Fieldays innovation award winners solve primary industry challenges

Springarm Products Limited from Te Awamutu has developed an unbreakable ballcock arm. Photo / Stephen Barker, Barker Photography

This year's Fieldays innovation award winners have shown how Kiwi ingenuity and cutting-edge ideas are tackling the primary industry's biggest challenges.

The Fieldays innovation event organisers received more than 65 entries from across New Zealand for awards in categories including Prototype, Early Stage, Growth and Scale, and Young Innovator.

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The categories had a new format this year, following the innovation life cycle. Fieldays innovation event manager Gail Hendricks says: "The categories were organised to provide the support, mentoring and exposure innovators needed to bring their revolutionary products to market or grow market share."

Winner of the Prototype Award was Springarm Products Limited from Te Awamutu. Inventor Ric Awburn developed a ballcock arm that won't break: Instead of snapping when put under pressure, the Springarm flexes, saving farmers water, time, money and stress.

Cropsy Technologies from Auckland took home two Fieldays Innovation Awards: the Early Stage Award and the Young Innovator's Award. The team of five young engineers have created a crop analytics system, comprising scalable AI-enabled hardware.

Co-founder and COO of Cropsy Technologies, Leila Deljkovic, with their innovation, crop analytics system. Photo / Stephen Barker, Barker Photography

Co-founder and chief operating officer Leila Deljkovic says: "Growers can't monitor every vine in their vineyard, and they don't have the resources to. Being engineers we thought, how can we help?"

Their innovation consists of a camera with machine learning capability that is attached to the front of a tractor. It can look out for diseases, count bunches of vines, detect missing or dying vines and anything that's wrong with the plants. This enables growers to potentially minimise crop loss, estimate yield to improve supply chains, and replant with precision.

The Growth and Scale Award went to IGS Limited, a company based in Scotland and the United States, for its Growth Towers. It delivers total Control Environment Agriculture having the potential to deliver maximum yield with quality and consistency, using 50 per cent less energy and 80 per cent less labour.

IGS Limited CEO, David Farquhar, says their product has the potential to enhance and enable sustainable food production for local growers.