Categories
Blog

What really drives profitability in pastoral agriculture?

Unique, profitable, and complex New Zealand pastoral agriculture is uniquely based around grazing pasture in the paddock while it is growing. In most countries agriculture is relentlessly dependent on diesel, machinery and chemicals to establish forage crops, spray weeds, harvest them, transport them, wrap them in plastic for storage, then fed them out often in […]

Categories
Blog

Four reasons why co-creating with your customers drives business performance

We’ve noticed that the past decades have seen a significant and positive shift in philosophy with product design and development. It used to be that entrepreneurs and designers would be reminding themselves of Henry Ford’s quip – “ If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” If in doubt, the product […]

Categories
Blog

Digital data in the agri-food supply chain

Established companies and technology start-ups are all racing to create solutions that better manage agricultural data in supply chains. Does this mean radical new transparency for farmers and producers? And have we thought through the implications for data collection, management, and ownership? In this post: What is agricultural data? How rich digital data can benefit […]

Categories
Blog

Going round in circles

I’ve just finished refilling my Ecover washing up liquid bottle at work. Here in our shared office facilities our landlord is trying to get us all to go green and so has invested in a large returnable drum of Ecover from which we can all recharge our plastic bottles and avoid yet more plastic into land-fill.

My eco-crusade doesn’t stop there. In the past month we’ve stopped buying milk from the supermarket and I’m now popping into our local dairy farm on the way home and refilling glass bottles from their state-of-the art milk dispensing machine (at twice the price I might add).

Categories
Blog

Five reasons to attend Ag Innovations Bootcamp

The Ag Innovations Bootcamp returns October 1-2, 2019.  Hosted by Rezare and Fieldays Society, this bespoke training opportunity for New Zealand agricultural businesses offers a curated learning journey to grow your business capabilities.  The two-day bootcamp covers new product development, understanding your customers, business model development, creative problem solving and a whole lot more. We […]

Categories
Blog

Time to demonstrate sustainable delivery of human nutrition

As the debate about the carbon footprint of livestock farming rages on, I was encouraged to hear a very persuasive presentation from Professor Michael Lee recently. Michael heads up the team at UK-based Rothamsted Research’s North Wyke site, a world leading centre for farm-scale ruminant livestock production research. In the past couple of years, North […]

Categories
Blog

How do you build empathy with your agricultural technology customers?

Customer Empathy will be well-known to anyone who has heard about design thinking. So too, for that matter, anyone who has attended an Ag Innovations Bootcamp. Customer empathy is fundamental to creating great design that meets people’s needs. So how do you do it? Empathy or sympathy? Often “customer empathy” can sound a bit soft […]

Categories
Blog

#EvokeAg – Making the agritech ecosystem visible and discoverable

We recently attended and exhibited at EvokeAg, the new agrifood international technology event specifically for the food and farming community hosted by AgriFutures Australia. EvokeAg brought together more than 1100 attendees from across the Australian and wider agriculture and agritech industries, including 100+ attendees from New Zealand and a substantial contingent from Israel. The event […]

Categories
Blog

Embracing The Unknown: Reflecting on the First Ag Innovations Bootcamp

Jeremy Suisted, 25 February 2019 Confession time. It was with more-than-a-little nervousness that I arrived to Rezare Systems’ Ag Innovations Bootcamp at Mystery Creek in December. I wasn’t nervous about the content – as a facilitator I had guided and coached many teams through design thinking and innovation experiences. I wasn’t nervous about the size […]