How do some farmers continue to grow profits even as input costs rise and markets remain volatile?
According to Matt Dart, Executive Director Agribusiness and CFO at DB Ag, the answer lies in focusing on what you can control — adopting a flexible mindset, using agtech to find and deliver efficiencies, and basing operational decisions on reliable, high-quality data.
Matt has witnessed first-hand how technology has transformed the business of farming over the past three decades. Raised on a farm at Merriwagga in the northern Riverina, he studied Agricultural Economics at Sydney Uni before holding senior agribusiness roles at Westpac and Rabobank in Albury and Wagga.
In his early 20s, one of Matt’s first jobs was to teach Westpac Agribusiness Managers how to use laptops on farm visits — at a time when spreadsheets were relatively new and most budgets and cashbooks were written by hand.
Today, DB Ag operates more than 10,000 hectares across several properties, producing oilseeds, cereals, lamb, and wool. Matt and his partners have fully embraced digital tools for planning, operations, and decision-making.
“If you don’t know your exact input costs to create a commodity, you’re blind to the one thing you can actually control,” Matt says.
“Creating a pasture to feed a lamb involves seed, sowing, fertiliser, herbicide, pesticide — and if you know how much weight your lambs are putting on, thanks to EID tags, you can calculate exactly how much income that pasture is generating.”
For more than a decade, DB Ag has used soil moisture probes and digital weather stations, giving them deep insight into soil profiles and the implications for crops. The team uses Agworld Farm Management software to record every cropping activity across every paddock — from spraying and sowing to spreading and harvest.
While the transition to digital recordkeeping wasn’t without challenges, Matt says the effort has paid off.
“It took trial and error and a commitment to getting it right, but now we trust our data. It doesn’t make decisions for us, but it gives weight to the argument for change.”
That confidence in data has helped DB Ag refine its enterprise mix across six key areas — canola, wheat, barley, lamb, wool, and mutton — based on actual and potential returns. Spoiler alert: There’s less wheat and more lamb on the horizon for 2026.
Matt is also leading the development of a new multi-peril revenue insurance scheme for farmers, covering risks such as drought, pests, and frost. A key requirement: participating farmers must use digital farm management systems.
“I recently spoke to a group of 25 growers,” Matt recalls.
“Everyone said they used some kind of digital recordkeeping, but when I asked who kept it up to date — not one hand went up.”
That gap between collecting and maintaining reliable data, he says, will only become more critical as farmers face increasing demands for carbon reporting, market access, and finance compliance.
To make the process easier, Matt says dashboarding tools such as Pairtree which integrates data from different software platforms, will play an increasingly important role. He sees the ability to have data extracted and validated to allow potential access to programs, products & services as an exciting and potentially lucrative area and says carbon programs and finance access are two areas that come to mind.
“The one thing I’d say to anyone who hasn’t started collecting digital data is: just start,” Matt advises. “Today is day one. Time goes fast, and before long your dataset will be rich, reliable, and incredibly useful.”
The message is clear: in a volatile industry, data isn’t just information — it’s a competitive advantage that pays dividends.
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