PlantTech Research Institute

PlantTech Research Institute Ltd. is a new industry-led research organisation based in the Western Bay of Plenty, focussed on technology and innovation in premium, plant-based value chains. PlantTech will leverage the Western Bay of Plenty’s regional strengths in horticulture, to create a unique applied research capability that will accelerate regional and national innovation for knowledge-intensive companies. PlantTech’s founders include eight companies (Bluelab, Cucumber, GPS-It, Eurofins, Plus Group Horticulture, Trimax Mowing Systems, Waka Digital and Zespri International) alongside the University of Waikato and Priority One (the Western Bay of Plenty’s economic development organisation). These organisations all share a vision for a collaborative R&D capability that will improve their global competitiveness, and the regional and national innovation systems they work in.

"PlantTech’s value proposition is in applied scientific research, coupled to innovation and knowledge transfer, at the interface of digital and natural systems. Its activities are directed through design-led innovation and informed by market drivers from a variety of companies. PlantTech aims to be a world leader in enabling customised, precise and automated production systems for premium, natural plant production, management and distribution, and in making these systems accessible to businesses at a range of scales. For the first stages of PlantTech’s operation, the focus is on research in artificial intelligence, applied to multi-modal sensor inputs, to enable autonomous solutions for growers and managers of horticultural operations or crops. While the Western Bay of Plenty provides the ‘lab’ in which the work will be conducted, PlantTech’s research will contribute to outcomes in many sectors, and will be commercialised nationally and globally in markets as diverse as sports facilities, hydroponics, logistics and other primary industries; including horticultural industries such as kiwifruit.

PlantTech’s benefit to New Zealand will ultimately be realised by accelerating business growth through improved speed and quality of innovation. If successful, participation in PlantTech by technology SMEs will generate an estimated $34million p/a additional revenue and create 100 new jobs by 2022, growing to an estimated additional revenue of $102million p/a and 290 new jobs by 2027.

Start-up investment of $8.425m for PlantTech has been secured through the Ministry for Business, Innovation and Employment’s Regional Research Institute (RRI) fund, announced in July 2017. By year five (2022) total private investment will exceed Government investment and by year ten (2026) will comprise up to 80% of the total investment."

For more contact:

• Dr Mark Begbie, CEO on +64 7571 0226
• Visit planttechresearch.com(external link)

• Investment and Development
• People and Place
• Excellence
• Impact

Investment and Development

PlantTech Research Institute Ltd. (PlantTech) is an Independent Research Organisation, based in Tauranga, regional Bay of Plenty, pursuing a mission to “Deliver Globally Relevant AI-Based Enabling Technologies” to “Power Data-Driven Solutions across Primary Produce Value-Chains” by making these capabilities available for the next generation of products and services growing the regional economy of New Zealand, and being exported globally.  This is achieved through a three-stage acceleration pathway based on a “triple-helix” approach

Applied R&D – creating market-led, science-based, and globally relevant technology platforms.  This is driven by grant funded, broadly disseminated R&D, and complements the more fundament research activity of universities and CRIs.

Proof-of-concept – developing scalable solutions, that are proven in the field, with strategic partners.  This is driven by collaboratively funded activity, and focuses on de-risking new solutions to show they have the speed, accuracy, reliability, affordability, and fit with common practice to make them valuable.

Commercial Acceleration – The final stage is to work with strategic and/or solution provision partners, to embed PlantTech technology in products serving global markets.  By ensuring R&D is market-led, and working closely with partners to proof-of-concept, we minimise the risks and delays of market introduction.  By working with established partners, who already have routes to market and commercial scale, we can significantly shorten the time to have a scaled commercial offering, delivering long-term returns to be reinvested in the next challenge.

PlantTech now supports 13 full-time equivalent high-value roles in Tauranga, 8 of which are qualified to PhD level or beyond in their field of employment.  In the financial year July 2020 – June 2021, PlantTech’s turnover was $2.31M, with $2.22M of this directly supporting translational research, aimed at delivering medium-term commercial outcomes for the NZ primary sector economy.  Of this research activity, $0.674M (30%) has been directly funded by industry partners.

