A new program designed to tackle horticultural challenges will help accelerate growers’ innovative ideas into commercially viable products and services
Hort Innovation, the not-for-profit and grower-owned research and development corporation for Australia’s horticultural industry, has launched a new Hort Frontiers program.
The program – Australian-Grown Innovation – is designed to drive innovation to tackle the sector’s challenges and has been developed in partnership with global start up support network Startupbootcamp and Cluster Connect, representing five state-based regional food and agri clusters.
A key offering of the program will be mentoring Australian growers and those across the horticulture supply chain to help transform ideas into real solutions.
Over the next five years, it will accelerate grower-led innovation through three stages of mentorship, with the aim of turning great ideas into commercially viable products and services that make a difference.
Some of the industry challenges the program aims to solve include climate resilience strategies, value-added product innovation, technology-driven solutions harnessing AI, and supply chain improvements to increase productivity.
All solutions created will deliver on solving these challenges through a requirement to meet one of the five overarching Frontiers themes – healthy living, adaptation and resilience, market access, disruptive technologies and capability building.
“Australian growers are the country’s most innovative entrepreneurs,” Hort Innovation CEO Brett Fifield says.
“They’re on the frontline of horticulture and know better than anyone the problems that need solving.
“This program has been designed to tap into this knowledge and the entrepreneurial spirit of Australian growers to try and solve problems together for our horticulture sector.
“Our recent Australian Horticulture Statistics Handbook showed that the horticulture sector has now reached a total production value of $17 billion. With more growers being given the tools to bring farm changing ideas to life we know that we will see this number continue to grow.”
Australian nursery growers, Matt Mansfield and Symone Brown, general managers from Mansfield’s Nursery and Tissue Culture Australia, have experienced their own innovation journey and shared the potential they see in a program like Australian-Grown Innovation.
“We set out to find an enterprise resource planning (ERP) program that would help us capture all of our costs on a day-to-day basis,” they say.
“What we found was that local and global ERP solutions were unable to cater to the varied nature and volumes of our crops and capture labour and production costs, so we felt like we were flying a bit blind.
“After looking at all the expensive solutions on the market we realised that the amount we were spending we should really refocus into building something that suited what we needed. So, we created our own software.”
Mansfield and Brown add the innovation journey was a rollercoaster full of ups and downs.
“It felt like we were renovating a house at times – setting out to solve one problem, only to uncover more along the way, and seeing the costs escalate beyond what we had planned,” they say.
“A program like Australian-Grown Innovation would have helped us explore the ideas more thoroughly and figure out our end goal faster.
“We can see how it would have benefited our program creation, and we are sure it will help lots of other growers just like us to create their own innovations.”
Food and agriculture innovation partner at Startupbootcamp Anna Barlow says Australian-Grown Innovation is for growers, producers, entrepreneurs and businesses across the horticulture supply chain who want to develop new ideas and turn them into real-world products or services.
“Helping new businesses in the food and agriculture space has been a big part of what Startupbootcamp has been focused on and we are thrilled to be able to work with Frontiers to bring this program to life to continue doing so,” Barlow says.
This program has been co-funded by the Hort Frontiers program and Startupbootcamp to solve real world horticulture challenges and give growers the tools to innovate more homegrown technology.
To find out more or register for the program, visit www.frontiers.au/agi