Western Australian ag tech company SWAN Systems is among only 15 food and agriculture startups from around the world chosen to advance through to present at a major international virtual pitch competition to be held next month.
SWAN Systems – an innovative precision irrigation and fertiliser platform founded by farmers in WA in 2016 – will join finalists from across five countries to participate in FoodBytes! Virtual Pitch 2020 event on December 2.
Run by global food and agribusiness bank Rabobank, FoodBytes! is an international program which facilitates mentoring and showcases food and agri startup companies to corporate leaders, investors and the wider market. Competition winners in different categories will receive cash prizes and consulting support to contribute to their business growth.
SWAN Systems and fellow Australian ag tech startup ProAgni, from rural New South Wales, were among the 15 finalists selected from an original field of nearly 340 applications from across 14 countries, based on their innovative solutions to major food system challenges.
The SWAN Systems platform is designed to deliver smarter resource management to growers allowing them to precisely schedule, deliver, monitor and report on water and nutrient consumption to improve economic and environmental outcomes.
SWAN Systems co-founder, WA horticulturalist Tim Hyde, said the SWAN approach was “about getting rid of the need to rely on assumptions – enabling farmers to instead make decisions based on data”.
“With increasing volumes of data generated across all types of farming hardware, SWAN automatically captures and process numerous data streams to deliver actionable insights,” he said. “The technology enables water managers to improve yield, save money and time, and conserve resources. SWAN technology is tailored to an exact geography and irrigation context; transforming historic, current and predictive data from multiples sources into actionable insights. This allows users to make better decisions about how much to irrigate and when.”
Mr Hyde said SWAN Systems was “essentially farmers who had built software, not a software company targeting agriculture”.
“We’ve tried to make the process of irrigation and nutrient management easier for the farmer, not more complex,” he said.
