Abstract
The digital revolution has dramatically impacted our daily life, with change
occurring at an increasingly rapid pace in the agricultural sector. The collection,
collation, analysis and application of data digitally, has transformed global
agriculture through precision technology, forecast modelling and sounder
decision making along the supply chain – from demand-driven plant breeding,
through food processing, to the delivery of products.
This year’s Crawford Fund Conference considered what impact the digital
revolution could and/or would have on the developing world. Could access
to better interpretation of data and information herald improvement in
agricultural productivity and profitability in these countries and Australia? The
simple answer is yes. However, there is still a long way to go in revolutionising
agriculture technology for the smallholder farmer, and digital mechanisms alone
are simply not enough. We need to take a farm, systems and global approach.
However, as stated by Dr Lindiwe Majele Sibanda in her Sir John Crawford
Memorial Address, to make digital mechanisms sustainable, to make them
useable and ensure they have impact, we need a new narrative. We need a new
narrative for hunger, to set the tone for not just producing more food from less,
but producing more nutritionally sensitive food – quality over quantity. Current
agricultural systems are not nutrition sensitive: for instance, we have 800 million
people hungry vs 1.8 billion people obese or sick. We need to deliver nutritionsensitive
agriculture using our global data resources.