UNE computer science lecturer Mitchell Welch said the two industries on their own offered great prospects for graduates, but together they were “exceptional”.

“Separately, ag and IT are presenting themselves as great career choices, but there’s also great scope to put them together and contribute to the planet’s urgent need for more sustainable agriculture by working with data, not dirt,” Dr Welch said.

Jobs specialist SEEK reported in mid-2016 that vacancies in its farming, animals and conservation category had jumped 32 per cent year-on-year, some of the fastest growth in the sectors it tracks.

Meanwhile, recruitment consultancy Robert Walters forecast this month that pay in some IT jobs would jump tens of thousands of dollars this year, especially for roles that protected organisations from cyberattack, built better relationships with customers, or extracted useful information from data. 

Putting data in the service of ag was a natural fit for UNE, another computer science faculty member said.

“The university has decades of expertise in teaching agriculture, and we’re now enhancing that knowledge with computational science,” Professor Paul Kwan said.

A university spokesman said one example was the computer science department using software development to change the way farmers worked with livestock genetics.

To improve the use of complex genetic information in sheep breeding, the Sheep Cooperative Research Centre, based at UNE, decided to simplify the interface – just as the 2007 iPhone put a simple user interface on complex handheld technologies, the spokesman said.

The resulting app, RamSelect, gave ram buyers a user-friendly graphical interface that let them put in a few clicks and get back a clear listing of the rams genetically best-suited to their ewe flock, without having to navigate the complex underlying data.

Similarly, Dr Welch was working with UNE’s Precision Agriculture Research Group to engineer and code instruments which, attached to sheep or cattle, could help introduce “precision grazing” by tracking animal movements across plant and soil types.

“The interface between agriculture and technology is especially important, given that it is the basis of human life,” Dr Welch said.

“But we deal with other interactions every day. We using computing and data to help tackle invasive species, support better outcomes for the environment, produce better outcomes for rural communities.

“In relative terms, computer science has only just been invented, but it has already become one of the most important drivers of human prosperity – and the job market reflects that.”

UNE’s computer science program had a strong focus on app development and data science, producing graduates that were in high demand in a competitive environment, Dr Welch said.