The Coggan family shares their experience about a practical path to smarter farming in Queensland’s Western Downs. 

The United Nations has declared 2026 the International Year of the Woman Farmer. It's a timely opportunity to celebrate women's contribution to agriculture and to ask what more we must do to unlock their potential.

Farmers are an important partner in managing the risk of fire across the landscape and a critical part of the firefighting effort, often providing a first response to fires. Many farmers are also volunteer firefighters.

Australia is a known world leader in diversity and inclusion after decades of effort to achieve balance in how we run this country. Geographical representation for our regional-rural population, however, is one of the big final omissions.

The lens of space habitation is driving innovation in Australian agricultural sustainability and new opportunities for bioproduction.

Trait development is long term and expensive, the latter making it hard to fund from commercial sources, but it is critical for delivering the step changes required for future profitability

In a disrupted geopolitical trade system looking for trusted, consistent, values-aligned partners, Australian agriculture has a unique value proposition to offer.

“For generations, Australian farmers have been presented new ideas on how we are going to feed the world into the future. Some of them are what you might call blue sky. This, to a degree, is fine but not at the cost of ideas that are practical for solving real problems for farmers today. Ultimately, like most professions, agriculture is a human activity. No matter how sophisticated an agricultural technology is, much like the next generation submarines that will be based here on the coast of my home state of Western Australia, there will always be a need for a competent farmer to install, operate, and maintain it. While these implementation issues generally seem to be recognised by most in the agricultural industry, the elephant in the room I feel is the related challenge of actually attracting young people to work on the farm to ensure its viability for decades to come. With so many options available for our country’s youth, especially mining here on the west coast, we as a nation need to be thinking more about a sustainable workforce into the future. And this largely boils down to one simple universal idea: farmer incomes and their impact on farmer quality of life. The reality is that farming is getting harder and returns are, given various economic forces, diminishing for many farmers year on year. Imagine if this was happening in the healthcare sector. Or aviation. Or finance. Or education. Or construction. Surgeons, pilots, teachers, builders, and bankers would leave their professions in droves. And these industries suffer and perhaps eventually collapse. This idea is not about farmers whinging for more money. For the world’s oldest industry, however, this long term labour problem becomes an existential one for the entire human race. And farmers cannot solve it on their own.”

Australia’s farmers are poised for global growth, but to stay competitive, they’ll need to attract long-term investment, embrace innovation, and turn world-class production into world-leading exports.