For more than two decades, the success of Australia’s agricultural and rural sectors has been supported by the work of the Rural Research and Development Corporations (RDCs). The RDCs are funded by industry and government. For the first time, all fifteen of Australia’s RDC’s have joined forces with the Australian government to design a solution for the use of big data in Australian agriculture. This is the first known example of a nationwide approach for the digital transformation of an agriculture sector, internationally.

The Accelerating precision agriculture to decision agriculture project collaborated with six leading research organisations evaluated the current and desired state of digital agriculture in Australia and made recommendations for Australian primary producers to overcome the challenges currently limiting digital agriculture and profit from their data. The project conducted surveys of producers to understand their needs, drivers and level of knowledge; reviewed the state of and requirements for data connectivity on and off-farm; explored legal aspects looked at rules concerning data ownership, access, privacy and trust; assessed data sets currently available and what will be needed for digital agriculture in Australia; and it developed a big data reference architecture to support interoperability across datasets and systems into the future.

Digital agriculture in Australia was found to be in an immature state in many parts including strategy, culture, governance, technology, data, analytics, and training. This is to the detriment of innovation and producer adoption of digital agriculture in Australia. With maturity, the economic modelling identified that the implementation of digital agriculture across all Australian production sectors (as represented by the 15 RDCs) could lift the gross value of agricultural (including forestry, and fisheries and aquaculture) production by $20.3 billion (a 25% increase on 2014). Thirteen recommendations are made in the areas of policy, strategy, leadership, digital literacy and enablers. To achieve maturity, cross industry and cross-sector collaboration is vital as many of the issues impeding maturity are common and this scale of investment is required to implement solutions for Australian conditions and to keep pace with the rest of the world.