Oscar Parry spoke with Bulla Park chief executive Georgia Beattie about the future of indoor food production and the role of artificial intelligence at her farm. Georgia Beattie said her decision to buy her farm was not just to learn how to grow food—but how to grow food indoors. Bulla Park's indoor mushroom facility is vertically integrated, meaning mushrooms are grown in stacked layers. The farm grows mushrooms for food and health purposes, and Coles recently provided it with funding to produce an Australian-grown dehydrated range.
"If you look at the supermarkets, they want to make sure that they've always got a range of food on the shelves. So rather than have these dips if there's a major flood in the area or a major drought and they're unable to get products, I think that they'll always have anywhere between 10–30 percent of their [supply] base grown indoors – [where] they know that regardless of what's happening, they'll be able to draw down some products," she said.
"What I want to do is … deeply understand how to farm in Australia. So that's from an asset perspective … and how we most efficiently are able to get products to shelves, [and] there's also a people and training perspective." Georgia said that over 60 percent of her staff have an IT background, proving useful in understanding and contributing to the company's data-focused approach to farming.
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