New UQ Gatton tech reveals future of Aussie crop yields months in advance

The UQ Gatton campus has remained a hub of activity for the latest AgTech solutions, with an academic having cracked the code on accurate crop yield predictions months in advance.

UQ Gatton Associate Professor Andries Potgieter has developed a system offering accurate predictions of crop yield and farm production risks up to four months before sowing.

The era of groundbreaking AgTech has manifested in the Lockyer Valley, with a Gatton academic the latest to concoct a system that predicts crop yield and farm production risks up to four months prior to sowing.

Developed at the University of Queensland’s Gatton campus, CropVision is the brainchild of Associate Professor Andries Potgieter, linking crop models with data from Earth Observation monitoring of physical, chemical and biological systems and global climate information.

Professor Potgieter said existing crop forecasting can be unreliable because it’s driven by historic data with limited understanding of the biophysical-climate systems at field, farm or regional levels.

Associate Professor Andries Potgieter. Photo: QAAFI

“CropVision is a science based, holistic innovation that will enable better decisions and more sustainable practices to meet the many challenges affecting crop production,” he said.

“Growing up on a dryland cropping farm in South Africa, I experienced first-hand the impact of droughts and floods, and in those days, farming decisions were mainly reactive and opportunistic.”

Professor Potgieter explained the reason behind this was due to the little to no information that was available on production risk and projected climate and its impact on the crop potential before sowing.

“CropVision can now provide that additional information at both the temporal and spatial scales and has been validated for different crop management practices and environments across Australia,” he said.

Proposed set-up of a multiple digital sensor platform to record information at a detailed crip validation site in recently funded GRDC project (CropPhen). This targets the development of new approaches for the accurate monitoring of crop phenology and discriminating of crop types. Copyright QAAFI.

The system has been used at the Queensland Alliance for Agriculture and Food Innovation to develop and calibrate a new wheat model predicting yield at the 10m pixel scale and the field scale from more than 400 observed fields across Australia with significantly high accuracies at region, farm and field scales.

CropVision’s national wheat outlook was for a close to median yield of 2.30 tonne per hectare back in March 2024, which closely aligns with the October 2025 yield estimate of 2.25 tonnes per hectare.

Dr Potgieter said the outputs generated from CropVision would be invaluable to better inform farmers and industry in making smarter, data-driven decisions well before sowing of their winter and summer crops.

“Having advance knowledge of the impact of the climate on the likely production for the coming season is critical information for farmers but also for companies looking at fertiliser and seed sales, and bulk handlers planning the movement of commodities,” he said.

Professor Potgieter said the next step for the program would be to work with the Queensland government to provide the technologies developed in CropVision to industry partners.