Startup Showcase

Athena IR-Tech informs farmers if and when their crops need water so they can best optimise irrigation practices.

The Athena IR-Tech Transp-IR solution maximises water use efficiency through proximal, infrared transpiration monitoring and notifies the grower when the crops transpiration rate has dropped below the optimal level for the current growing stage therefore giving the plant only the water it needs to efficiently develop its crop.

Transp-IR leverages years of research about how drought and heat stress impact crop photosynthesis and layers it with a defined optimal irrigation zone for each crop to maximise water use efficiency without compromising yield or quality.

Beewise provides robotic beehives to support bees in the face of climate change, allowing for superior pollination and dramatically improved honey yields. The newly designed hives include precision robotics, computer vision and AI. To date, Beewise has saved over 124 million bees with less than 1,000 devices in the field.

Beewise is not changing how beekeeping is done, instead, they are simply applying it in real-time with a robotic arm vs a human one. This offers farmers a superior pollination solution by guaranteeing the delivery of quality pollination on time and at market prices.

CropX provides an affordable and scalable farm management solution integrating both above and below ground data to optimise resources and results. Our models constantly adapt to the crop’s growth stage and changing environmental conditions to provide crop-specific recommendations.

Planning and reporting tools allow growers to use detailed maps to record, monitor and schedule farm activities from their phone, tablet or computer. With thousands of data points, growers can be alerted to everything from burst pipes and irrigation needs to early-stage field variability and pest risks.

VineSignal, by Deep Planet, delivers confidence to growers and winemakers to make informed decisions by centralising the key viticultural data points that impact decision making throughout the growing season to harvest planning.

Our solution can reduce variability and disease by tracking daily, weekly and monthly changes in vegetation (NDVI). Our unique two-week prediction delivers and accuracy of 93% to see the future impact of irrigation and fertiliser application on individual vineyards.

InvertiGro’s innovative indoor vertical farming solutions address the agricultural industries two key challenges of cost and complexity whilst also delivering unparalleled flexibility and scalability; enabling businesses to become highly-efficient and sustainable modern farmers, almost anywhere, and at any scale.

The combination of unique, patented hardware, proprietary software and supporting services delivers a fully-integrated plug-and-play solution for growers and multiple revenue streams for InvertiGro. Crop-agnostic and highly-flexible, InvertiGro’s solutions have applications throughout supply chains and across industries, for food, fodder, forestry and pharmaceuticals. Already growing with Woolworths, InvertiGro is currently raising Series A and preparing to deliver on local and international sales.

100% electric. They cultivate the soil between and under a row as well as being adaptable and carry a wide range of tools.

Weeding robots assist both the environment and people by providing a solution to assist farmers in their daily work, reducing a strenuous physical workload and limiting the use of chemical weedkillers.

Fruit picking is traditionally done entirely by hand which is time-consuming and expensive, and impacted by frequent labour shortages. Human pickers also damage about 5–15% of their harvest, which cuts an apple’s value by a factor of 10. To tackle this, Ripe Robotics design, build and operate robots that pick apples and stone fruit for commercial orchards.

Artificial intelligence has advanced sufficiently to detect and assess outdoor fruit better than humans, making robotic picking finally feasible. Data collected can also be analysed for disease, damage, yield estimates, and much more. Over time the hardware can be upgraded to do pruning, thinning, and precision spraying, leading to fully automated agriculture.