Darling Downs producers set sights on ag tech, innovation and investment

Producers are hatching their plans for success in 2017 across a range of industries as we celebrate the Chinese New Year, the year of the rooster.

The opportunities we see include growing exports, emerging innovation in the ag technology space and increasing inbound investment for food and agriculture.

Not content just to wing it, in the past two years TSBE and FLA has built a strong Asian strategy for trade with the help of business development manager Wen Liu in Shanghai. 

For producers on the Darling Downs, Asia is the goose that lays the golden egg, an importing powerhouse salivating over our clean, green food bowl.

Ag tech discussion around start-ups and new projects with existing players will come to the fore in 2017, but we’re not counting our chickens until they’ve hatched. In the meantime, we are hard at work preparing for the second round of the 400M Ag Tech and Investment conference that drives innovation.

Our region and cluster is well positioned to lead an ideas and innovation boom, with projects like the FKG Pulse Data Centre, an infrastructure project that promises new industries and opportunities. 

In January I also travelled to Hong Kong for the 10th Asian Financial Forum Deal Flow session which attracted some peckish investors.

Perhaps having Food and Australia in our name assisted that interest.
FLA is poised to facilitate this inbound investment in the food production and processing sector.

We are excited by the major coop we are building in the region in terms of logistics and production capability. The Toowoomba Transport and Logistics Symposium provides the knowledge around this for road, rail and air freight options.

Booming exports in the food space is a decades-long trend, and to move away from poultry puns for a moment, further up the farm gate we see beef looking for better export returns this year.

Australian exporters of beef should be focused on the higher end consumers for long term profitability. With that said, the overall trend for our food demand is as bright as a healthy rooster’s comb and wattle (annnnd we’re back).

Some key areas to watch in 2017 include nutraceuticals (natural products with extra health benefits), logistics, on and off-farm food production innovation, and export and investment topics. 

In 2016 the Toowoomba region flapped its wings, taking off for Shanghai with AccessChina and establishing weekly freight flights direct to Hong Kong. 

2017 is now set to ruffle feathers and show up the year just gone.