Farm Tech Rebates Reopen With $10 Million and a 15 October Deadline

The third round of the On Farm Connectivity Program opened on 16 September with $10 million in rebates for primary producers buying connectivity and ag-tech equipment. Applications close at 5:00pm AEDT on 15 October.

The rebate covers up to 50 per cent of the purchase price of eligible equipment, to a maximum of $20,000 excluding GST per ABN. The program is funded through the Better Connectivity Plan for Regional and Rural Australia, with up to $43 million allocated across its three rounds. Rounds one and two paid more than $30.5 million in rebates to more than 2,900 primary production businesses.

The deadline is not the real constraint

Round three is the smallest of the three pools. Round one had $15 million, round two had $18 million, and round three has $10 million. The department describes it as a demand-driven grant opportunity and says it may be oversubscribed.

Applications are assessed in order of submission, and assessment can stop at any point once the available money is fully allocated. The 15 October close is the outside limit. What decides whether a producer gets a rebate is the date the application is lodged, and which queue it lands in.

First-time applicants are assessed first

Producers who have not received a benefit under an earlier round are assessed first, in order of submission. Everyone else is assessed once those priority applications are finalised. Taking a rebate in round one or two does not make a producer ineligible, but it does put them behind a queue drawing on a pool a little over half the size of round two's.

The supplier lodges the application, not the farmer

The rebate is paid to an Approved Supplier, and the Approved Supplier submits the application. The producer completes an online declaration and provides an ABN, the delivery address, and proof of average annual revenue. To be eligible, a producer needs an ABN registered for 12 months or longer, an eligible primary production activity code, and average annual revenue before expenses and tax of between $40,000 and $4 million across the 2022-23, 2023-24 and 2024-25 financial years. Hobby farms are excluded.

The sequence matters as much as the paperwork. A quote has to be dated on or after the round opened, and it has to itemise each piece of equipment rather than bundle it. Equipment bought before an application is approved is not eligible. Once an application is approved, the supplier has 120 calendar days to deliver, install and train.

What to do

Build the quote backwards from the caps rather than forwards from a catalogue. Because the rebate is half the eligible price up to $20,000, $40,000 of eligible equipment reaches the maximum and anything above that is ordinary equipment spending. The floor is $2,000 of eligible expenditure. Soft costs sit inside their own sublimits: training and one-off subscriptions of up to 12 months are each capped at 10 per cent of the eligible equipment price, and delivery and installation at 20 per cent. A quote written with those limits in mind captures the soft costs; one that prices them loosely can push them outside the eligible amount.

Three practical moves before 15 October. Pull the revenue evidence for the three financial years to 2024-25 first, because it is the document most likely to hold an application up. Choose the Approved Supplier on service rather than the sharpest price, since they lodge the application, they carry the 120-day delivery obligation, and an application falls over with a supplier removed from the program. And if an earlier round already paid out on your ABN, decide now whether the purchase stands up on its own, because the priority order makes the rebate the least certain part of it.

This article is general information only and is not financial advice.