The Queensland Agtech Fast Lane

Founder Sam Rogers is Building GrazeMate From Paddock Problems To Global Demand

When Sam Rogers talks about autonomous drones mustering cattle, it doesn’t sound abstract or futuristic. It sounds like a kid from a North Queensland cattle station who grew up watching his dad leave before sunrise and return after dark, and decided there had to be a better way. 

Sam’s family manages around 6,000 head of cow–calf cattle in the Bowen region. As a child, Sam saw firsthand how much time and risk went into moving stock across big country. Later, he left agriculture altogether, diving into robotics and AI research with CSIRO and the National AI Centre. 

Those two worlds – long days in the paddock and cutting-edge robotics – eventually collided. 

Sam realised there were “really pressing problems in agriculture” and a shortage of people who could bridge deep tech and on-farm reality. Out of that gap, GrazeMate was born: an autonomous drone platform to muster cattle and, over time, act as what Sam calls a “physical AI layer for farm infrastructure.” 

GrazeMate’s story isn’t just about technology. It’s about experiments run from a uni dorm room, hundreds of conversations with graziers managing a significant chunk of Australia’s land, and a series of decisions that now have the team preparing to launch into the US. 

It’s also closely tied to Queensland. Sam’s first call on the startup journey was into the 

Farmers2Founders QLD Pre-Accelerator, where regular accountability – “who did you talk to this week?” – helped turn a technical idea into a business that farmers actually want. 

What follows is a Q&A drawn from a recent conversation between Sam and Program Manager, Phil Doran, on where GrazeMate came from, what’s been hard, and what he’d say to other QLD founders sitting on a problem that won’t leave them alone. 

Q&A WITH SAM ROGERS, FOUNDER OF GRAZEMATE 

Phil: For people who don’t know GrazeMate, what are you working on at a high level? 

Sam: We’re building GrazeMate, which is an autonomous drone platform primarily to muster cattle to start with. In a broader sense, it’s a sort of physical AI layer for farm infrastructure – where a farmer can deploy a drone to monitor something, to muster cattle, or in general to build this “farmer as a service” platform. It feels due for a farmer to get the same level of technology that the rest of the world’s had access to for a while now. 

Phil: How did you get from growing up on a station to building this? 

Sam: I grew up on a cattle station in North Queensland. Dad manages about 6,000 head of cow–calf cattle up in the Bowen region. So born and bred in North Queensland – and then, to start with, I went as far away from that as I could. I went into robotics and AI research, did some work with CSIRO and the National AI Centre. 

My whole childhood I’d seen Dad go out before I was up to start mustering cattle, and his headlights wouldn’t be back until after dark. So it was being in between those two worlds that made me think: there’s all this technology, and all these pressing problems in agriculture, and we need more people to serve as a bridge between those worlds. 

The first call in my startup journey was actually to you, Phil, when we started looking at the pre-accelerator. 

Phil: When you think about GrazeMate, what were the “hair-on-fire” problems that made you say, I have to build this? 

Sam: With any startup, you want to be looking for the most hair-on-fire problem. For me, in the early days, I’d be sat on a quad bike for hours trying to move cattle from one paddock to another. 

There’s all this auxiliary stuff – more data helps, better decisions across thousands of hectares helps – but the nuts and bolts are: farmers spend up to five hours a day mustering cattle. They’re spending up to 300 grand a year. 

It felt inevitable that sooner or later we should be able to do that with robots, and I always favour the sooner rather than the later. 

Phil: Once you saw that, what did the early experiments look like? 

Sam: It’s always got to be a mixture of things. For a few years before starting GrazeMate, I’d been messing around mustering cattle with a drone manually. Then I talked to family friends who’d hired people to muster with a drone – it turned to shit. They were really capable mustering on horseback or a motorbike, but when you put a drone in their hand it just becomes unconventional and different. 

I’d been doing some projects with CSIRO working in robotics and thought: this should transfer. At the time I was still in uni, so I ended up simulating a bunch of cattle from my dorm room, which was a horrible idea that I recommend no one do. It goes back to: innovate only where it’s needed. Rebuilding cattle wasn’t where we should have been innovating. 

It did get us set up in the industry we wanted to build in, and then it was shuttling back and forth between uni in Sydney and the property in North Queensland to start testing. 

Phil: You’ve done a lot of testing and pilots now. What signals told you there was something real here – that you should go all in? 

Sam: It took a ton of iteration to get anything vaguely working. But when we got to that point and started talking to customers about, “How would it be if you got back a few hours in your day? How would it be if you didn’t have to jump in a helicopter and put yourself at risk?” – when you start layering those things, you don’t need to push it – rather, you get pulled.

I’d tried to my hand at a couple other ideas before GrazeMate, and the sales cycle was always the bottleneck. It’s hard to convince people to do things differently. With GrazeMate, the first months were just listening. It meant by the time the product was ready, we had a list of people calling us each week hoping to trial GrazeMate. When potential customers start trying to pitch themselves as the right buyers, it’s exciting.

Our journey so far has centered so much around building an awesome product, and one that actually makes sense for a farmer. To know what that should look like, we spoke to hundreds and hundreds of graziers. Every Monday in the Farmers2Founders program it’d be: who are the five or ten people you’ve spoken to this week?  

That accountability meant we just kept going. Through Farmers2Founders and the drought hubs, we got connected to the people feeling these problems most severely. 

At this point it’d have to be 300 or 400 graziers, managing somewhere in the ballpark of 20% of Australian land. 

