Western Australia-based ag-tech startup Origo.farm has received $375,000 in commercialisation funding as part of the federal government’s Accelerating Commercialisation grant program.
Western Australia-based ag-tech startup Origo.farm has received $375,000 in commercialisation funding as part of the federal government’s Accelerating Commercialisation grant program.
Established in 2014, the program has awarded 410 grants in the past five years totalling $200 million, with about $12 million of that going to 23 companies based in WA, according to BNiQ data.
Included among those recipients is Environmental Water Solutions, which in July received $292,000 to commercialise its water contaminant filter.
A total of $2.8 million was awarded to seven businesses in this latest round, with Origo.farm one of two WA-based organisations to receive grant funding. The other was Curtin University, which received $174,354 to commercialise development of a probability engine to identify malicious activity online.
Origo.farm chief executive Annie Brox told Business News the funding would aid the company in large-scale production of its already developed and tested package of software and hardware for whole-of-farm monitoring.
Founded in 2015, Origo.farm emerged from Ms Brox’s background in telecommunications and her upbringing on farms in Germany and Norway.
When she moved to Australia in 2013, she noticed farming in WA’s Wheatbelt was becoming increasingly reliant on decentralised, often highly technical and computer-operated systems.
“Farmers don’t want to be telecommunications or IT experts, they want to farm,” Ms Brox said.
“They’re looking for solutions to get the right sets of data to make their operations more efficient.”
That led her to recognise the value in developing a system that could use the Internet of Things to integrate different activities like water tank monitoring and weather stations through a series of devices that streamlined processes and made farming more efficient.
“We can install these systems to be completely autonomous on farms, which is important because a lot of places … there is no good communication coverage,” Ms Brox said.
“Even if they haven’t got internet or lose internet connectivity, they control and monitor the waters, see the weather and do the spraying, all the farm work activities that need to be done independent of internet access.”
The package has already been trialled on a 40,000-hectare grain farm, where an automated network of weather stations has allowed farmers to see the local distribution of rainfall to determine where fertiliser can be best used.
“That means they’re saving hundreds of thousands of dollars on fertiliser, and our system is basically paid for straight away when (farmers) start seeing they can start managing on a more detailed level,” Ms Brox said.
While Ms Brox said Australian farmers would benefit from further commercialisation of these developments, she said international expansion was her next goal for the company, having already undertaken preliminary discussions with business partners in Brazil.
She said that success with Australian farmers would motivate Origo.farm’s ability to scale up and enter foreign markets.
“We’ve been cooperating with these big and progressive farmers to learn and get it to a level that is still quite small scale, then go to a level where we have that input from the industry,” Ms Brox said.
“We’ve been growing up with the industry and that’s the competitive edge we’ve been developing.
“We’re getting all these good inputs to get these systems to work on a large scale.”
