Bosch, Monash University announce ag-tech collaboration

Melbourne’s Monash University has teamed up with leading global supplier of technology and services, Bosch, to develop a unique facility centred on agricultural technology and innovation.

The ag-tech launch pad and an accompanying development centre will take up one hectare at Bosch’s headquarters in Melbourne’s southeast suburb of Clayton. It will add to the billion-dollar investment hub known as the Clayton Innovation Precinct.

The facility will house a prototypical ‘smart farm’ and will enable collaborative industry partnerships and research. The space will include cropping trials and early-stage prototype development, enabling the use of artificial intelligence, automation, robotics and advanced sensor technology.

The first-of-its-kind establishment comes at a crucial time for Australia as farming is set to overtake minerals and mining as the biggest industrial sector by 2050. Future developments from the facility can potentially bolster efforts to increase agricultural productivity in Australia to meet rising global food and fibre demand.

Monash Deputy Vice-Chancellor, Ken Sloan, says the facility would leverage the University’s close connections to industry and multidisciplinary capabilities across engineering, IT and science, to drive technological advances in agriculture.

“This Monash-Bosch collaboration represents our shared capabilities in agriculture technology and creates the opportunity to lead future advancement of the ag-tech sector - the next big growth industry for Australia,” Sloan says.

“With rising temperatures and rapid population growth requiring food production to double by mid-century - it’s clear we need major innovations in how we eat and farm. We need inventions to increase yields, nutrient quality and sustainability of our food production to cope with the world demand and climate.

“This ag-tech launch-pad could prove instrumental in driving long-term collaborative efforts to address global food security and significantly advance farming practices to safeguard against rising demands.”

The facility will become a key component of food and agricultural innovation at Monash which already includes the Food Innovation Centre, the Food Incubator, and the Australia-China Dairy Manufacturing Centre.

President of Bosch Australia, Gavin Smith, believes that Australia is the perfect place to set up an ag-tech innovation centre.

“The establishment of the launch pad by Monash at our facility in Clayton will present a myriad of opportunities for collaboration,” Smith says.

This is not Bosch’s first venture in agriculture. Most recently, the company engaged global enterprise Bayer in a research collaboration to safeguard yields by sustainably clearing weeds using smart spraying technology.

In Australia, Bosch is a lead investor and technology partner of The Yield, an Australian ag-tech company aiming to use real-time microclimate data to transform agriculture and food production practices.

Bosch Australia has also partnered with SwarmFarm, another Australian ag-tech start-up, to provide engineering and manufacturing services for its autonomous agricultural robotic platform.

Construction for the Monash-Bosch ag-tech facility is expected to commence in 2018.