The local boys making a global impact in agritech

My other job is Entrepreneur in Residence at QUB, in my role there I've crossed paths a few times with the amazing team from Cropsafe.

What started as a school project has just secured a £3m seed investment round, driven by John and Micheál from Derry.

(Pic and text credit: Startacus)

CropSafe is an online application in which agricultural landowners can register their land, request for their land to be surveyed by passing satellites and processed through the Cropsafe machine learning software to report back any possible growth of disease or infection within the crop.

By using satellite imagery combined with machine learning techniques, CropSafe provides customers with instant reports that could not be gathered through traditional survey aircraft or drones without days of planning and waiting for all variables to line up perfectly.

This is the story in John's words from the cropsafe website cropsafe.io

'It was a few years ago, in a youth hostel in County Kildare, Ireland that Micheál and I published the first prototype of CropSafe. 3am in the morning it went live - still remember it. It was a homepage and a single map that users could interact with. Pretty scrappy, being held together by thread and what seemed to be no more than spaghetti strands that wobbled under load if more than five visitors tried viewing the same page. But hey, it worked. And we celebrated with a few half-burnt pop tarts in the hostel's 70s-era, still avocado green communal kitchen.

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CropSafe was built from day one to bring technology with simplicity to a few farms in our local town, however, always with dreams of how many we could reach across the world. The power of simplifying anything now, we believe is still hugely underrated. The difference between an analytics tool for a few thousand farms, to a few million. The difference between a banking system for the most tech-savvy, to the entire population. The difference between bringing sustainability and livelihood to a few farms in a small town in Ireland, to many across the world.'

The great news for all of us is that these two are not the only ones. Northern Ireland is full of talented young people who are tackling some of the biggest challenges we face. We've had teams working on vertical farming, sustainable packaging, biocomposites made from food waste, methane 'hoovers', worm farming kits, pollution sensors, biodiversity monitoring...and loads more.