Horticulture productivity unlocked

A new report from Hort Innovation and CIE has revealed that adoption of productivity-enhancing innovations in the horticulture industry could generate up to an additional $1 billion annually in value added, reaching $22 billion in 2040. The Australian horticulture industry is at a critical juncture and productivity increases will be the key to growth.

Over the past 30 years, the annual productivity growth of the horticulture industry has been between 0.5% to 1.5%, while the broader agricultural sector’s growth has been 0.88%.  To accelerate the growth of the industries productivity, The Factors Driving Productivity Report, which was released at Hort Innovation’s Peak Industry Body Forum, revealed that targeted action is required across four key areas:

• Production cost analysis: Building the skills and capability to understand cost drivers and profitability. This allows enterprises to modify operations and discontinue unproductive activities or practices.
• Automating data collection: Using digital technologies to support real-time management decisions. This involves capturing, processing, and operationalising data and information to inform farm practices and enable more data-driven farm management.
• Harnessing machine learning and artificial intelligence: Using advanced analytics to support better decision-making. ML and AI enable enterprises to interrogate data, uncover patterns, and understand the detailed dynamics of enterprise performance. This opens up new possibilities for agronomic and related practices.
• Embracing mechanisation and automation: Applying physical automation in farm-based production (picking and spraying, for example), packing and transport. While this overlaps with data collection and AI, this group focuses on the physical implementation and other forms of automated interaction with the relevant crop.

Brett Fifield, CEO of Hort Innovation, explained what these findings could mean for the future of the industry.

“Sustained productivity growth is essential for lifting profitability and ensuring competitiveness within the Australian horticulture sector. The industry continues to face ongoing challenges such as labour cost and shortages, so we wanted to examine what information and recommendations we could unearth to help support growers in becoming more productive.”

“This focus on doing more for less is not just an issue being faced by Australian growers. It is something that all businesses are seeking to prioritise. This report starts to look at what can change on farms to support our whole industry with the productivity shift. From starting with simple things such as data collection, to bringing more automation on farms, it should have something in there for every grower, no matter the size of their business.”

“Positively we’ve already seen growers starting to implement these processes and hope that many more of our R&D innovation projects can support further implementation into the future,” concluded Fifield.

The report is accompanied by an excel spreadsheet tool that growers and stakeholders across the industry can use to help model their own scenarios and adoption rates.