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Finalists at this year’s Enterprise Ireland Innovation Awards include a dosing gun designed to reduce medicine usage, a smart weighing scales and software to optimise parasite control.
The National Ploughing Championships kicks off today (17 September) and will include some of the most innovative agritech start-ups in the country.
As part of the event, Enterprise Ireland will host its annual Innovation Arena Awards, where nine start-ups have been named finalists for their innovative tech.
Three companies have been named as finalists in each of the three categories, and each start-up will deliver a live pitch in front of a panel of judges this afternoon.
This year’s Start-up Innovator of the Year award comes with a €10,000 prize, while the new Green Impact Award 2024 will honour a company whose innovation is focused on sustaining the development of food and farming for future generations to come.
Meanwhile, the Innovation Arena Champion 2024 prize will be awarded to an established company with a focus on scaling and innovation.
Enterprise Ireland CEO Leo Clancy said Ireland’s agritech innovators are “shaping the sector globally”.
“It is their innovations and solutions which are driving efficiencies and helping to address global challenges by meeting growing demands for food, safeguarding our planet for future generations and ensuring farm families have good livings,” he said.
Brandon Bioscience
Brandon Bioscience is a marine biotech company based in Co Kerry and founded in 1998. The company was the overall winner at the Innovation Arena Awards in 2021 for its biostimulant product using brown seaweed extracts, which can reduce chemical nitrogen input on farms by up to 20pc.
The company’s latest innovation focuses on reducing pod shatter (the natural process that plants use to disperse their ripe seeds) in rapeseed. The company’s product does this by helping with the elasticity of the pod containing the seeds, especially in the period before harvest.
Cotter Agritech
Limerick-based Cotter Agritech was founded by brothers Jack and Nick Cotter in 2019. The founders have built Cotter Crate, a sheep monitoring system that uses hardware and software to help farmers keep track of their animals and identify which ones need treatment. With this, the start-up was named best agri-engineering start-up at the Innovation Arena Awards in 2019. In 2022, the company was also one of three start-ups to win big at the AgTechUCD accelerator.
Their latest innovation, Automed, is an automatic dosing gun that integrates with the company’s existing SmartWorm automatic parasite detection software to deliver precision medication administration for livestock.
Dairymaster
Kerry-based dairy equipment manufacturer Dairymaster is no stranger to the Ploughing Championships, having bagged the top prize in 2015 for its Swiftflo Commander processing system. The company has a wide product range of milking parlour systems, equipment and management software for milk cooling, feeding and slurry handling, as well as health and fertility monitoring. In 2018, it scored at a €2m R&D partnership with IT Tralee and the software research centre Lero to develop intelligent autonomous systems for farms.
Now, it’s bringing its DairyVue 360 product to the Innovation Arena, a digital farm management platform that analyses all aspects of herd performance in the milking parlour, giving the farmer real insights for decision support on the farm.
EasyFix
Founded in 1996, EasyFix is a family-owned business that designs, and develops a wide range of products for the agricultural, equine and safety industries.
The company is now focused on reducing ammonia and methane emissions in slurry storage systems, using technology that stimulates bacterial growth, which reduces ammonia and methane emissions in storage. Their new technology system works by delivering a low electrical current that stimulates the growth of bacteria.
Grassland Agro
Grassland Agro was formed when Liam Woulfe’s Grassland Fertiliser merged with Timac Agro Ireland in 2013. The Dublin-based company specialises in soil, plant and animal nutrition. The company’s product is a urease inhibitor, which protects against nitrogen loss through the volatilisation stage of the nitrogen cycle.
Previously, it was not possible to combine this inhibitor with phosphorus-based fertilisers due to degradation as a result of the acidity of these fertilisers. The company’s Glaze Extend Blend overcomes this challenge by buffering the inhibitor against the acidic effects of the phosphorus-based fertiliser.
Mastek
Having been in operation since 2000, Mastek is a leading manufacturer of low-emission slurry equipment and applicators, such as dribble bars, trailing shoes and umbilical systems. A previous prize winner at the Ploughing Championships, the company’s HQ is in Cootehill, Co Cavan with an additional office in Shrewsbury, England.
Its latest innovation is the Flexi Shoe applicator, a sustainably focused product that aims to provide lower emission slurry application, especially on uneven land. The machine delivers the slurry in a band just underneath the grass surface, which reduces the loss of ammonia into the atmosphere.
Reap Interactive
Reap Interactive began operating in 2021 and aims to disrupt farming with data-driven performance monitoring. To do this, the company has developed BovinePlus, which is designed to track each animal individually, eliminating reliance on herd averages.
This tech uses AI and image analysis to provide real-time data on weight, health and water intake, optimising profitability by pinpointing issues such as underperforming animals and enhancing feed efficiency.
RT Sales
RT Sales is a family-owned business jointly run by Johnny Reidy and his son-in-law Padraig Teahan with more than 20 years of experience in hedge-cutting contracting. The company has now designed and manufactured its own hedge cutters, the RT ProArm Hedgecutter range, which features their patented mounting system.
This mounting system optimises safety by stabilising rear mounted grass mowers and eliminating the need for axle brackets on a tractor. In an interview with the Irish Farmers’ Journal, Teahan said they wanted to create a design that “allowed machines to be easily interchangeable between tractors”.
Samco Agricultural Manufacturing
Another former prize winner is Samco Agricultural Manufacturing, a start-up that focuses on the machinery, technology and mulch film sectors. The company, which is a family-run business based in Limerick, won a prize in 2017 for agri-engineering SME.
Now, Samco is now focused on early potatoes in Italy, and has developed a new application system and mulch film designed around establishing earlier planting and growth of the crop. The potato plant establishes an earlier growth pattern due to the microclimate generated by the film covering the surface above the plant, which in turn will enable earlier harvesting and entry to the market.
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