The Ashburton crop grower stood to lose $600,000 after a pivot blew over.
Insurance covered the loss but Lovett was shaken by his insurer’s suggestion irrigators might not get future cover unless they can stay upright.
Lovett’s imagination whirred when he talked to a motorbike rider who said he couldn’t race without a spoiler.
Kite-makers had similar aerodynamic advice for him and it wasn’t long before Lovett was road-testing an appendage for his pivot.
The iWing was a standout entry at this year’s innovation awards at South Island Agricultural Field Days.
Contest organiser Charlotte Glass, a farm consultant and panelist at a recent agri-tech forum in Christchurch, recalled Lovett’s response to judges asking how he tested the design.
“Well, we hooked it up behind the ute and we nipped up the road at 100kmh,” he told them.
Glass, founder and managing director of farm consultancy Agri Magic, said farmers can often find their own fixes and the iWing was a fine example of Kiwi innovation.
It is easy to over-complicate technology and she often tells clients if they’ve got a hammer every problem looks like a nail.
Glass also advises clients against rushing into untried systems suggesting the second mouse gets the cheese.
While entrepreneurial farmers like Lovett seldom have problems testing designs they often lack connections and funding.
Farmers could do more if the innovation sector was more supportive, she said.
Panelist Will Burrett from data software and analytics company Map of Agriculture said some developers fail to do enough market research.
“It’s really about understanding what problem you are trying to solve. A lot of people see a commercialising ideal without robust conception for getting that prototype into the market. You’ve got to really make sure that when you do go to market, your product is going to be effective.”
Entrepreneurs in early stages of commercialising have to guard against being distracted by short-term, money-making side ventures with little relevance to original strategy.
After working so hard to get a product to market and now earning cash, forward-thinking for the business could go out the window.
Farmlands chief financial officer and strategy head Kevin Cooney, whose company is making a major investment in IT, said farmers want integrated systems but technology adoption is too fragmented.
“Personally, I think we need to have some kind of platform that is the honest broker for the data.”
Burrett said while that would be ideal, developers naturally want their own version that nobody else can touch.
Lincoln Agritech chief executive Peter Barrowclough said commercialisation can be a rocky path. Seed funding for new ventures has fallen on hard times and a supportive ecosystem needs to be recreated.
On the up side, Barrowclough predicts more farmers will adopt a digital ag approach to business using data to understand variabilities in a herd, for instance, or to apply inputs at just the right time.
Kiwi companies continue to make it to market with new products, operating in a first-world nation where agriculture is a major and important part of the economy.
That is a rare status for primary industries in developed countries, he said.
Primary industries will benefit from the so-called internet of things – the transfer of information between linked devices, image processing and artificial intelligence to help decision-making.
Similarly, robotics could relieve labour shortages and create local manufacturing opportunities.
“You’re not going to compete with the Japanese in terms of indoor robots but why not compete with robots that work in harsh environments. We could be a world leader with that,” Barrowclough said.
