From AgFunder:
Editor’s Note: Anders Torud is a senior advisor at Inkubator Aas, the campus Startup Incubator at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences.
Inkubator Aas has companies like N2Applied and Saga Robotics among its
incubator companies. Edvard Bergiton Iversen is the project coordinator
for the Agritech Nordic Initiative connected to the T:lab incubator in Steinkjer.
Here Torud and Iversen write about the strengths of the Norway Agritech sector.
During this year’s World AgriTech Innovation Summit
in London, one of the leading conferences for the agriculture
technology community, five out of the 13 startups showcased were
Norwegian.
Norway is not one of the world’s leading agricultural producers in
terms of produced volumes and will most likely never be. Only about 4%
of its total landmass is arable land, and less than 3% is actually
farmed. So why does this small mountain nation have so many ideas about
something it does relatively little of?
Norway is home to one of the fastest growing startup ecosystems in
Europe, which might be translating into agritech. While small in terms
of land mass, agriculture is still prominent in Norway, reaching across
the country’s coastal regions, into the mountains, and from the cold
South to the freezing North. It may be that this has made sure that
farming is present in the mind of many tech entrepreneurs.
Mountain Management
NoFence,
which presented at World AgriTech has its background in trying to a
solve a problem that is very prominent in the mountainous areas of
Norway but is also valid other places in the world: fencing. The founder
of NoFence, a west coast goat farmer himself as well as a tech
entrepreneur, developed a solution that allows the farmer to fence in
his goat, sheep or cattle by way of a “virtual fence.” The solution
consists of a GPS collar for the animals and a smartphone user
interface; it has already been sold to over 2,500 customers.
The fact that smartphone penetration in Norway is at 91% (2017) and
that Norway has the best mobile broadband coverage in the world, makes
Norway a good place commercialize this solution.
Another company, Soilsteam International,
also presenting at AgriTech, was originally founded by a group of
farmers wanting to eliminate or at least drastically reduce the use of
artificial pesticides in food production. The solution was the use of
steam. In cooperation with local industry, academia, and the tech
sector, the team has developed a soil steaming solution that has been
proven to effectively combat fungi, nematodes and weed seeds, down to
30cm depth. Field tests during the summer of 2018 showed increases in
yield for vegetables like carrots of over 40%. Recently UC Davis in
California abandoned plans to develop a similar solution and instead
purchased equipment from Soilsteam International; commercial customers
are lining up.
Fertilizer’s Frontlines
A third company worth mentioning, N2Applied,
has its legacy from one of Norway’s great industrial success stories –
fertilizer production. In 1905, Norsk Hydro – now Yara, one of the
world’s largest fertilizer companies, was established based on the
combination of access to abundant hydropower resources and the invention
of the electric arc technology that enabled the production of nitrogen
fertilizer from the air. N2Applied has developed a modern version of the
electric arc process that enables the energy efficient production of
nitrogen in a processing unit the size of a kitchen fridge. This
technology, which can be deployed on farms, has the power to potentially
disrupt the value chain of fertilizer, putting the farmer in the
driver’s seat. The company has installed several test units with pilot
customers and has received about €7 million in funding from investors.
Robotic Readiness
The Norwegian offshore oil and gas industry with its demand for
robotic solutions, as well as a strong drive to automate industrial
processes in general, has been a good basis for the development of
academic and industrial competence in this field in Norway. The Agritech
startup Saga Robotics is a company that will continue that tradition onshore.
Saga Robotics has developed a highly-versatile, modular robot that
can be adapted to do a range of tasks in the open field, as well as
orchards, greenhouses and polytunnels. The first commercial use case for
the robot is as a carrier of UV-light racks in a greenhouse or in the
field that exposes strawberry, tomato, cucumber and other crops to a
defined dose of UV-light to reduce fungal infections and replaces
chemical fungicides. The treatment needs to be done in darkness and at a
slow, steady pace; a job well suited for a robot....MORE
Also at AgFunder:
aquaculture is only going to increase in importance and feeding the fishies is part of the job.
