Plans for Australian wool data hub shared with global industry

A panel at the recent International Wool Textile Organisation Congress in Japan spoke about the need for the platform, which is being developed by five Australian wool industry groups.

The hub is part of work being done by Australian Council of Wool Exporters and Processors, Australian Wool Exchange, Australian Wool Innovation, the Australian Wool Testing Authority and the National Council of Wool Selling Brokers of Australia to streamline traceability.

AWI CEO John Roberts said it was important for the development of such a data hub to be a collaborative process.

"Our focus is not to duplicate, not to compete with anything else in the marketplace," he said.

"It's purely to help facilitate those platforms and make it easier for them to provide evidence-based data.

"We think the future state wool involve an Australian wool data hub and those various schemes can feed off it."

Among the data that could be pulled together in the platform could be the e-speci collaboration between AWEX and AWI, Property Identification Codes and AWTA data.

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Mr Roberts said people are often scared by data but with the right governance and information about how it would be used, it could be a very positive thing.

"When I talk about customer demand, we know that our customers are increasingly wanting sustainable products, they don't necessarily know what sustainable means yet, they're still trying to work out their version of sustainability.

"But if we can give them the data they can start to build their own version of sustainability.

"They want to know the environmental impact, they want to know whether it adheres to the modern slavery acts going through the supply chain, there are so many things that need to be validated.

"Being able to validate it through having a good solid database in Australia where we can capture on-farm practices and then hopefully have the interoperability with other blockchain providers and the integrity schemes that are already in the marketplace, this should make that process simpler and have more substance."

Mr Roberts said many growers were already using practices that appealed to the market, such as using rotational grazing and regenerative farming on native pastures, but hadn't captured the data.

"I know when I talk to our brand partners, when you start telling them about these things, they say,' well, give it to me, give me the data, validate it'," he said.

"The key thing for us is to make sure all these parties we talk to... we make sure we have an open dialogue.

"A number of us have already got a lot of the digital building blocks in place, it's a case of making sure we leverage those and don't duplicate them again and we work as an industry to build a platform that's going to allow Australia to put their best foot forward."