Fieldays tends to set the tone for the year, and this year the mood at Mystery Creek felt noticeably more confident.
It was busy, the conversations were good, and after five years of turning up we are feeling like a core part of the ecosystem rather than a booth waiting on foot traffic. The people we needed to talk to knew where to find us, and we had a run of quality conversations with the clients and partners that we have been building relationships with over time.
A package with agtech at its core
Some of that optimism may have been linked to an announcement that landed the day before the gates opened. The Government’s “Optimising land use to power rural productivity” package commits $143 million across six commercial projects, $59 million from government and $84 million from the sector, spanning dairy, sheep and beef, horticulture, forestry, whenua Māori and aquaculture. A Lincoln University and ASB report referenced alongside it suggests a smarter mix of land use, science and technology could add around $10 billion to the economy over the next five to seven years.
The exciting bit is that agtech sits right at the centre of it. The whole premise is lifting productivity and getting more out of our land and water, and that is exactly the kind of work we exist to support. Credit where it is due, this was developed with industry, and you can see the key contributors named in the document itself.
My honest read is that the funding is a catalyst rather than the whole answer. The bigger prize is not just exporting more primary product, it is commercialising and exporting the technology we build around food security and productivity. That is the genuinely global opportunity, and announcements like this one are a useful nudge towards it.
The Innovation Awards
Congratulations to Scanabull, who took out the Prototype Award for the Scanabull WeighApp, using 3D LiDAR and AI to deliver accurate, real-time cattle liveweights from a simple phone scan. A genuinely smart, scalable answer to an everyday problem, and exactly the kind of early engineering we love to see.
It was a strong field across the other categories too:
- Enivo took Young Innovator of the Year for its biodegradable plant pots, made from New Zealand forestry and primary industry waste to replace single-use plastic.
- elert won the Early-Stage Award for elert EQ, a wearable that monitors equine health, temperature and location around the clock.
- Elm Lab Skincare earned a Highly Commended in the same category for its A2 Colostrum Baby Lotion, made from surplus colostrum on a single traceable family dairy farm in Mosgiel.
- Trussed Systems took Growth & Scale for its Truss House portal frame, a precision-engineered timber system that speeds up residential and multi-unit construction.
Every one of them well deserved.
More than one kind of innovation
Judging gives you a front row seat to how people define innovation, and how narrow that definition can sometimes be. There is a strong tendency to hunt for deep tech breakthroughs while waving away other “softer” forms of innovation. I think that mindset is dangerous. In New Zealand, we excel at building new things but often fall short on the commercial elements that scale impact – brand, marketing, channels, and business models. If a solution solves a real problem, its simplicity is not a flaw; good innovation is supposed to make the complex look easy.
The other thing worth remembering is that innovation is not only about the product. Plenty of the value sits in the business model, customer experience, and go-to-market strategy. Today, the biggest breakthroughs come from combining multiple forms of innovation rather than relying on technical novelty alone. To win, you usually need more than one kind of innovation working together, and the product itself does not always have to be the most novel part of the story.
The ambition gap
If I had one piece of constructive feedback from the week, it is this. Alongside some genuinely incredible innovation, there is still a gap in global ambition from some of our founders. We need to be thinking globally from day one. The best of what I saw at Fieldays could absolutely compete on the world stage, and that is the mindset that turns a good local product into a category-defining company.
We came away energised, with plenty of follow-ups underway and a clear sense of where we can help. If you are building something in this space and thinking about how to get it from a good idea to a product in the market, we would love to hear about it.
