Agriculture & food technology
ISSUE_05 / Inside the technology helping agriculture stay ahead of climate change
16 June 2026
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Almost as soon as South Australians can talk, they’re taught that ours is the driest state in the driest continent on the planet.
What usually goes uncelebrated, despite the arid handicap, is that our State still grows millions of tons and billions of dollars of high-grade wheat, barley, lentils and other grains year in and year out – and all without a drop of irrigation.
It sounds counter-intuitive, impossible even, until you discover the constant hum of agricultural innovation that is concentrated at the Adelaide University Waite Research Precinct, located only 7km from Adelaide’s CBD.
A global leader in AgriTech
‘The Waite’ is one of South Australia’s innovation places and has been at the heart of advancing the state’s agricultural resilience and productivity since it was bequeathed to Adelaide University for that express purpose – established as the Waite Agriculture Research Institute in 1924.
Dr Trevor Garnett, Field Phenomics Director for the Australian Plant Phenomics Network (APPN), has worked at The Waite for over 20 years. In that time, he’s seen it transition from a centre of critical plant science into a global leader in AgriTech.
Today, he’s unlocking crop improvements for a hotter, drier climate where a growing population requires more food be grown in poor soils with less water, fertiliser, expensive chemicals and financial risk.
The biomass bottleneck
One of the key challenges plant scientists have always faced, and the one Dr Garnett is helping to solve, is how to investigate a living plant without destroying it. Commensurate with that is the difficulty of assessing thousands of plants while they are all at the same growth stage.
“Plants grow into structures that are fantastically hard to measure with any accuracy, so just about any assessment used to mean the plants had to be destroyed.”
“You’d go and physically cut the parts you wanted, bag them, weigh them fresh, put them in an oven and dry them, and then weigh them again,” Dr Garnett explains.
“That’s a huge amount of effort, just to measure a simple parameter like biomass… and you’re left with no way of seeing how those plants would continue to develop.”
This “biomass bottleneck” often meant researchers only obtained a single snapshot of data at the end of a season.
Roboticised digital scanning
APPN now enables researchers to measure their plants with roboticised digital scanning systems, a purpose-built X-ray CT machine (think 3D hospital scans for plants), ground-based imaging platforms, and Uncrewed Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) equipped with LiDAR (pulsating laser light scanners) and hyperspectral sensors.
“We can fly a UAV over a paddock and calculate the biomass without even touching the plants,” Trevor says. “And we can do it week after week if that’s what’s needed, to build up a picture of how hundreds or even thousands of plants are responding to their climate, soil conditions, and inputs across the entire growing season.”
“What’s more, once we’ve collected those digital images, we can combine the data with sophisticated analytics, machine learning algorithms, and AI tools to analyse a whole range of important indicators and traits. And we can do it in hours, not weeks or months.”
This digital high-throughput plant phenotyping is finally giving researchers the insights they need to explore, test, and commercialise better crops at a rate that may just allow us to stay ahead of climate change and global population growth.
“We can also use the X-ray CT scanner to visually assess the wheat heads at the end of the growing season, which gives a 3D image and calculation of the grain number and weight, allowing us to understand how different plants yield under different scenarios.”
Inside the Plant Accelerator
The next frontier for Dr Garnett’s team is a new “Drone in a Box” system, where the UAV will be based on a solar-powered dock placed in the field.
Rather than sending a team out to perform each research flight, a single operator at The Waite will be able to remotely trigger a flight 500 km away, land the drone back on its charger to await the next flight, then download the high-resolution data for processing.
While APPN’s drones are busy in the skies, some of the precinct’s most intricate work takes place inside a purpose-built, 4,000 m2 glass-and-steel building called The Plant Accelerator®.
The research facility is dedicated to growing and evaluating plants at digital speeds.
Opened in January 2010, it is built around the world’s largest conveyor-based plant imaging system called the Smarthouses.
“The Smarthouses are built around their imaging systems, which take high resolution RGB images but which can capture 650 different wavelength bands using hyperspectral sensors,” Dr Garnett explains.
“But instead of researchers taking the scanner to each plant, the conveyor system brings the plants to the scanner.”
“Barcode readers track each plant and link it to the image data – and we can use those images and spectral signatures to identify signs of disease, drought stress or nutrient deficiency long before they’re visible to the naked eye.”
“It almost goes without saying that the history, size and continually evolving capabilities of The Plant Accelerator® have made it the envy of the plant science world.”
What really makes The Waite special
The Waite Research Precinct is more than just a single facility. It is a research and innovation powerhouse – the largest concentration of agricultural research and teaching expertise in the Southern Hemisphere.
Many of its facilities provide open access to research infrastructure, under the Australian Government’s National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy, to drive innovation.
But what really makes The Waite special is the close collaboration between its 15 major co-located organisations, centres, and research groups including CSIRO, the South Australian Research and Development Institute (SARDI) and the Australian Wine Research Institute.
This collaboration attracts important investors including industry research peak bodies like the Grains Research and Development Corporation (GRDC) which has already invested millions in infrastructure like APPN’s X-ray CT scanner and Dr Garnett’s APPN mobile phenotyping platforms.
Those external investments can be seen as a ringing endorsement of the innovators working at The Waite – and the way they work together.
And that is the true power of South Australia’s innovation places.
