APPN puts agriculture at the heart of national research infrastructure

Richard Dickmann, CEO of APPN had the opportunity to present the expanding activities of APPN to the entire National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS) community at the NCRSI National Forum in Canberra on February 14. Presenting the activities of APPN to this audience is critical for emphasising the presence of agriculture at the heart of the NCRIS program.

The foundational role of APPN is to digitise and automate the collection of high-quality data from agricultural experiments across Australia. Explaining and aligning these activities with those of other NCRIS facilities increases the opportunity for collaborative projects which can accelerate learnings into new areas. An excellent example is the OzBarley “phenome to genome” project involving four NCRIS facilities, five universities and four private sector crop breeding companies. The project will accelerate breeding processes and outcomes in this important food crop where Australia is a world leader. The current expansion of APPN is likely to increase the opportunities for further projects along similar lines.

Economic importance

The economic importance of such collaborations for Australian agriculture cannot be under-estimated. The total national value of farm production reached $100 billion in 2022-23 (ABARES Insights 2025), an increase of 35% over 25 years. In fact, agriculture leads all Australian industries in terms of total factor productivity growth, increasing some 20% in the last 10 years and 30% since 2000.

These increases have been made despite the fact that the number of extreme temperature days (top 1%) since 1960 has increased by more than 200% while rainfall across large sections of southern Australia has decreased by 20 to 40% (BOM, 2021). 

“Gains in productivity have been achieved through constant Research and Development and as these climate trends are set to continue we need to increase delivery of world class R&D, which APPN will directly support,” said Mr Dickmann. 

National phenotyping for national impact

As Mr Dickmann was able to tell the NCRIS Forum, APPN has now expanded from two nodes to nine, with facilities in all of Australia’s mainland states.

“This expansion is critical not only because APPN now covers all major agro-ecological zones,” he said, “but it also includes infrastructure experts providing services to leading researchers in Australia's premier agricultural universities.

“APPN is now a truly national network.” 

 The second key development has been the creation of an ‘impact pipeline’, which links APPN’s seven controlled environment sites, five semi-controlled fixed field sites and six mobile phenotyping units to support the progressive stages of crop development.

“Our overall goal is to accelerate the delivery of research innovation to on-farm impact and grower sustainability, productivity and profitability,” stated Mr Dickmann.

Consistency and collaboration

Equally important to this research infrastructure network has been the thought given to developing uniform data networks and an organisational setup which focuses on joint decision-making over critical infrastructure decisions. Further to this, IP for new phenotyping methodologies is being automatically shared across the network, reducing barriers to open innovation.

“Perhaps APPN’s most important outcome will be a new culture of collaboration throughout the Australian ag research and research infrastructure ecosystems,” Mr Dickmann concluded.

4 March 2025