Panel | What’s for dinner in 2050? A Look at the Future of Agriculture for Australia

The year 2050 is just 26 growing seasons away. Climate shocks during the first two decades of the 21st century have sharpened our attention on the reality of the impacts of climate change, but continued incremental production gain has enabled us to compensate so far. Meeting future food security and sustainability goals will require more than this. Recent exponential advances in areas such as genomics, robotics and autonomous systems, machine learning and AI, remote sensing, modelling and landscape monitoring, have positioned agriculture for a step-change in innovation and production. However, innovation is constrained by the 'lock-in' between farm management, machinery/infrastructure and species genetics. Simultaneous coordinated innovation in all these areas is required to achieve that production step-change. The CSIRO Agriculture and Food Ag2050 program has defined this need through a landmark futures publication, in conjunction with the Commonwealth Department of Agriculture Forestry and Fisheries, and will demonstrate the value of this approach through use-cases co-designed with stakeholders and utilising expertise from socio-technology to landscape management to farming systems to robotics and machine learning. CSIRO's network of research farms will be a key component of this, acting as 'living labs' and centres of engagement for these use-case demonstrations and the future of sustainability in Australian agriculture. Critical to success of this program is partnering early with industry in identifying and co-developing sustainable and commercially viable opportunities to drive significant change. This session will provide an introduction to the Ag2050 program and a panel Q&A around its implementation with members from CSIRO and partners.

About Tony: 
Tony May is Head of Sales for the Crop Science division of Bayer in Australia and New Zealand. Tony is responsible for leading the commercial team in executing the strategies for Bayer’s crop protection, cotton and canola traits businesses.
 
Tony studied a Bachelor of Applied Science (Rural Technology), Agronomy and Crop Science at the University of Queensland. He worked as a General Manager at Beela, an irrigated farm in Moree district, growing 2,000 hectares of cotton for five years before moving on to work at Deltapine Australia as a Regional Sales Manager. During Tony’s time at Deltapine Australia he worked as a Technical Services Manager and General Manager developing marketing, sales, production, operations and administrative strategies.
 
In 2008, Tony joined Monsanto Australia as the Canola Business Manager. Four years later, Tony was appointed as the Technology Development Lead for Row Crops. In 2016, Tony was appointed as the Managing Director for Monsanto Australia, serving in this role for more than six years. Following Bayer’s acquisition of Monsanto in 2018, Tony was appointed as Head of Customer Marketing for Australia and New Zealand, and led the Customer Marketing team until his appointment to Head of Sales in December 2022.
 
Tony is passionate about innovation in relation to biotechnology, new breeding techniques, the Herbicide Innovation Partnership between GRDC and Bayer, and biologicals. He also strongly believes in the importance of teamwork and positive workplace culture.