Australian Plant Phenomics Facility: supporting the agricultural industry through R&D to deliver successful new products to market

Date:05-30-2017

Developing and bringing new agricultural products to market can be costly and time consuming for industry. Nufarm Limited recently sought the technology and expertise of the Australian Plant Phenomics Facility (APPF) to provide independent testing on potential new foliar sprays under development.

“The full service approach at the APPF, from the technology to the specialist staff, really appealed to us”, said Chad Sayer from Nufarm’s Product Strategy Group.

“The non-destructive, high-throughput phenotyping technology at the APPF gave us the ability to gain insights into our products under development that we could not achieve anywhere else. Their highly skilled, specialist team helped us design our experiments and provided invaluable advice throughout the project, right through to the data analysis.

“This has been exciting for us. Our pilot project delivered such promising results, we already have a large project underway”.


“We have a bespoke approach, working closely with our customers to design their experiments to deliver the best results”, said Dr Bettina Berger, Scientific Director at the Adelaide node of the APPF.

Dr Berger and her colleagues provide consultation on all projects carried out at the Adelaide node, supporting the development of the initial design and execution of the research. The specialist horticultural team set up the experiments and manage them through to completion. Customers can make use of online monitoring and access of projects throughout the experiment stage via Zegami (‘live processing’ which allows result checking on a day-to-day basis). On completion of experiments image analysis and data analysis are handled by our skilled engineering, software and statistics team. The research team then provide consultation on results and further follow-up as required.


The APPF is available to all publicly or commercially funded researchers. For further information or to discuss how we can support your research, please visit the APPF website for contact details. For more information about this project, contact Dr Berger.

Nufarm Limited is an Australian company. It is one of the world’s leading crop protection and specialist seeds companies, producing products to help farmers protect their crops against damage caused by weeds, pests and disease. With operations based in Australia, New Zealand, Asia, Europe and the Americas, Nufarm sells products in more than 100 countries around the world. Find out more about Nufarm here.

Zegami is a web application which allows users to filter, sort and chart data from experiments undertaken in the Smarthouses at the APPF Adelaide node, with the unique feature of being able to group that data with the corresponding images. To get a real feel for the application, we highly recommend you watch the video. Further reading here.