The Victoria Drought Resilience Hub is expanding its coverage to include a greater focus on agricultural innovation.
The hub, which includes four universities, five farming and industry groups and Agriculture Victoria has received a further $2.5 million federal government funding from the Future Drought Fund.
The Hub's interim co-director Professor Ruth Nettle said it had already established expert teams to develop and implement projects in each of the four innovation priorities it had set.
"We thought it was really important to progress the agriculture innovation agenda," Professor Nettle said.
"We have got four themes we need to be working on, that is Australia being a trusted exporter of quality food, climate resilience, biosecurity and digital agriculture.
"Ag Innovation, for us, means collaborating to solve problems in these areas and to find solutions."
Prof Nettle said there was a significant focus on technology to enable such things as food traceability, but farmers were really interested in where the economic benefits lay.
She said researchers would also focus on climate resilience, testing models of adaptation that helped farmers and regions think more about the changes they needed to make.
"There is also a focus on perennial horticulture - there's a lot of work going on in livestock industries, but there are quite a number of challenges to perennial horticulture, because of the long term nature of the crops," she said.
When it came to biosecurity, work would begin on smart surveillance and early detection of risks to the bee population.
Professor Nettle said Hub researchers would also look at better use of data.
"We have lots and lots of data, how do we layer that for our farm, could we use machine learning, how do we integrate with the Agriculture Victoria Internet of Things trial?," she said.
In a separate allocation of new funding, the Hub has also received a further $1.125 million for the recruitment of adoption officers, who will work with local farmers and communities to use the relevant tools, knowledge and support provided by the Hub to support future drought resilience and preparedness
"The adoption officers will be placed with our five regional nodes and at our Dookie headquarters, where they will be best placed to target their efforts to what's needed by farmers, land managers, and communities in their regions," Professor Nettle said.
The recruitment process for the new adoption officers is expected to begin immediately.
The Hub is headquartered at the University of Melbourne's Regional Campus in Dookie with five regional nodes across Victoria: Southern Farming Systems, Birchip Cropping Group, Mallee Regional Innovation Centre, Riverine Plains and Food and Fibre Gippsland.
The Hub's University partners are Melbourne University, Deakin University, La Trobe University and Federation University.