This travel scholarship funding enabled one researcher to attend and present at the International Tri- Conference for Precision Agriculture 2017. The primary aim of attending the Asian-Australasian Conference for Precision Agriculture (PA17) was to gain a solid foundation of the status of precision agriculture in Australia and across the globe (US, Europe, Asia). There were four particular areas of interest to the researcher, including:

1. How people are currently using spatial ‘big data’

2. Different approaches to creating ‘management zones’

3. Current approaches of predicting yield – both mechanistic (e.g. APSIM) and empirical (e.g. the approach we developed in the AgData challenge for cereal and oilseed crops)

4. The use of the various available remote sensing platforms to understand crop status and health, as well as using these data sources as an input into empirical approaches to predict yield

The conference was an opportunity to showcase the work that our Australian researchers have achieved using big data and machine learning to predict yield over large areas.