Agriculture
CeRDI has an established national and international profile for its eResearch collaborations in agriculture, characterised by innovative approaches using advanced spatial mapping, the federation of agricultural-related data from disparate sources, as well as portal design and visualisation tools.
Food Agility CRC
The Food Agility CRC is an innovation hub creating new digital technologies and services to help the Australian agrifood industry grow its comparative advantage.
Soil CRC
The Soil CRC is bridging the gap between soil science and farm management to assist Australian farmers in making decisions on complex soil management issues.
Agricultural Price Guide
The Agricultural Price Guide project is enabling growers and agronomists to examine historic pricing information and fluctuations in prices for major agricultural commodities.
Agricultural Research Federation (AgReFed)
The Agricultural Research Federation (AgReFed) project is supporting collaboration and novel insights in research, development and policy through improving the discoverability of data.
Australian National Soil Information System (ANSIS) - Soil Data Management Project
CSIRO are seeking to expand engagement with Federation University so that third tier soil data custodians can be supported to participate in the ANSIS data federation.
Climate Variability and Grazing
Perennial Pasture Systems (PPS) is leading a project, with CeRDI and Agriculture Victoria, to use technologies with pasture growth predictors for on-farm decision making in response to changes in climate and environment.
Decision Wizard
The Decision Wizard project is a decision-making web app helping guide farmers in their on-farm decision-making and building knowledge about how decisions are made.
Digital Data Sharing Agreement Tool
The Digital Data Sharing Agreement Tool is a templated tool for anyone collecting, managing, or sharing farmers’ data. It is designed for contracts with only a few parties, such as: a research project contract between a farmer and a research institute, or a farm business and a processor, or a farm business and another farm business.
Growing Southern Gippsland
Growing Southern Gippsland has been designed to encourage southern Gippsland landholders to identify and target their own climate change knowledge gap needs as they journey through the portal.
Hyper Yielding Crops
The Hyper Yielding Crops project is maximising cropping yields in high rainfall areas by informing the setting of attainable grain yield targets.
LimeAssist
The LimeAssist calculator is designed to help advisors and farmers make decisions on liming to address soil acidification. While it can’t make the decision for you, it gives you the critical information in an easy-to-use online platform to help you make decisions on lime investment.
My Farm Dashboard
My Farm Dashboard assists farmers to make better decisions based upon critical support information and data about their property. CeRDI has been instrumental in the development of the portal.
National Landcare Program Smart Farming Project
The Building the Resilience and Profitability of Cropping and Grazing Farmers project is providing farmers with information to make better on-farm management decisions.
Natural Resource Management Portal
The Corangamite Natural Resource Management Portal is providing the tools and information for communities and agencies to identify joint priorities for catchment management.
Online Farm Trials
The Online Farm Trials project is digitally transforming trial research for Australia’s grains industry to enable users to rapidly find decision useful information.
Precision Agriculture
The Collaborative eResearch in Agriculture project is a partnership with Precision Agriculture to develop digital tools to enhance precision agriculture services.
Rangelands Carbon
The Rangelands Carbon project is developing a remote sensing tool to accurately and affordably measure soil carbon in Australian rangelands.
Soil Health Knowledge Base
The Soil Health Knowledge Base is a repository of soil health information for the Corangamite Catchment Management Authority (CCMA) and the Glenelg Hopkins Catchment Management Authority (GHCMA). It assists land managers and other stakeholders to implement catchment management plans across the region. The Knowledge Base was awarded the 2015 Victorian Spatial Excellence Award and the 2015 Asia Pacific Spatial Excellence Award, Environment and Sustainability category.
Soil Sampling Research
The Soil Sampling Research project is supporting the establishment of a soil monitoring network to help farmers improve and protect their soil.
Southern Farming Systems Soil Probe Network
The ProbeTrax project is a web platform displaying soil moisture and temperature values across a soil probe network in the high rainfall zones of Victoria and Tasmania
Visualising Australasia’s Soils
Visualising Australasia’s Soils (VAS) aims to provide participants of the Cooperative Research Centre for High Performance Soils (Soil CRC 
), and the agriculture industry broadly, with access to data and information about Australasian soils.
Visualising Victoria's Groundwater
The Visualising Victoria’s Groundwater project is an innovative technology offering a real-time, centralised site for Victoria’s groundwater information.
3D Soil Constraints
In collaboration with the Grains Research and Development Corporation and the Colere Group, CeRDI contributed to a project evaluating existing and emerging technologies for three-dimensional (3D) soils data at a sub-paddock scale for grain growers.
Forecasts for Profit
The Forecasts for Profit project is improving the use of seasonal climate forecast information and how it is communicated.
Kangaroo Grass, as a crop and to heal Country
The Djandak Dja Kunditja (Country Healing its Home) project is using Kangaroo Grass (Themeda triandra) as a modern perennial broadacre cropping system.
Knowledge Sharing for Good Soil Stewardship
Knowledge Sharing for Good Soil Stewardship project is funded by the Cooperative Research Centre for High Performance Soils (Soil CRC). The project identified knowledge-sharing strategies to increase landholder engagement in soil health improvement practices.
Online Final Reports
The Online Final Reports project is using innovative knowledge management approaches to evaluate, convert and collate reports into a consistent and accessible format.
Piggery effluent - waste or valuable resource?
