What good agtech actually looks like: a day at TSBE's Protein 2026 in Dalby

Will Onus was in Dalby last Wednesday for TSBE's Protein 2026, out on the Darling Downs with producers, processors and industry people working through where the protein sector is heading. Good room, good conversations.

Two things stuck with him on the drive home.

The first was a point Brendan Tatt from JBS made plainly: sustainability reporting is just how business works now. Farmers have always found ways to produce better products from fewer inputs. The job, for everyone in the chain, is to find where those two things genuinely overlap and make sure there's something in it for everyone, not just the businesses at the top of it. Rachel Chambers made a related point from the producer side. Having the right information to respond to supply chain questions with confidence isn't a nice-to-have. Not having it has a real cost, even if that cost doesn't show up anywhere obvious.

The second was a conversation about what good agtech actually looks like. Jarrod Jackson made the point that AI is going to touch every product and platform in this industry, whether you're using it directly or not. What's more interesting is what the technology is actually removing from a producer's day. The tools that get used are the ones that take work away. Halter is a good example. Filling in a spreadsheet is not a high-value use of a farmer's time, and if a piece of technology doesn't solve for that, it's just a new way to fill in a form. That's what the Ruminati team thinks about.

If you're a producer wanting to get your first emissions report done without the spreadsheet, Ruminati PRIME is free to get started.

Thanks to Rowena Beveridge, Anna Geddes, April Cavanagh and the whole TSBE team for a day worth the drive out.