A number of international guest speakers and technologies will descend on Rotorua for the MobileTECH 2019 agritech event in April.

“MobileTECH is one of New Zealand’s largest annual agritech events and we are looking forward to showcasing a wide range of world-class digital technologies for our food and fibre sectors,” says programme manager Ken Wilson.

“Artificial intelligence, machine learning, smart data and other automation technologies are starting to make a big impact on productivity for early-adopters throughout our agricultural, horticultural and forestry sectors.”

With more than 30 speakers signed up for MobileTECH 2019, close to half are flying into NZ to take part in the programme.

Keynote speaker, Sarah Nolet, CEO of Australian-based Agthentic, is a global trailblazer on the adoption of agri technologies and how innovators and growers can succeed together.

Sarah says she’s really looking forward to speaking at MobileTECH 2019 “about how we can continue to bridge the gap between ag and tech, as well as enable more collaborations between Australia and NZ”.

Netherlands-based artificial intelligence for ag leader, Yasir Khokhar, CEO of Connecterra, has been making waves internationally in recent years. His mission has been to “build an artificial intelligence that will grow food sustainably to feed future generations”.

While Connecterra has released an award-winning intelligent cow-monitoring system, Yasir says his company’s drive has been that data and algorithms in themselves won’t change anything – “but they do offer us the potential to experiment and to learn what works best under what circumstances”. “Connecting individual data points with multitude of related data can have an enormously positive impact on farm productivity,” says Yasir.

Andrew Bate will also speak. He’s an Australian farmer who founded agritech startup, SwarmFarm Robotics and developed the SwarmBot – a platform of robotic machines which can ‘talk’ to one another and work in swarms to autonomously plant, weed and undertake pest control.

The opening keynote at MobileTECH 2019 will be Russell Craig, Microsoft NZ’s national technology officer. His focus will be on how digital innovations are transforming the NZ economy.

“NZ is a world-leading digital nation. I’m excited to see all the digital opportunities and innovation happening across our primary industries,” says Russell.

MobileTECH 2019 is on April 3-4 in Rotorua. Details are at: www.mobiletech.events.