Consider, for a moment, a job that requires a working understanding of the following: the use of sensors and their accumulating data for machine learning and artificial intelligence, for automation, for cloud computing … indeed a whole suite of information technologies including blockchain trading.
Add to this a long list of equally complex earthy stuff – soil science, environmental science, genetics, biology, agronomy, and biosecurity. And this is still just skimming the surface of the mechanical, computational and biological technologies that are part of your daily responsibilities.
If you were a science nut, it would be the dream job, though the pace of change is not for the faint-hearted. It is as technically complex and fast-evolving as any career can get … has been for eons. The only thing that hasn’t changed is its name. Farming.
This 'job' is the ultimate marriage of technology, skill, experience and, even with all the science now at play - intuition.
Farming requires you to make complex decisions, often daily, based on your understanding of what is happening around you locally and globally; in your soils, in your plants and animals, in their markets, in your weather and climate systems. You get no second chance. There is no rewind on seasons.
Complementing this and the digitisation of farming’s tools and systems are sweeping changes to the whole biology of food production. These are enhancing farming ecosystems (soil and landscape health) and productivity – dramatically improving the ‘crop per drop’ (water use efficiency). This is what is keeping food on the shelves despite the unrelenting pressure of evolving pests and disease, loss of arable land to urbanisation, and the existential threat posed by climate change – against which agricultural science is arguably humanity’s only real hope.
Coretext's story of change
Making sense of all this change; turning complex sciences into avenues of curiosity, and making knowledge sharing a platform for community engagement and empowerment, is why Coretext was created almost 20 years ago. It is why we, like farming, have endured and mastered our own disruptive technologies.
The key to this has been our unwavering focus on content; on the essence of the story of change – on the questions, the answers, the relevance to the stakeholder communities we service as a specialist client publisher. We have evolved to embrace and master digitisation and the fantastic dynamics of online multimedia publishing.
We are contemporary, but our professional roots run deep.
Coretext was created by people from media and science backgrounds who sought to make a difference. Over the years we have forged a team that blends these backgrounds into a unique publishing and journalism service for organisations we call ‘the knowledge sector’ … the engine rooms of the future.
But for science to make a difference it has to be understood, appreciated and put into practice. That's our 'job spec' and, like the farmer, our tools keep changing. What doesn't change is the purpose. For the farmer it is to feed the world. For us, it is to tell stories of human capability.
After a year that has pushed many communities to the limits of endurance, we believe there is no more important a story to tell.