Aussies Invest in Agricultural Traceability System

The Australian government has announced another AUD 11 million ($7 million) in funding via grants to boost Australia's agricultural traceability systems.

This is in addition to $55 million ($35.5 million) already granted this year – an investment that will help protect Australia from biosecurity incursions, as well as support the goal of the Australian Agricultural Traceability Alliance to grow the sector to AUD 100 billion ($65 billion) by 2030.

The latest funding has been split between regulatory technology (RegTech) grants and the Food Agility Co-operative Research Centre. The RegTech grants will aid agricultural businesses and exporters to meet regulatory requirements more efficiently, providing Australian agriculture with a trade advantage, whereas the Food Agility funding will drive industry-led digital innovations to streamline and modernise Australia’s food data management systems.

15 different projects, running until June 2025, have been awarded funding under the RegTech grant, namely:

• FreshChain Systems: to enhance and validate additional standardisable features on traceability platforms for RegTech applications in agrifood supply networks.

• University of Adelaide: to eliminate illegitimate timber and plant-derived products from global supply chains.

• University of Tasmania: to assess traceability RegTech applications for honeybee and cherry industries and related supply chains.

• Ricegrowers Ltd: for digital traceability of carbon emissions in rice.

• Horticulture Innovation Australia: to develop RegTech applications across horticultural value chains.

• Seafood Industry Australia: for a traceability and verification RegTech solution to increase efficiencies for the Australian seafood industry.

• South Australian Dairy Farmers Association: for algorithmic auditing of milk supply chains.

• CSIRO: for a digital exchange to streamline data collection and flows in the red meat supply chain.

• Venturenauts: for Halal beef e-certification and traceability.

• Agrifood Connect: for its Trace2Place project mapping the red meat supply chain.

• National Farmers’ Federation: to examine industry-led, cross-commodity RegTech in cross-commodity production systems.

• University of Newcastle: for global agricultural trade and traceability, international models, and future architecture.

• T-Provenance: for digital traceability to streamline pest and chemical management in the Australian grain industry.

• RegSoft: to use rules as code to create farm-to-export traceability for agriculture supply chains.

• Meat & Livestock Australia: for the Australian AgriFood Data Exchange, an interoperable data platform and exchange to transform agricultural traceability.