Developing AI models rapidly or for complex problems, requires specialist, high powered, computing infrastructure based on Graphical Processing Units .  This differs from the sort of machines historically built for High Performance Computing (HPC) and operated by organisations such as NIWA.  PlantTech and New Zealand e-Science Infrastructure (NeSI), the national organisation responsible for delivery of HPC for the New Zealand research community, have signed an MoU committing to a partnership development of open GPU-based HPC for New Zealand.  Through this partnership, PlantTech will have access to world-leading compute facilities and NeSI will have a specialist AI partner with whom to co-develop their investment strategy.  The partnership will ensure this is done in a way that maximises benefit to NZ and minimises duplication of effort or investment.

Capability and Vision Mātauranga

PlantTech took on 6 summer internship students from 4 New Zealand universities; five supported through Callaghan Innovation Summer Experience grants and one fully funded by PlantTech.

• Two interns were retained on 12-month contracts and continue the work they had started; giving these young scientists their first substantive career opportunity.
• Two have found employment with other organisations within horticulture.
• The final two have found employment in data science and geographical information systems data science; areas they worked on with PlantTech.

We worked closely with the interns to create a worthwhile learning and developmental experience for them and the feedback they gave us was extremely positive in terms of feeling valued and providing a supportive around them.

PlantTech further developed 4 PhD opportunities with New Zealand universities, three of these are in the areas of machine learning and deep learning associated with the horticultural industry and remote sensing in particular, the remaining scholarship will look to leverage human centred product design to improve the usability and product experience in innovative fruit measurement systems. 

We have continued to be strongly involved with the Industry Transformation Plan for Agritech, with a particular focus on data sharing and data interoperability, where we have led an industry group (The Data Alliance) in developing a proof of concept project.  The project will further the development of mechanisms to support trust and consent in the context of data sharing, ensuring that data owners can be confident they will retain control over their data, even after it has been shared, thereby protecting their interest, their sovereignty in the data, and their rights to ongoing value.

Implementing approaches to respect the sovereignty and value in data, coupled with the techniques we are developing for regional-scale environmental understanding, support our vision of a future where we can identify and respect the value of all land uses in a catchment, not simply the areas which support a cash crop.  By leveraging the capability of AI and ML to make sense of highly complex systems, we seek to enable participants in the environment to identify, evidence, and benefit from the true value that their land brings; whether this is in the form of a cash crop, of water capture and purification, or it relates to biodiversity and bio-resilience.

PlantTech has been engaging with our tangata whenua, particularly around the vision for holistic and sustainable land use based on the approaches above.  We are now working closely with two of our local iwi to explore how we can support better outcomes for the generations ahead.  We have also been supporting Toi Kai Rawa in their efforts to bring excitement and engagement with technology to the tamariki and rangatahi.  Our staff brought relevant and accessible demonstrations relating agritech as scale to concepts they are familiar with in their everyday lives.  We will continue supporting their work with kura Māori and intend to develop further materials to support this.

Excellence

PlantTech staff have co-authored seven directly related papers published in high quality journals during the period, covering:

• Measurement of canopy nitrogen in grasslands, which we are further developing for application to horticulture. This has led to demonstration of the potential to use satellite data, opening up the prospect of cost-effective, national-scale, monitoring and management of nitrogen.
• The early detection of fungal disease in plantation seedling crops.
• Hyperspectral assessment of feed crops relates to other important attributes of foliage which we are developing for their commercial value in crop management.
• Impact of hyperspectral measurement on animal performance.
• Real-time tracking relates strongly to much of the work we have delivered in crop counting and sizing, an area where we believe we can evidence PlantTech is in the top tier globally.

