General News
4 June, 2023
A hub of interest for producers
KEEN interest was shown by producers engaging with the team from the Tropical North Queensland Drought Resilience Adoption and Innovation Hub at last week’s Rotary FNQ Field Days.
KEEN interest was shown by producers engaging with the team from the Tropical North Queensland Drought Resilience Adoption and Innovation Hub at last week’s Rotary FNQ Field Days.
The TNQ Drought Hub, which is led by James Cook University and dedicated to creating a better future for Australian farmers, is keen to uncover what problems local farmers are facing.
These problems are then used as the basis for sourcing technology and research solutions that can help Tropical North Queensland producers to build stronger, more sustainable and resilient businesses.
TNQ Drought Hub has launched an online portal called The Muster where producers can submit details of challenges they are experiencing so that they can be analysed and linked to existing solutions or activated within the entrepreneurial or research community. Nicole Lucas is the Ag Innovation Program Lead within the hub.
“The TNQ Drought Hub is committed to better understanding the challenges faced by TNQ producers, that’s why we are going straight to the source to collect these problems,” she said.
“Once collected, we then use these problems as the basis of solution finding through on-farm technology trials, innovation or research that will benefit the wider community.
“Notable success stories have included the on-farm trials of a pregnancy breath testing device for cattle and on-farm trials using Pairtree Intelligence to integrate a range of different property man-agement software into one dashboard making it less complicated for the user.
“Our next range of trials will be dedicated to products which will solve some key problems for the horticultural industry.”
TNQ Drought Hub director Professor David Phelps said farmers and producers in Tropical North Queensland experienced different challenges compared to their southern counterparts.
“It is important that we are investing in research and technology to make their businesses more sustainable and resilient to future droughts,” he said.
“Agriculture has always benefited from new technologies, and the things many landholders now use on a day-to-day basis were once new innovations.”
Dr Phelps said “starting with the problem in-mind” had already proven to be effective, with the TNQ Drought Hub team recently working with New South Wales start-up Agscent to trial a new method of breath testing pregnant cattle in North Queensland.
“A great example of this ‘problem to solution match-up’ is the Agscent breath-based pregnancy test product that we recently tri-alled at JCU’s Fletcher Station in Charters Towers,” he said.
“In this case, the issue was quite simply a lack of availability and affordable pregnancy testing services, as current pregnancy detec-tion methods for cattle can be costly and time-consuming.
“Therefore, TNQ Drought Hub worked with Agscent to test their technology in northern Australia to ensure the design team are producing devices that are ready for use in the northern beef herd and able to withstand our tropical conditions.
“In the event of a drought, farmers also need to be able to quickly determine which cattle to keep and which to move to another property, so having an easy method to help with this decision-making is a game changer for producers.
“This is a great example of how we were able to identify and capture an issue that northern cattle producers were facing and find an existing innovative solution to help improve their business operations.”
Landholders and producers are encouraged to head to the Problem Statement Capture form on the TNQ Drought Hub website to submit any problems they are currently facing.
For more information go to www.tnqdroughthub.com.au/problem-statement-capture/