Piggeries can give rise to substantial amounts of waste materials. The producer-owned pork industry body, Australian Pork Limited (APL), has a strong focus on sustainability and was interested in exploring the use of piggery effluent as an agricultural resource.
Riverine Plains
The Capturing In-Paddock Variability for Bespoke Fertiliser Management project is using precision agriculture datasets to unlock new insights about plant performance.
Rekha Attanayake
Rekha commenced her PhD with CeRDI in 2019 with Southern Farming Systems, Victorian Limestone Producers Association and Precision Agriculture as industry partners. She also receives a top-up scholarship from the Food Agility CRC. Her research is exploring and developing novel approaches to advance the understanding of lime type, quality, variability and spreadability on performance for agricultural purposes under current farming systems and practices.
Developing new methods to help farmers make decisions on lime use and lime requirement
Soil acidity is recognised as one of the major soil constrains to increased agricultural productivity in Australia.
Robert Clark
Robert commenced his PhD with CeRDI in 2019 with the Grains Research and Development Corporation as the industry partner. He also receives a top-up scholarship from the Food Agility CRC. His research is exploring how federating Australian grain trial data can lead to new discoveries that support the ideals of digital agriculture and enduring profitability for growers.
Predicting crop yield within the growing season at sub-paddock scale: a big data approach
The availability of accurate and timely predictions of crop yield within the growing season would be of enormous benefit to the grains industry in Australia.
Pramod Gautam
Pramod completed his Master’s degree in Plant science from Norwegian University of life sciences, Norway, and Bachelor of Science (Agriculture) from Tribhuvan University, Nepal. He worked in different non-governmental organizations in the sector of agribusiness and environment for more than 8 years. He is currently enrolled as a PhD candidate supported by a Destination Australia Scholarship, in partnership with IBM Watson Centre in Ballarat, focused on decision support systems to help farmers achieve net zero carbon. His research will explore how farmers are using decision support system for monitoring carbon emissions and will also develop a Decision Support System (DSS) using sensors, artificial intelligence to access the quantity and quality of data for carbon monitoring, modelling to achieve net zero carbon for agribusiness.
Pramod commenced his PhD in the Centre for eResearch and Digital Innovation at Federation University in May 2023.
Achieving net zero emissions in agriculture: Developing decision support systems for land and enterprise managers
Achieving net zero emissions in agriculture: Developing decision support systems for land and enterprise managers - Global anthropogenic greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions are increasing day by day and net zero target is a great challenge.
Andrew MacLeod
Andrew commenced his PhD with CeRDI in 2021 and receives a scholarship from the Food Agility CRC. His research is exploring the adoption of the latest international advances in syntactic and semantic interoperability to develop standardised data streams from disparate sources to enrich decision support systems used within the agricultural and food industries.
Advancing syntactic and semantic interoperability for data in the agricultural and food industries
Access to data provides the fuel for next generation decision support systems and the opportunities for sharing data have never been greater.
Peter Weir
Peter commenced his PhD with CeRDI in 2020 and receives an Australian Government Research Training Program fee-offset scholarship through Federation University Australia. He also receives a scholarship from the Cooperative Research Centre for High Performance Soils whose activities are funded by the Australian Government's Cooperative Research Centre Program. Peter’s PhD was confirmed in 2025.
In-Paddock Variability of Plant Available Water
With the adoption of precision agriculture and implementation of site-specific crop management by farmers there is a better understanding of spatial and temporal variabilities in cropping fields and pastures.
Resources
Data Federations in Agriculture
For generations, Australasian farmers have gathered and shared knowledge on how to grow better crops. In the 21st century it makes sense to use technology to improve our agricultural know-how and profitability. But how can that be achieved?
Soil CRC Project: Visualising Australasia's soils explainer (2:55)
This animated video explains how the Visualising Australasia's soils project will use data.
Visualising Australasia's Soils - Ballarat Workshop 2019 (4:28)
Project kick-off workshop 11-14 February 2019 held at CeRDI, Federation University, Ballarat.
Online Farm Trials (6:09)
The principle objective of the Online Farm Trials project is to help improve the productivity and sustainability of farming enterprises by improving access to trial research information. www.farmtrials.com.au .
Grower and adviser involvement wanted for the Hyper Yielding Crops initiative (7:14)
ABC NEWS VIDEO: Hyper Yielding Crops: Crops yielding five-times the national average (11:46)
Visualising Victoria's Groundwater (10:36)
An interoperative web-GIS that federates groundwater data from disparate sources to assist groundwater researchers and help water managers make the correct choices for the sustainable use of a precious resource. www.vvg.org.au .
Natural Resource Management Portal (6:55)
The Natural Resource Management Portal project is testing how online mapping can be used to match local and regional priorities for catchment management in the Corangamite Catchment Management Authority region. www.ccmaknowledgebase.vic.gov.au/nrmpp
Probe Trax SFS moisture probe platform (4:48)
A new web based platform to interact with the SFS moisture probe network. probetrax.sfs.org.au
Drought-Resilience Showcase (2024) - Digital solutions for agriculture (9:38)
Carolyn Staines, from the Vic Hub's University partner Federation University, presents 'Digital solutions for agriculture - Soil health implications for surface spraying effluent' at the Vic Hub's Drought-Resilience Showcase (2024).
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