Allister was raised on his family’s mixed cropping and livestock property at Finley, NSW. In 2018, he completed a Bachelor of Science in Agriculture (Honours) at Sydney University.

As a Research Associate in the Global Digital Farm team Allister is involved in CSU’s research as a part of the Rangelands Carbon project with the Food Agility CRC. The Rangelands Carbon project is a $6.5 million collaboration that aims to develop an accurate and affordable way to estimate carbon in Australian rangeland landscapes. The project is in partnership with AACo, Cibo Labs, FLINTpro, Carbon Link, University of Technology Sydney, Federation University Australia and Charles Sturt University.

Along with his role in the Global Digital Farm, which focuses on collating farm operations data, Allister is completing his PhD studies. This research is a part of the Food Agility project, ‘Enhancing Rice Provenance and Quality Prediction’, which partnered with Australia’s leading rice processor and global retailer, SunRice. This research has applied a data-driven approach to predicting rice milling quality by collating in-season crop records with climate and satellite data to train predictive models using machine learning algorithms.