Friday, March 29, 2024

Deal opens gate for innovators

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The twin tyrannies of distance and lack of capital will be diminished for New Zealand agritech firms in coming years should a new partnership with a major United States food company prove successful.
Andrew Cooke has been recognised for his leadership in agritech, having headed up a number of collaborative projects of international significance.
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Agritech NZ, a new collective of agritech interests working to better integrate new technology into farming systems, has formalised a partnership with giant US produce company Western Growers to help accelerate the rate of tech uptake in the sector in both countries. 

Western Growers is the largest fresh produce firm in the US, supplying the country with more than half its nuts, vegetables and fruit and almost half its organic produce.

Agritech NZ chief executive Peter Wren-Hilton said a recent visit to California by NZ agritech executives highlighted the value such a partnership can deliver.

“What we were struck with the most was the scale of production in the US with some farms typically over 4000ha in size. One Washington state apple orchard produced more apples than NZ’s entire crop.”

However, the trip also highlighted areas of weakness in the US agri sector where NZ agritech can help.

“Waste is a big issue. We visited a watermelon farm where a third of the crop was not picked because the male melons have too many pips in them and consumers will not eat them.” 

The other issue shared more closely with NZ farmers and growers is the labour shortage, not helped by President Donald Trump’s policies on Mexican migrants.

“The economy has also improved in Mexico, meaning there have been more workers heading back home to work, further tightening up the labour supply in a sector almost completely reliant upon migrant labour.”

But agricultural software development company Rezare Systems head Andrew Cooke said a lesser publicised aspect of the agreement could deliver even greater benefits for NZ tech firms.

“NZ has also signed up as the first country partner to Farm 2050 and this will be of real interest to start-up companies from NZ.”

Farm 2050 is an agri-tech collective founded by Google head Eric Schmidt eight years ago to address looming global food demands. 

Other partners in the collective include heavy hitting agri firms like DuPont, Trimble and AgCo.

“NZ start-ups have typically had a real struggle with capital-raising. 

“For our company we are more interested in how companies execute their ideas but it is really hard to execute an idea when you don’t have the cash. Farm 2050 will help with that.”

 He suspects the Western Growers agreement will hold more benefits for orchard and horticulture operators than for the pastoral sector.

“Organisations we work with in Bay of Plenty will be particularly interested in this.”

Wren-Hilton said the 2050 group recognises NZ’s greatest challenge is getting access to capital and the struggle to get good ideas commercialised.

Having access to the capital such big players provide and the scale of Western Growers’ research trials in the offseason offers a major opportunity for small NZ firms to springboard into the large and diverse markets in the US.

Wren-Hilton said he was unfamiliar with a recent World University Rankings survey that had NZ’s main three agri focused universities Lincoln, Waikato and Massey languishing in global rankings between 270 and 332 in the world for farming and forestry.

“All I would say is based on our capacity through Crown research institutes and universities we do extremely well in terms of research. Commercialising that is more debatable.”

He was heartened to hear Western Growers’ head of science and technology Hank Giclas say he believes NZ has the edge over the US crop industry when it comes to robotics.

“Robotics is a key area we are both interested in so just as a concept one of the things we are talking about doing is setting up a robotics academy or something along those lines,” Giclas said.

“To actually hear the science head of the US’s largest grower acknowledge that says a lot about our sector,” Wren-Hilton said.

Like the US the NZ horticultural sector is experiencing major labour shortages and several companies including Robotics Plus in Bay of Plenty are well advanced on developing robotic solutions.

Connecting NZ innovators with US producers and agritech companies through the Western Growers Centre for Innovation and Technology in California will provide an opportunity to cross pollinate ideas and processes.

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