In addition, PlantTech staff presented four papers at eResearch 2021. These cover:

• The role of temperature control in kiwifruit supply chains
• Machine vision as a means of performing phenotyping in orchards
• Influence of weather on irregular crops in avocado
• The path to, and opportunities created by, data-driven horticulture

PlantTech is working internationally with researchers in:

• Durham University in the UK
• Charles Darwin University in Australia
• Australian National University

In addition, PlantTech is leading a bid into the Endeavour Fund “Smart Ideas” programme, which has passed the science excellence assessment, and has partnered with two CRIs in separate bids into the Endeavour Fund Programme.

Impact

High-Throughput, High-Accuracy Harvest Estimation

Crop estimation is carried out by kiwifruit marketer Zespri™ at the start of every year to understand the volume and size (weight) of kiwifruit they will have to export and market globally after it’s harvested in autumn. This intelligence is needed to inform decisions related to logistics and market planning.

Accuracy is critical for Zespri™ as it aims to maximise kiwifruit grower returns by optimising revenue, which is achieved by optimising sending of appropriate sized fruit to various global markets.

Current crop estimation methods include a combination of historical crop data and manual monitoring, where a sample of kiwifruit (Green and SunGold™) is picked from various orchards and a size profile is measured.

Zespri™ wants to improve on the current methodology to achieve greater accuracy. Firstly, a small sample is not always representative of the whole population of fruit in an orchard. With current methods, increasing the sample size dramatically would be prohibitive in terms of effort and cost of the sampling regime. Coupled with this is the challenge of carrying out the sampling programme in a tight timeframe of only a few weeks.

PlantTech only began working on size estimation of kiwifruit using imagery in early 2020.  By March of that year we had demonstrated a clear lead over other developers in New Zealand.

For the 2021 harvest, the system was used to process survey data from a substantial survey campaign run by Zespri™ and proved able automatically to process the data in two days, resulting in over 23 million calculated fruit weights, approximately 13 million Hayward green and 10 million Sungold™.  The error level achieved was around 5% which compares extremely well to the current approach, where the error is often >20%.  The further development of this solution to provide OSE predictions, based on current information and markets, would deliver 10’s of millions of dollars additional value to Zespri’s 2,500 growers over a three-year period.

International benchmarking identified two leading developers of similar technology, one in Switzerland and the other in Israel.  Both of these are startups, attracting appreciable investment, but neither of them is achieving the accuracy levels for their crops that PlantTech has demonstrated in kiwifruit.  A key opportunity we will pursue in 2021-22 is development of solutions for global crops.

The solution was presented to Fieldays 2021, at Mystery Creek, as an entrant in the innovation awards.  Feedback from the event validated the capability and potential for the technology in fruit produce, as well as confirming that solutions that provide information earlier in the season will deliver increased value to growers, where the crop estimation is of most value to post harvest and marketing.

Low-Cost Wider Area Surveillance for Productivity, Sustainability, and Security

PlantTech staff bring many years’ experience in the analysis of hyperspectral image data, a way of seeing information from across a very wide portion of the electromagnetic spectrum in great detail.  Similar capabilities are seen in nature, in creatures such as bees and mantis shrimps, as a ‘super sense’.

Using this approach, PlantTech scientists have demonstrated the ability to measure economically  important characteristics of horticultural crops, such as plant vigour and nutrient status.  In addition, we can identify species, and species diversity, which has applications in sustainable land management and ecosystem management / audit.  Early indications are that the techniques can be cost effectively deployed at regional and national scale.

We will be working extensively over the coming year to encapsulate these analytics techniques within tools that can be put in the hands of land managers and other practitioners to deliver timely and cost effective insights and decision support.  By partnering with influential players in the global geospatial data and analytics space, we will pursue opportunities at the global scale, with technology and solutions developed and owned in New Zealand.

Fieldays also strongly validated our belief that affordable and accurate area monitoring techniques are attractive for their potential to support a range of monitoring, management, and sustainability challenges across a variety of sectors.  We see strong potential in both agriculture and horticulture for productivity optimisation, nutrient and agrichemical input management, crop performance, and pest and disease monitoring.  It also has potential to support deeper understanding of the environment as a whole, playing an important role in creating the sustainable practices of the future, spanning all the uses of the environment across a catchment and into littoral waters.