Graeme Acton Beef Connections project national producer survey asks: Is agtech worth it?

Millie Unthank

Using a monthly diary format, Graeme Acton Beef Connections program member Amelia ‘Millie’ Unthank is outlining her experiences and learnings as part of the mentoring program in the lead-up to Beef Australia next May.

Here’s Millie’s third monthly diary entry, with earlier entries available at the base of this page ….

WHY do beef producers adopt – or reject – agtech? My Graeme Acton Beef Connections (GABC) research project is going to find out.

This month marks the official launch of my national producer survey as part of it.

The survey is the centrepiece of my project titled Is Agtech Worth It? How Values Define Value.

The Australian Farm Institute estimates digital technologies add more than $20 billion a year to the value of Australian agricultural production.

What’s far less clear is whether that value is being felt – or trusted – on the ground by the producers actually running the systems.

(L to R) Millie Unthank, Charlotte Gibson and Tom Scholes after a muster at Devoncourt Station.

How I got to this survey

The basis of my project has emerged from my path, an intergenerational livestock business, developing agtech, then managing its implementation in a northern pastoral business. Don’t be fooled into thinking it came to me fully formed.

The first thing I knew is that producers’ experiential knowledge is important, both generally and personally. Successful beef production systems have been running for centuries; no piece of technology can undermine that.

Initially I had pitched a producer decision-making roadmap. I approached pastoral industry consultant Ian Mclean from Bush Agribusiness for some advice. He assured me: “It is a big and important area, not without its challenges, that I do think is worth pursuing.”

The GABC Brisbane workshop in March was my prompt. Learning how values, identity and trust shape how we show up in the world made me realise the links to agtech adoption.

There is a lot of anecdote in the agtech adoption space and not a lot of evidence. I realised the concept of a decision-making roadmap was going to lean on unsteady assumptions.

This was the biggest risk to my initial project plan. It wasn’t until I looked this risk in the eye, that I saw my task: to replace the theories with a real dataset – built by producers, not built about them.

Survey details

The survey takes around six minutes to complete and asks producers about their enterprise, their decision-making, their experience with technology, and the values that matter most to their business.

I look forward to sharing my findings at Beef2027, with industry stakeholders, agtech developers and producers themselves.

Producers can complete the survey here. Please share it with your neighbours.