Time was when agriculture was seen as the country cousin of industry when it came to innovation. How times change. These days, if you want to see leading edge technology and internet of things applications in action, you’ll find them down on the farm.
What’s more, it’s an area in which Ireland could be set to punch above its weight. Just ask Gary Wickham, chief executive of MagGrow. A science graduate from Trinity, he went on to work in R&D in the adhesives industry, before heading up a pharmaceutical company, when a chance dinner party conversation provided the inspiration for his award winning ag-tech business.
His dinner companions were talking about the fact that 70 per cent of the chemicals sprayed on crops miss their target and are wasted. This is despite the fact that farmers add water to chemicals in an attempt to weigh down the droplets, reducing loss through “drift”. But all that did was waste water too. While the use of electrostatic spraying, which imbues a solution with a negative charge, had been proven to go some way towards reducing waste, it didn’t go far enough.
To Wickham it was a problem in search of a solution. He set up MagGrow in 2013, based at NovaUCD, the Centre for New Ventures and Entrepreneurs at UCD.
Today his company, which employs 43 people, has a patented technology that magnetizes water to reduce waste in the spraying of crops, whether with herbicide, pesticide or fertiliser. The technology saves water, chemicals and, ultimately, farmers’ money.
MagGrow tested its prototype sprayers with agricultural research institutes such as Wageningen University & Proeftuin Zwaagdijk in the Netherlands. It has raised more than €5.5 million to date and last year won the prestigious international Thrive Accelerator Sustainability Award at the second annual Forbes AgTech summit in California.
In 2015, he successfully completed field studies on commercial farms in The Netherlands, Kenya & Ethiopia, which demonstrated that the MagGrow spraying technology reduced the amount of water needed to spray crops by 75per cent compared to conventional methods.
He then developed four commercial products, ranging from industrial scale “plug and play” devices that sit on the boom of a tractor’s sprayer to a backpack device for use in countries in the developing world.
Given that there is an estimated €30 billion worth of water wasted in the process of spraying crops in Europe alone each year, the market potential close to home was clear. But from the start he realised it was an even more compelling proposition in places with water shortages, from California to Kenya.
“Some of our users want it because it reduces water usage, others because it allows greater efficiency – they can use less chemicals with it,” said Wickham, who now oversees offices in Kenya, Ethiopia and San Francisco as well as Dublin. Africa alone is predicted to need 300 per cent more food and water by 2050, to help it cope with population growth likely to double from the current figure of 1.2 billion over the same period.
MagGrow sells to some of the biggest farms in the developed world. For customers in the developing world, it offers its technology on a pay-as-you-spray basis. Tailoring its commercial offering to suit each market is just one of the ways by which Wickham aims to create the “world’s first ag-tech unicorn”.
In Carlow, third-level spin out from Carlow IT, Microgen Biotech is getting international traction for an innovation that can clean up contaminated soil. The business is headed up by Xuemei Germaine, whose PhD research into bioremediation technologies and biosensors underpins much of her commercial work, creating bacteria based products that can reclaim even the most polluted land.
Working with colleague David Ryan, a microbiologist and lecturer at the college, the two have created a company with major international potential. Already they have raised €1 million from Irish and Chinese investors.
Meanwhile, back on the farm, Fabien Peyaud’s Herdwatch is helping farmers all over the country, and overseas too, to keep track of their animals for welfare and tracing purposes via smart phone.
The product, which he has described as “customer relationship management for cows”, launched in 2014 and today thousands of farmers use it to record farm events and compliance information relating to the more than one million calves born in Ireland each year, plus the many multiples of that in the national herd, saving acres of time.
Entrepreneur Emmet Savage developed Moocall, another innovative farm app that helps keep cows safe when giving birth, alerting farmers to their impending arrival, and helping reduce the traditional fatality rate whereby 3 per cent of calves do not survive at birth. Many more require a helping hand.
Using internet of things technology Moocall uses a sensor on a cow’s tail, the movement of which is a telltale sign that birth is imminent. When the sensor detects the right movement pattern it sends a text to the farmer’s mobile phone to let them know his or her presence is required.
The business, which launched in 2015, received investment backing from business people such as Michael Stanley of Cairn Homes and packaging magnate Michael Smurfit, and has already cracked the US market. But it’s not stopping there. The company has a pipeline of sensor based products on the way, for a range of livestock. As Savage puts it, “We want to be the FitBit for animals”.
That Irish ag-tech innovators can achieve global scale has already been proven by such players as Dairymaster and Keenans, now part of Alltech, says Lance O’Brien of Teagasc, which is currently developing its Kilworth Farm facility in Cork into a “smart farm”.
This will be a national test bed for the dovetailing of internet of things technology and agriculture. “The biggest potential comes from the linking of agriculture with the ICT sector,” he says. “It’s the use of sensors providing data to allow for easier and more efficient farm management, or precision farming, and there is huge export potential in it.”
With Brexit likely to impact most severely on the agri sector, its ability to compete will rely increasingly on innovation, says David Meagher, head of food and agribusiness at KPMG.
Fluctuations in the value of sterling alone will drive that challenge. “The fact now is that businesses have to do things 10 per cent better, or cut costs 10 per cent better, or get 10 per cent more margin – or some combination of the above,” says Meagher.
Innovation will be critical to achieving this. “We are seeing lots technologies addressing everything from what cattle should be fed and who they should be crossed with, to the development of drones for watering crops and the use of predictive analysis in the reduction of food waste. Much of the innovations coming through is using internet of things sensors to better utilise resources,” he says.
On the down side, other countries too are actively pursuing ag-tech innovation, and Ireland is small and often less well funded by comparison. But we have natural advantages, he reckons: “We have a rich tradition and heritage of farming and we also have a strong ICT skills base to draw from, with some of the best known tech companies in the world located here. We have the raw materials, we have the talent. It’s just a question of bringing them all together.”
