Six students from the UNE Business School will be competing in the International Food and Agribusiness Management Association (IFAMA) Student Case Competition as part of the annual IFAMA conference to be held in Miami 18-21 June 2017.

The IFAMA conference theme, Become the Solution: Food Security 2050, continues a three-year initiative that focuses on the ‘the challenges and opportunities facing the food and agribusiness firms that play a major role in feeding the growing and diversified global population’.

The conference attracts industry, government, academics and researchers, and top agribusiness students from over 50 countries from around the world. The Student Case Study Competition consists of teams who simulate a fast turn-around analysis and presentation to a senior management team on an industry—hot topic. This is the third consecutive year that UNE students will be competing in the competition and, as in previous years, UNE will be the sole Australian representative.

Prior to the IFAMA conference students will visit Wyoming and the Colorado Front Range, an urban corridor located along the eastern face of the Southern Rocky Mountains which is an emerging innovation cluster in the food and agricultural industries. Included in the tour are visits to a cattle ranch, livestock markets, bison processing factory, craft brewery, agrotech company producing vertical farming systems and research and extension centres. The students will also visit Syngenta’s research and development facility in North Carolina prior to attending the conference in Miami.

The two UNE teams, Sarah Wall, Max Laurie, Rebecca Clapperton, Christina Stannard, Matt Winkel and Casey Onus will be accompanied on the tour by team advisors Stuart Mounter and Sally Strelitz. The teams would like to acknowledge the contribution of Lyn Gollan to their preparation and the support of their sponsors, Syngenta, Ceres Ag, Guyra Milling, Rabobank and the School of Environmental and Rural Science.

IFAMA 2017 from David Waugh on Vimeo.