We also put up a simple website early on with a “sign up to our pilot” form. A farmer from Louisiana emailed and said, “This is great, how much? Do you have somewhere we can pay? Can we pay now and can you give me a trial on Tuesday?” We were nowhere close to Louisiana. When you’ve got people on the other side of the world basically begging to give you money, that’s a good sign there’s something there. And ever than that - it’s a sign we’re going to be able to have a positive impact.

Phil: You’ve moved fast and done a lot. What have been some of the toughest parts people don’t always talk about? 

Sam: How long have we got? 

Recently, regulation has been a big one. In the drone space, Australia has come in with quite a bit of red tape. It’s slowly getting edged back, but for a VC-backed startup you need to be returning on fund cycles, and regulation and fund cycles don’t go hand in hand. 

Finding the right market has been huge. First that meant moving away from Sydney – there aren’t cattle stations in Sydney – so I moved back to North Queensland. Now it means looking at where the best launchpad is for what we’ve built. That’s what’s taken us to look at the US. 

More broadly, agritech already has long sales cycles and complicated, deep tech products. Fighting regulation on top of that is another battle. If you can enter a market where the commercialisation pathway is clearer, it frees a lot up. 

We’re doing product-focused pilots across about a million acres in Australia and we’re becoming confident in the solution. The question now is how we commercialise it and bring it to market. 

Phil: That leads nicely into the US decision. Is it fair to say it’s not just being pushed – there’s also a decent amount of pull? 

Sam: Absolutely. Half of the world’s land is dedicated to grazing. The problem is bigger than Queensland, bigger than Australia. When you build in this industry, you’re building for the whole world – you’re building to feed the world. 

We’ve seen really strong interest from the US and a regulatory pathway that makes sense. So we’re going in pretty hard there. In the next six months we’ll have closed our seed round, which will let us get into the US market, move a couple of our team over and get boots on the ground talking to as many customers and graziers as possible. 

In the 12-month period, we’re looking to have onboarded 50 ranches across the US. We’re excited to extrapolate the savings and impact we’ve seen in product pilots in Australia into ranches in the US, and are really hopeful about what we can unlock for the graziers we’re working with.

Phil: If you could talk to yourself 10 months ago, what would you say? 

Sam: Don’t be scared, and fail really fast. I spent too long dawdling over cold calls, thinking about what people would think, or the chance of failure. 

Failing is by no means losing. You’re winning just by having a go. It really comes back to repetitions. The more reps you can put in, the more likely you are to get to the point you see – or even a point you couldn’t imagine yet. Fail fast and fail often. 

Phil: What would you say to a Queensland founder in their first 3–6 months? 

Sam: It should all be about partnerships. Particularly in this industry, it’s really tough to go in standing alone. 

There were so many olive branches extended to us that fundamentally changed where we are now. Farmers2Founders was one – that first three-month stint actually turning our idea into a business. The connections that came from that have been huge. 

We’ve now got a project with Meat & Livestock Australia. We managed to raise VC funding, which let us bring on a team of really capable engineers. We’ve connected with drought hubs and industry partners who are on the ground and happy to talk to farmers about us. That’s the aim of the game, because farmers, for the most part, have escaped being chronically online like the rest of us. Figuring out how to talk to them and understand what they really want is the most important thing you can do in those first six months. 

Phil: Any advantages to being a Queensland-based agtech founder? 

Sam: The obvious one is programs like the Queensland cohort of Farmers2Founders. We received money that was specifically allocated for Queensland founders, and there’s a lot of that support around. It can turn a team of one with just an idea into a company. 

The Queensland startup ecosystem is really strong as well. Whether it’s within Queensland, or even as we look to the US market, there’s Queenslanders everywhere who have been willing to extend and olive branch - the support network goes so much further than you could ever imagine. That ecosystem and those partnerships make a massive difference.

Phil: Finally, what’s the ask? What do you need from people reading this? 

Sam: Right now we’re looking to understand the US market as much as we can. Any introductions or connections into the US – particularly Texan and Southern Belt agtech ecosystems – are absolutely huge for us. 

Closing reflections 

Sam’s story sits at the other end of the spectrum to a “slow burn” founder story. It’s fast, technical and global in ambition, but the pattern underneath is simple and familiar: 

• see a real agrifood problem 

• build capability in the right direction 

• talk to hundreds of people who feel that pain 

• find partners who’ll open doors 

• fail forward as quickly as you can 

For Queensland founders with a novel idea – or something in agriculture that “pisses them off” enough that they want to fix it – Sam’s journey shows there is a path, and you don’t have to walk it alone. 

Often, like Sam, it starts with a single call and a commitment to put in the reps. 

Ready to put in the reps?

If you’re a Queensland-based agtech founder sitting on a problem you can’t ignore — something you’ve lived, seen, or been frustrated by — Sam’s story shows what’s possible when you pair deep problem insight with the right support at the right time. From a single idea to global traction, it often starts with one conversation and a commitment to move faster.

In 2026, Farmers2Founders will run a new intake of advanced pre-accelerators for early-stage Queensland founders ready to validate, pressure-test and accelerate their path to market. These programs are designed for founders in the first 3–18 months — technical or non-technical — who are serious about building solutions farmers actually want.

👉 Submit your Expression of Interest here: https://airtable.com/appg8u3FYyP2wMOtc/pagUtH6ZxmHi9UbUn/form

If the problem keeps pulling you back — that’s usually a sign it’s worth building.