New Zealand will soon be at the centre of a global search to find innovative and sustainable ways to boost world food production by 70% to feed a projected population of 10 billion, partnering with some of largest international agri businesses.
New Zealand is the first country partner of Farm2050, an initiative launched in 2014 by Google chairman Eric Schmidt to find new technology to produce more food sustainably and soon a three-year series of field trials will start here.
Participation in this project is one of three initiatives to come out of the recently published Agritech Industry Transformation Plan, the result of nearly a year of consultation between the Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment and other government departments and industry.
The Government views the agritech industry as having high potential for export growth and throughout March workshops were held at Auckland, Hamilton and Lincoln where the industry was briefed on process so far and what happens next.
Three high-impact projects have been identified, a horticulture robotics initiative, an agritech venture capital fund and the Farm 2050 Global Nutrients Project.
“Eric Schmidt got together with a number of leading venture firms and they pulled together a large fund of potential investment to invest in the type of technologies that will help disrupt current food supply to make sure we can feed ourselves in 2050,” Agritech NZ executive director Peter Wren-Hilton says.
The first global Farm2050 initiative is to identify nutrients that will improve plant yield but also have a positive impact on environmental sustainability and a white paper will be released in the next couple of months with details of the field trials to be done here.
“It will set out a three-year initiative whereby a number of global agribusinesses together with NZ companies that want to take part in field trials across NZ where we can actually benchmark performance of different nutrient technologies so we will have a much better understanding as to potential future use of nutrients and how that will impact on both plant yield and the environment,” Wren-Hilton says.
“We’d like to run this in conjunction with Ireland because it gives us a northern-southern hemisphere opportunity to accelerate the field testing.”
Wren-Hilton believes the project will be a great opportunity for NZ to identify itself as a global expert in this space.
“It will also enable a lot of early-stage companies the opportunity to partner with some of the world’s largest agri-businesses. It’s a massive opportunity and fits in very nicely with our overall strategy of producing more food profitably and sustainably,” he says.
The Government is also keen to see the establishment of a horticultural robotics academy. Agritech Taskforce leader David Downs of NZ Trade and Enterprise says we have the chance to become a world leader in this field.
“Multiple universities and some organisations and companies had come together and said ‘let’s be a world leader in horticultural automation products and sensing and we think we have all the moving parts to do that’,” Downs says.
“There are multiple parties working on how Government can support them to create this national centre of excellence for horticultural robotics and it will address some major issues both within NZ and globally around things like labour shortages in horticulture.
“It links us into international markets so it ticks many of the boxes of where we think agritech could take us.”
The third initiative is an agritech venture capital fund and the Government has committed $300 million to what is now called NZ Growth Capital Partners (formerly the NZ Venture Investment Fund).
“Work is going on to identify sub-funds to invest in and this will come to fruition shortly,” Downs says.
In addition to the high-impact projects there are six core work-streams looking at global opportunities, commercialisation, investment, data interoperability and regulations, skills and workforce and governments’ role.
More than 200 people attended the three workshops and now Wren-Hilton is counting down to the official launch of the Agritech Industry Transformation Plan at MobileTECH Ag 2020 in Rotorua on April 7.
“To date, the focus of our work has been on Government consultation, however, from April our focus will be on delivery,” he says.
“We are keen to fully engage the widest representation of the sector. Opportunities like this one do not come around too often.”
