Ella Shannon led a double life. On weekdays she was in the city in a business suit or travelling around the country as a consultant to big investment funds in agriculture. On weekends she'd be called home to the family sheep and cattle property near Yass, NSW to get into jeans and help out in the paddocks because "there is no access to quality workers".
She saw first-hand a disconnect between the demand for good farm labour and the willing supply of backpackers, uni students and "grey nomads". So she set up AgDraft last October, choosing the name to reflect the farmer's practice of drafting good stock out from the not-so-good.
It's an online job site for agriculture workers with an AirBNB-style referencing system for employers and workers to rate each other. A pilot launched in April for northern NSW has averaged 37 per cent month by month user growth.
Ms Shannon is now looking for the next stage of funding. Startup support in the Australian agriculture technology sector is scant compared with our competitors such as Israel, the US and Canada, says a new report StartupAUS, co-authored by by KPMG. It says agriculture will be Australia's next $100 billion industry by 2030 but growth is being held back by a lack of venture capital and a mismatch between research and industry needs.
"We have to call it out. In Australia the level of research is significantly lower than the markets we are competing with," said Ben van Delden, KPMG agtech leader and head of markets. "At the moment we're too heavily biased towards longer term research with limited focus on commercial outcomes".
Half of our land mass is farmed, half of our food produce is exported, and Australia is globally recognised for its clean, green environment. So "there's a beautiful connection opportunity there" said Mr van Delden. Australian agribusiness should be able to tell "a much better story" about provenance, food security and the "trust in our supply chain", he said. Just solving the weed and food waste problems could save over $11 billion. But instead agricultural productivity growth is stalling.
Alex McCauley, CEO of StartupAUS, said older firms shed 400,000 Australian jobs in the five years to 2011, while young firms created 1.44 million jobs. Agtech is "a great example of how technology can have a transformative effect on broader traditional industries," he said.
There have been leaps with drones, robotics, decision support technology and smart irrigation systems, but Australian agtech "has the potential to be a leading source of technological manufacturing, exporting high tech products to a global agricultural market in need of innovative solutions to meet exploding demand for food", according to the report.