A Western Australian agtech start-up which aims to replace the soil probe and improve the profitability of fertiliser decisions has received $1.2 million in seed funding.
Laconik co-founder and managing director Dr Darren Hughes said the company aimed to shift the way farmers made decisions about applying fertilisers to crops.
"We want to move away from predicting responsiveness by taking a single soil test from a single site location and and extrapolating that result across an entire paddock to recommend fertiliser rates," he said.
"Ultimately we are in the business of improving fertiliser decisions."
Dr Hughes said Laconik used machine learning combined with multiple data sources to help farmers make smarter decisions about fertiliser requirements across their entire paddock.
"Machine learning combined with farm data, such as yield and rotation history, allows us to make the most profitable management recommendation of where and how much fertiliser should be added to the crop to maximise profitable yield potential," he said.
"Compared to other nutrition models on the market our system better understands mathematically how plants respond to fertiliser."
Dr Hughes said the company was not trying to re-invent the wheel.
"We aren't in the business of collecting, collating or connecting the data - there is already so much of that out there," he said.
"We aren't in the business of hardware or software, every tractor comes with the technology to enable data collection or variable application.
"We are the gap that takes the data to make the profitable decision."
Dr Hughes said the research had attracted $1.2 million to support development of the product.
"We have just finalised our seed round investment and that is a combination of investment out of Wavemaker Partners, a Singapore based investment firm, the Grains Research Development Corporation's Grain Innovate Fund and Artesian's Sprout X fund," he said.
"That complements the accelerated commercialisation grant we accessed earlier in the year."
Dr Hughes said unlike some agtech startups Laconik was focused on using that money to provide good underpinning research to back up its claims, rather than putting the risk onto the farmer.
"We have 50 replicated trials across Western Australia to get the data to prove our concept," he said.
"The question we will answer is whether our digital solution is better than the incumbent system of manual soil tests and response curves, which we will answer by early next year."
Dr Hughes said his co-founder Wayne Pluske had 25 years experience in fertiliser research and had been involved in the development of many of the incumbent models used by the fertiliser companies.
"He felt he couldn't improve the incumbent process any further," he said.
"So we threw out the idea of physically measuring a soil to extrapolate a response, and instead moved to a data driven approach because it allows us to understand spatial variability."
Dr Hughes also has significant experience in the Australian grains industry, having grown up on the family farm near Geraldton WA, gained a PhD in crop agronomy, and carried out significant industry roles including a national role with the GRDC.