The Bishop’s Action Foundation is a leading partner supporting AgritechX as part of our management and innovation role for the Bashford-Nicholls Trust.
AgritechX is designed to provide a ‘vehicle’ for farmer-user driven innovations to be identified, researched, developed, and successfully commercialised. The commercialisation skills and experience of Massey Ventures Ltd (MVL), combined with the agri-tech skills and experience of engineers and designers from Massey (and elsewhere if needed) will be co-invested alongside the capabilities and insights of Taranaki farmers within a cooperative working environment. It’s a model that Bashford-Nicholls Trust (BNT) also has confidence to support and invest in, given its potential to engage Taranaki farmers in innovation and capability development, to provide diversification of income streams for farmers in Taranaki and to emerge new agri-related businesses within our region.
This collaboration between MVL and BNT provides a foundation investment of $100,000 and $50,000 respectively for this start-up limited liability company. 10 farmer-entrepreneurs were invited to join following a region-wide promotion, investing $5,000 each, and obtaining a 2.5% share in the company.
Farmer-entrepreneurs have been involved from the get-go in governance, agreeing on operational priorities, deciding investment/development priorities and in validating solutions and business propositions. Projects to be advanced will be derived from a pipeline agreed by the group, with farmer engagement ongoing throughout the R&D and product validation process, and the group involved in trials to test new technologies on farm.
R&D and business activities are decided following due diligence at the front end to ensure an informed “customer/user pull” innovation model, rather than the more traditional invent-make-sell “technology push” innovation model. Co-funding for R&D projects (from Callaghan Innovation, KiwiNet, MBIE, MPI, AGMARDT and potentially others) will be applied for where possible to support R&D.
AgritechX will allow participating farmers to have ownership and share in the financial rewards from commercial agri-tech, rather than just being purchasers of farm products. Profits from commercialisation of products will be reinvested back into new ideas or paid out as dividends, as determined by the Board.
If this sounds like something you could be interested in, please contact us.