Agtech trailblazers involved in our OpenGround plant health program are set to showcase their innovations at a special Demo Day on Thursday 23 November.
Held at the Agtech and Logistics Hub, the event will see the nine innovators share their solutions that have the potential to transform crop and pasture health.
Their cutting-edge tech includes digital versions of farms, drones, autonomous vehicles that identify and control weeds and a satellite mapping platform.
Run in conjunction with Meat & Livestock Australia, OpenGround brings together leading minds from academia, industry, innovators, agribusiness, researchers and government to collaborate on solutions that can address the challenges facing the agricultural industry.
The Demo Day is a great opportunity to discover some of leading plant health innovations from the following OpenGround program participants:
- Hone: Hone has designed and developed a handheld spectrometer, ML chemometric model engine and data platform to analyze chemical properties of Agricultural commodities, soil and leaf tissue. Our purpose is to create real time data to empower agricultural producers and landowners to make better management decisions, with a vision that anyone can test what they want, when they want.
- Airborn Insight: An innovative company providing expert data capture and analysis services using advanced drone technologies to clients in Southeast Queensland and Northern NSW. They use drones equipped with advanced sensors to collect data on plant health and traits.
- DataFarming: A Toowoomba-based agtech co-created by leading Australian precision agricultural specialists, Tim and Peta Neale. Their platform allows farmers and agronomists to understand and manage their paddock variability using satellite imagery, which is available every five days for any farm.
- InFarm: An agricultural Intelligence company that delivers big data and AI solutions to producers where connectivity is challenged or doesn’t exist. Their technology systems help producers bridge the gap between data to dirt.
- Agronomeye: A company putting the power of data into the hands of farmers. Their digital twins and AgTwin platform deliver on-farm insights that are actionable and marketable across the spectrum of an ag business including erosion control, carbon farming, biodiversity, animal welfare and sustainable land management.
- WeedScan: WeedScan is Australia’s first real-time, easy to use automated identification of national, state and regional priority weeds (new, emerging and established) as well as an online system to better enable cooperative community-led weed management. It uses computer vision weed identification (trained on over 120,000 images) to identify 268 priority weeds and some 190 other weeds.
- Kelpie: AOS Group’s Kelpie autonomous ground vehicle technology uses an advanced, autonomous navigation system and AI-based vegetation recognition to identify weeds, such as serrated tussock, from pasture and precisely control the weeds, avoiding over spraying.
- Calix: Uses core mineral processing technology to produce nano-form magnesium oxide and derivatives that are quantifiably; safe and provide non-lethal suppression of a range of crop pests and, fungal and bacterial pathogens. A initial product, BOOSTER-Mag 609 S.C has been registered an a non-lethal miticide in Australia. Applied as a foliar spray, the broad-spectrum pest and pathogen suppression induced allows lethal insecticide, fungicide and biocide use to be material reduced.
- NonTox: NonTox is a small biotechnology company which has created a biological solution in contact herbicides which may provide part of the solution. Prompted by the potential for Bionix C4 to be a cost effective and all-encompassing solution, distinguished scientists from the University of Queensland and the Queensland Department of Agriculture and Fisheries have joined NonTox to look at sustainable weed control within the grazing farm sector for both cattle and sheep.