The finalists have been shortlisted for this year’s Innovation Arena Awards, which will return to the 2024 National Ploughing Championships (NPC) in Ratheniska, Co Laois next week.
The Innovation Arena, which is hosted by Enterprise Ireland in partnership with the National Ploughing Association (NPA), is an annual exhibition platform showcasing cutting-edge solutions from Irish agritech companies and innovators to thousands of visitors at one of Europe’s largest outdoor events.
The 2024 Innovation Arena will focus on innovations for future generations, showcasing solutions that will help improve efficiencies in animal science and technology, agri-engineering, digital technologies, animal health and nutrition, sustainability and climate action, and farm health and safety.
“We have made some changes to the Innovation Arena Awards this year,” says Enterprise Ireland senior development adviser on agritech, climate and sustainability, James Maloney.
“We are focusing on three areas and there will be an Innovation Arena Champion 2024 prize for established companies with a focus on scaling and innovation, 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. In addition, there is a Start-up Innovator of the Year to recognise the best and brightest start-ups coming through.”
According to Maloney, this year’s crop of start-ups are focused on a range of innovations including technology to improve farm productivity, support sustainable decision making, and have a positive impact on the environment as well as farm finances.
Enterprise Ireland supports innovative agritech firms throughout their journey from start-up to maturity and success on international markets.
“We help them to build capability, to find the right people and to form innovation partnerships with universities and other higher education institutions,” he said.
“We support companies in a number of ways through their start-up journey,” he adds.
“The Pre-Seed Start-up Fund (PSSF) supports early-stage companies in reaching the key technical and commercial milestones required to attract future seed funding. After that, companies can go on to Enterprise Ireland’s High Potential Start-up programme. There are also accelerators like Yield Lab Europe and the AgTechUCD Agccelerator Programme which specialise in supporting early stage companies in this space.”
TU Dublin spin-out Micron Agritech took the start-up award in 2022. The company provides first of its kind rapid on-site parasite testing for grazing animals.
The company started life as an undergraduate project in TU Dublin, explains CEO and co-founder Daniel Izquierdo Hijazi.
“We were looking for a solution to antimicrobial resistance. One of our co-founders had spent time talking to vets about the problem and heard about difficulties with tests for parasites. Testing is so burdensome that farmers tend to administer anti-parasitic medicine without knowing if it’s needed. That was causing resistance to build up.”
Izquierdo Hijazi and his co-founders worked on the problem and developed a product to provide a solution..
“You collect a sample, prepare it with a few simple steps, put it into a reader device, and your mobile phone scans it. The scan is uploaded to the cloud where it is analysed using AI and you get the results in a few minutes. In the past, you had to send the sample to a lab and wait for days. And that’s if you could find one to do it.
“We spent two years developing the product and last year was our first full year selling it and we tested 180,000 animals in Ireland. We’ve had a very positive response from farmers, vets, and animal health stores. We now employ 20 people here at the TU Dublin Grangegorman campus and in the UK.”
He describes the critical role played by Enterprise Ireland from the very beginning.
“When we were undergraduates still in college, we got funding from Enterprise Ireland to help us develop the idea. After that, they supported us with everything from filing patents to registering the business. At the very start we got Competitive Start Funding (now the PSSF). In December 2020, we raised €500,000 in seed funding from animal health company Bimeda, The Yield Lab Europe and Enterprise Ireland.
“We have been a HPSU even since and have been working with Enterprise Ireland international offices in the UK and Europe. The people there have helped us expand into the UK and we are now entering the French and Benelux markets.”
The Innovation Arena Awards are another form of support.
“At the ploughing, [it] will showcase Irish innovation to a domestic audience as well as a number of international buyers. We expect buyers from 11 countries to attend. These buyers were chosen by our market advisers as the most suitable due to their interest in pasture-based farming where Ireland excels.”