Agtech award winner hits aquaponic market

The two-day ThincLab Agtech Innovation Bootcamp, organised by the University of Adelaide's ThincLab business incubation team, was held in Renmark.

University of Adelaide's professor Noel Lindsay said innovative ideas were the driving force which brought progress to businesses in every sector of the economy.

"The bootcamp stretched participants to solve real-world problems, generate ideas, while being part of a community of like-minded people who want to take on challenges to benefit everyone," he said.

Budding innovators used the bootcamp to test their ideas through immersive workshops like an intro to AgTech and emerging technologies.

Participants were able to discuss, iterate and test ideas, and get real-time feedback from a group of industry, AgTech experts, entrepreneurs, and researchers in a supportive and collaborative environment.

Eight teams from schools and businesses, as well as University of Adelaide students, worked on three challenges:

The Riverland's diverse produce, which includes citrus fruit and almonds and 50 per cent of Australia's wine grapes, all requires picking.

Participants were be asked to find innovative ideas to improve picking and harvesting processes.

The Riverland Region has a large amount of land sitting idle.

The vacant blocks are included in the Renmark Irrigation Trust and require drainage and irrigation, and yet are still empty.

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Participants were challenged to find creative and productive ways to activate the vacated land.

Data and digitisation can provide agricultural insights that enable farmers to make well-informed decisions, resulting in improved yields, outcomes, and profits.

The bootcamp teams were tasked to make data more accessible, usable, and valuable to the farming community.

Mr Dobson said his idea - Ecosystem Farms - which ultimately won the first prize of $2,000 was his start-up business.

"For us, it was to go up there and get fresh eyes on things and look at it in a different way to then be able to see how it could address a real world problem," he said.

"We have got a soilless farming platform where we integrate both plants and fish.

"You feed the fish and fish waste provides the nutrients for the plants then the plants clean the water for the fish in a closed loop recirculating system.

"Now aquaponics been done before - but the big difference for us is that we use really big gravel media beds on the ground that are scalable and modular - where the water rises and falls so because of that we can fit all sorts of plants from herbs all the way up to orchard trees.

"As they're on the ground and scalable you can use tractors for your harvesting and planting into it so it can really decrease the labour cost and because the plants are consistently cleaning the water for the fish means that we get this better aquaculture system that requires less knowledge and maintenance to be able to use.

He said they can upskill farmers and with remote monitoring, maintenance and management they could teach anyone to use one of the systems.

"They work in most areas because there's very low water usage as you don't do water changes," he said.

"We are going to lose water through evaporation and through what the plants take up.

"We really just want to start talking with more growers.

"It was networking just to people that actually in these areas and talking to people looking to get more out of their land.

"With the prize money, we're probably looking to do a small experiment in that area that's going to demonstrate what we're doing."