development fund. “We have to look to a global market,” he says. “If we do that, we have a much higher chance of capturing that value.”Lord says that there has been a concerted push by Australian authorities to transfer the “powerhouse” reputation the country already enjoys in agriculture into ag-tech. He points to GrowAG, a seed funding platform linking Australian start-ups with investors that has raised A$183mn for small ag-tech companies, and notes that half of that money is from overseas. Lots of groups are targeting the US and UK, but it is south-east Asia that is the real untapped opportunityIt sits alongside other research funding and the New South Wales state government’s Farms of the Future programme, which helps educate farmers about ag-tech. The federal government has invested A$1.1bn to boost data coverage across Australia’s outback, a scheme that offers farmers rebates on equipment including antennas as well as water and soil-monitoring probes.Many of Orange’s start-ups are expanding into the US and Europe, but some believe there is greater potential in developing markets, especially in the Indo-Pacific and south-east Asia. “Lots of groups are targeting the US and UK, but it is south-east Asia that is the real untapped opportunity,” says investor Mark Gustowski, partner and chair of Mandalay Venture Partners, pointing out that countries such as India, Bangladesh and Indonesia need to boost farming productivity to feed their growing populations. “If we don’t do it, someone else will reap the benefits,” he says.Stewart says that South Asia is a tempting target too. “If India becomes less likely to develop its own ag-tech solutions, they become more likely to buy them from somewhere else,” he says. “Australia is a heck of a lot closer than a lot of other places.”Tom Bishop, director of Sydney University’s Precision Agriculture Laboratory, recognises the scale of the challenge. “They won’t all survive,” he says of the crop of Aussie start-ups, but he believes some will certainly make a global mark, as Australian companies and brands have in the past.“There’s nothing wrong with being a good Aussie rock band playing pubs, but in terms of money, impact and global influence, we’ve shown it’s possible,” he says.Additional reporting by Susannah Savage
