F2F is pleased to announce the 18 teams who have been selected from over 50 applications for the Hatch 2022 program. The Hatch program is structured over six weeks and focuses on validating your idea with potential customers. In addition, it will support you to test your ideas, build capabilities, and develop a plan to take the next step in your journey as an entrepreneur.
Jessica Brunner WA Jessica is a passionate beekeeper with a big idea to help Australia's 30,000 hobby apiarists improve their honey harvest process. The Honey Harvest Trolley is designed to meet backyard and hobby beekeepers' extracting and harvesting needs whilst minimalising WHS risks to ensure the hobby's longevity and encourage more beekeepers to continue their pursuit of beekeeping.
Tane Tokorangi QLD Tane has been growing and processing Hemp since 2018. Tane's idea is to implement and innovate Industrial Hemp as a sustainable fibre resource to sequester carbon and produce sustainable Hemp toilet paper. In addition, Tane sees the opportunity to sell the Hemp toilet rolls directly to Australian consumers.
Kerrie Mercel QLD
Kerrie, a nursery owner from Mt.Tamborine in QLD, grows ornamental plants in tunnels and imports large quantities of Moringa into Australia. Kerrie's idea is to grow Moringa and create a co-op of growers in the local area. Moringa is a superfood and can be value-added and sold as a powder, and added to salads, smoothies, and other health and wellness consumer products.
Grant Cawood SA
Grant is a tech developer from SA; his idea, VinoScan, is a winery automation product to aid small to medium-sized wineries in their wine fermentation and storage. VinoScan uses sensors to collect data from wine tanks and uses that information to automatically control winery equipment such as coolant flow control to maintain target temperatures.
Reece & Tegan Modra SA
Reece and Tegan are growers of legumes (lentils, chickpeas, lupins); they are looking to value-add these crops to leverage consumer trends towards 'plant proteins'. Their focus for the Hatch Program is to investigate alternative product forms to dry legumes such as cooked lentils sold frozen or shelf-stable as a pre-prepared salad pack.
Joe Davis WA
Joe has spent the last 20 years as a production vet. Having worked extensively preparing cattle for sale, he understands the need for a verifiable health record for sale animals, which removes the need for trust between vendors and buyers whilst promoting the production of high-performing, healthy livestock production. Joe is looking to validate the idea and gain feedback from producers and others in the industry.
Team Bud Fruitfulness TAS
Thomas, Jo and Bob have joined forces to learn how to assist with grape yield estimation by using NIRS technology to predict grapevine bud fruitfulness non-destructively. In addition, they are developing a hand-held analysis tool that will scan a representative number of buds to predict the fruitfulness in cool-climate vineyards.
Millie Bach QLD
Millie is an agronomist, and part-time farmer and her passions for sustainability and the environment have led her to her idea to produce bio-degradable, non-toxic and gluten-free straws made from Australian bred and grown oat plants. The oat straws will provide people with an alternative to paper or plastic straws and break down quickly whilst still enjoyable to drink from.
Lisette Mill VIC
Lisette, a 2021 Livestock Leaders Program graduate, is developing a more attractive bait product that can be infused with modern rabbit viruses to attract pest rabbits to consume rabbit viruses faster in the short introduction window of breeding cycles which will enable rabbit biological control to be delivered to wild rabbits faster and in seasons when their uptake of current baits (grain/carrots) is low and slow.
Miffy Gilbert VIC
Miffy is a horticulturist and entrepreneur; she leads a team of strawberry growers
developing an application that uses a mix of artificial intelligence, robotics, weather station data, and packhouse data to improve fruit volume forecasting accuracy, in turn, improves price negotiations and workforce planning. Once they have proof of concept, the algorithm can be adapted to many other crops.
Sigfredo Fuentes VIC
Sigfredo, Eden and Claudia are a research team from VIC. Together, they have developed and tested the implementation of electronic noses and IoT for crops' monitoring of environmental hazards, physiological status and early detection of biotic/abiotic stresses using artificial intelligence to predict smoke contamination within canopies, bunches, and smoke taint in berries and wine.
Vijeesh Sathyanesan NSW
Vijeesh's background in IT and passion for empowering communities have led him to build collaboration tools and platforms to help producers get better results and save costs. For example, the ConnectOne platform allows farmer groups to perform farming activities based on data and insights derived from data analytics. Vijeesh plans to expand this platform as PaaS(Platform as a Service) to the regions such as Australia, New Zealand, Europe and USA.
Max Inverarity WA
Max, a grains producer from WA, is developing and establishing a Value Added template of primary products so that growers have the opportunity to retain ownership of resources during product development to maximise profits and minimise the import and repurchase of their original product. This ultimately creates more income locally through job creation and downstream processing.
Sylvia Mok QLD
Sylvia is exploring the benefits of microalgae as a feedstock. Microalgae present a massive opportunity to serve as feedstock boosters that enhance the health and welfare of livestock and mitigate greenhouse gas emissions. In addition, this creates positive consumer perception and enhances the competitiveness of the Australian red meat industry, which is a win-win result for producers and consumers.
Sally Strelitz NSW
Sally is a livestock producer from NSW. Sally, her husband Peter and the Milly Hill team have already launched their Milly Hill Lamb branded products which can be found in some of the best restaurants on the east coast. Sally is expanding her value-adding business to include small goods underrepresented in the foodservice industry.
Sarah Hamilton VIC
Sarah, a sheep producer, is on a mission to give consumers and tourists easy access to fresh farm food in the Grampian. She already supplies her branded Arakoola lamb to local businesses and is looking to develop gourmet meat and local produce box, including flowers grown on her property, to capture the local tourist trade and consumers looking for sustainable, traceable and quality eating experience.
Malkah Lara NSW
Entrepreneur and Agribusiness graduate Lara sees the need to change rural Australia's current drawn-out recruitment processes. This has inspired her to develop a platform that changes how we recruit and think about jobs for the young generation. An algorithm based app that automatically matches employers with potential employees showcasing individuals and companies holistically to open the gateway for young people into agriculture.
Tim Hulsen QLD
Tim has developed a new process to address a cost-intensive biofouling problem on tanks (e.g. Aquaria), cages, and netting commonly used in fish farming. The invention enables regular, automated, low-cost water cleaning of nets and cages. Biofouling is an expensive problem for the aquaculture industry, and Tim aims to design, commission and run a prototype at a company to confirm the invention's applicability.
We want to thank our partners AgriFutures, AWI, MLA, FRDC, Wine Australia and GRDC for their continued support of Farmers2Founders and the Hatch Program. With such a large cohort this year, it will be exciting to follow these teams as they progress through the 2022 Hatch program.
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