Agmentation 2023: supporting rural industries thrive through climate challenges
Agriculture students from Armidale, New South Wales and Laramie, Wyoming have joined forces this week to develop innovative ways to help rural communities impacted by climate change and variability.
Supported by the Armidale Node of the SQNNSW Innovation Hub, Agmentation 2023 at the University of New England 40+ students came together in a hackathon style event to develop programs to help agricultural producers manage climate variability. The innovation challenges asked how to promote on-farm practices that enable net zero farms, or support farm businesses to be resilient in the face of extreme weather or support the improved wellbeing and resilience of rural communities.
“Rural communities are increasingly impacted by climate change and increased climate variability, including the current concerns about developing drought conditions, and the impacts are social, environmental and economic,” UNE SMART Region Incubator Director Lou Conway said.
“The opportunity to bring together the next generation of producers, ag advisors, farm managers from both sides of the world with the inclusion of the ag students visiting from the University of Wyoming for this year’s Agmentation has resulted in some very exciting ideas.”
Agmentation 2023 is the fifth year of the event, and this year, the students developed ideas for a program that could be implemented by the Armidale Node of the SQNNSW Innovation Hub.
Armidale Node Manager Lu Hogan said it was the role of the SQNNSW Innovation Hub to help farmers and rural communities become more resilient to drought and climate variability.
“It was amazing to watch the students think about the technical social and economic solutions to the problems caused by climate variability, in the context of what can we do at the Hub to make a change and make an improvement for our agricultural industries and communities,” Ms Hogan said.
“These are the next generation who will drive the future of rural areas, whether it’s here in northern New South Wales or in the United States, and it was invigorating to watch them develop ideas into opportunities.”
At Agmentation 2023, six teams developed pitches for programs to: utilise sport to build community resilience, encourage the use of Ag360 to improve on-farm decision making through a farmer mentoring program, upskilling young people in rural communities to provide pathways into rural employment, better utilising NLIS data to inform herd management decisions, and improving water resilience while also encouraging generational knowledge sharing.
The winning pitch came from Carbon Clean, who proposed helping small to medium farming enterprises identify how they can improve their carbon neutrality, and use existing tools and calculators to identify their own preferred on-farm activities.
Ms Hogan said the Carbon Clean team would now work with the Hub to further develop the idea into something that could be applied on-ground.
The visiting students from the University of Wyoming added an extra dimension to the discussions.
“In Australia, we have a more export-focussed agriculture sector, compared to the domestic focus in Wyoming, but we are facing similar challenges and opportunities with regard to labour availability, changing consumer preferences (and demand for transparency), increasing demand for carbon neutral products, and a far more variable climate,” Dr Conway said.
“The solutions the teams came up with at the Agmentation hackathon aren’t designed to provide an opportunity to every industry or region, but they do provide some interesting new ideas, for the Armidale Node to work on.”
The pitches were judged by Armidale Council Deputy Mayor Cr Todd Redwood, Ag Tech Centric Director Leecia Angus, and SQNNSW Innovation Hub Armidale Node Manager Lu Hogan. The teams were mentored by facilitator Stephen Angus (Snowy Advisory), and Alex Hunter (Landcare Australia), Heidi McElnea (Community Power Agency), Shonelle Gleeson-Willey (Moss Environmental) and Dr Pete McGilchrist (UNE).
Agmentation is the annual flagship event for the UNE SMART Region Incubator in Armidale. It began in 2017 and has previously explored a range of ideas for on-farm safety, health, data services, weed management, weighing livestock and sustainability.
The purpose of Agmentation is to engage diverse talents in problem solving challenges within our communities and to develop solutions that can grow into opportunities for more innovative practices in organisations or as startups. The startup methodology of human centred design-thinking is used to bring forward rapid prototyping of ideas.
The SQNNSW Innovation Hub receives funding from the Australian Government’s Future Drought Fund.
