The future of science and technology isn’t just in cities. It’s in rural Australia, and that’s what SwarmFarm Robotics shows us.

Through world-class technology, they’re pushing agtech forward from our heartland.

It’s not been without support. Our department’s Business Research and Innovation Initiative (BRII) supported SwarmFarm to develop their proof of concept. Our Early Stage Venture Capital Limited Partnership (ECVLP) program enabled them to partner with Tenacious Ventures. These programs helped them develop new ways to make farming more sustainable and efficient.

National Science Week 2023 is all about powering future industries through innovation. SwarmFarm is living up to that mission!

Find more examples of innovation at science week: [ Ссылка ]

Find more innovative projects that have received support through BRII: [ Ссылка ]

Or venture capital partnerships: [ Ссылка ]

TRANSCRIPT
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I'm Andrew Bate from SwarmFarm Robotics.

We're here at a farm called Bendee, which is the home of SwamFarm Robotics. We actually run a farming operation here, so we run beef cattle as well as grow grain crops.

The reason we started SwarmFarm in the first place was to build more sustainable farming systems and better ways of farming.

We actually have like an app store and a developer ecosystem that we call SwarmConnect.

And what that does, it allows other people, other innovators around the world to develop new Ag technology that suits their region, their climate, their cropping system that they produce food in and allows them to release this new robotic technology as part of our robots.

We build the robot itself, and that's our base robot.

The first prototypes, the first robot we brought out were really a conversation starter with farmers saying, look, this is something that's going to fundamentally change the way you get out of bed in the morning and think about growing your crops.

And that's something we're really proud of because we're a team here in regional Australia, most of Ag Tech companies are based in capital cities, we're right here in the heart of agriculture on farm delivering cutting edge technology.

I'm Sarah Nolet, I'm one of the managing partners at Tenacious Ventures.

SwarmFarm often get asked, how do you think about are you taking jobs away or regional communities going to be smaller?

It's actually the opposite. If there are going to be young people coming back to these communities, what we're seeing is they want to work on the farm where the robot is.

And so it's actually quite a talent attractor and I think is heralding some of the future of work and service providers and talent that we will see in regional communities.

I still work on a fully commercial farm here. I don't spend a lot of time farming anymore and my life's tied up with robots and really proud to be an Ag Tech company that's based out in rural Australia.

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