Food Agility Congress 2026 to Put Agrifood Data, Resilience and Market Access on Canberra Agenda

Food Agility will hold a one-off congress in Canberra on October 7 as the Australian agrifood research organisation marks ten years of work on data, supply chains, food security and farm technology.

The event comes as the Cooperative Research Centre behind Food Agility approaches the end of its current funding cycle, giving the congress a dual role as both a retrospective and a discussion about what comes next for applied agrifood innovation.

The programme is built around issues that have become more urgent over the past decade: climate risk, supply chain resilience, market access, food security and the use of data-driven technologies in production and logistics.

Food Agility says its work over the past ten years has generated an estimated A$10 billion in economic impact through projects developed with industry, researchers and government partners.

The congress will bring together participants from agriculture, technology, research and policy rather than functioning as a conventional equipment trade show or product exhibition.

That format reflects a broader shift in agrifood innovation toward systems that connect farm data, traceability, markets, logistics and decision support instead of treating technology as an isolated piece of machinery or software.

Australia is a useful setting for the discussion because its producers operate across large distances, volatile weather and export-dependent markets, making data quality and supply chain coordination commercially important.

The October 7 event will therefore serve as a checkpoint for which agrifood technologies and collaboration models have produced measurable value over the past decade and which challenges remain unresolved.