Growth trajectory: Data solutions for livestock farmers

Posted on 8 Jul 2025
7 minutes read
Technology and design

Industry PhDs are helping two budding software engineers build their careers as well as real-world applications that improve productivity on Australian farms.

Ayush Kanwal and Islam Rezk share a background in computer science, an interest in data and artificial intelligence, and a passion for applying technology solutions to the real world.

Both worked with leading agricultural technology provider AgriWebb during their undergraduate degrees. So it was only natural they would both gravitate towards doing their industry PhDs with the company.

“AgriWebb has a huge amount of historical data on livestock and their growth, including behaviour in the paddock, location, weather and various life cycle records,” says Ayush.

“This data helps us understand how livestock will grow. We can use to predict their growth and do it in a way that’s sustainable and productive for farmers.”

Ayush and Islam are doing complementary PhD research analysing the complex factors leading to optimal livestock growth and providing prediction tools to help farmers improve their productivity.

They are drawing on AgriWebb’s data bank of information from 60 million animals and 12,000 farmers built up over eight years.

This PhD gives us the opportunity to work with vast data sets and have access to a big team of amazing people who all want to drive new innovations in the field.

Ayush Kanwal

PhD candidate

Islam is using graph theory to track groups of cattle, sheep and other livestock – called mobs – as they split apart and reform into new groups over time on the farm, making it possible to explore the drivers of the growth of individual animals.

Ayush is building on this work by creating algorithms that help predict livestock growth for farmers, particularly focussing on how mob data can be used in real-life scenarios.

Both of their work feeds into AgriWebb’s Foragecaster tool, an online forecasting tool that helps farmers track and predict the growth of their livestock, pastures and on-farm sustainability.

“This PhD gives us the opportunity to work with vast data sets and have access to a big team of amazing people who all want to drive new innovations in the field,” Ayush says.

“With this project, we know whatever we’re designing and implementing will be used in the real world. That's definitely a very big motivation to all of us.”

While research can be a solitary affair for some PhD students, Islam and Ayush are at the centre of a large support network of AgriWebb experts, academic supervisors and PhD researcher colleagues.

“Kenny Sabir [Vice President of R&D at AgriWebb] has put together a team with me as the graph expert and Ayush on algorithms. We also have experts on farm operations and the application team leader we can draw on from AgriWebb,” Islam says.

“Then on the academic side, my supervisors are there and are really helpful. All up, I have six supervisors so my progress meetings can end up having eight people at them.”

This kind of teamwork and sharing of ideas is essential to delivering tools that will be commercially successful and useful in the real world.

Their work is also supported through the National Industry PhD Program which provides up to an additional $17,000 per year on top of a student’s full-time PhD stipend.

We have a lot of support and the communication between everyone is working really well. We’re all giving out positive ideas and trying to push the project forward.

Islam Rezk

PhD candidate

Both Islam and Ayush want to use their PhD research to build deep expertise in data science and AI that they can take forward in their careers, regardless of whether their future lies in academia or industry.

“You always hope once you’re done with something and have put so much time in it, you’ll become expert in that area. That's definitely one of my personal goals,” Ayush says.

“By the time that I finish my PhD, I want to be one of the experts when it comes to understanding agricultural machine learning technologies.”

They’re well-aware that it builds not only their capabilities but also those in the agriculture industry.

“My parents always say the best investment you can make is an investment in yourself. A PhD is a huge investment - it's four years of our lives,” Islam says.

“It’s not just academic. An industry PhD is great for my resume and I’m also building something that will be used in actual applications in the real lives of farmers across Australia.”