Prof Bunt, the inaugural professor of agricultural innovation at the University of Otago, said companies in the region needed to talk more loudly about the work they were doing.
There was a mix of both large and small players in the agritech sector in the region and it was a high-tech industry. The presence of the university was also a strength.
"Across the university we have an incredible depth and breadth of research that is directly into or allied to the agri sector," he said.
Agritech had a good future and the use of technology helped farmers improve yield, profitability and sustainability, he said.
The use of technology helped create huge amounts of data and the use of data science and artificial intelligence (AI) could help build robustness and flexibility in systems.
Virtual reality and robotics had improved safety in the workplace in the agri sector.
However, there were certain policy challenges that were impacting the adoption of a few technologies, there were discussions happening with politicians, civil servants among others to get the message out, Prof Bunt said.
The use of genetically modified crops by farmers and using hemp-based products for feeding livestock were a couple, he said.
Technology could help attract young people into the agricultural sector as they came to realise the opportunities it offered, he said.
Dunedin-based Ingenium, a company founded by Tom Brownlie, used modern technology such as AI and machine learning. The company’s solution Sentinel-AI was an early warning system for emerging and endemic livestock diseases.
"Early disease warning systems are an emerging field. While traditional surveillance activities exist widely, it is only the very recent advances in on-farm technology and computational ability that have permitted Sentinel-AI to emerge," he said.
The use of early disease warning systems permitted faster and more effective disease diagnoses and eradication responses, he said.
