An agritech company from Tipperary has won the top prize at the Enterprise Ireland Innovation Awards at the National Ploughing Championships.
Roscrea-based Herdwatch received the Innovation Champion award for its artificial intelligence herd management tool.
Herdi or Herd Intelligence is an AI assistant that is designed to support livestock producers with everyday farm management tasks and decisions.
Herdwatch is a 12 year old business and this new tool is built into the company's existing app.
It aims to help farmers to make faster and informed decisions by interpreting a wide range of data, such as vaccination records and grazing plans, weather forecasts and regulatory guidelines.
Speaking on RTÉ's Morning Ireland, the Head of Innovation at Herdwatch, James Greevy, said their whole mission has been to help farmers move from pen and paper to digital systems.
"It's to help farmers get on that digital adoption journey to solve some of the challenges that they face around sustainability from both a financial and environmental point of view," said Mr Greevy.
"The result of that essentially has been as farmers have adopted more and more technology is that they've had data piling up around them, which is brilliant, except that When you need to make sense of this data, it can become more and more difficult," he noted.
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"What we've done with Herdi or Herd Intelligence is we've built an artificial intelligence system into our app which allows farmers to simply ask questions of their data in the same way that you use WhatsApp and say "tell me what my best performing cow", "what fertilizer should I use to best complement my soil fertility results"; Herdi will then will serve back the correct answer in real time with the context of their farm," explained Mr Greevey.
This is the 12th annual Enterprise Ireland Innovation Arena Awards and there has been a strong focus on AI-driven technologies and sustainable innovations.
A total of nine companies participated in this year's final with three companies delivering a live pitch in three different categories.
AI-driven tools to inform decisions on farms, a solar powered feeding machine and low-emission manure management systems were among the cutting-edge solutions which took centre stage in this year's final.
The 'Green Impact Award’, which recognises an innovation focused on sustaining the development of food and farming for future generations to come, was won by Galway company GlasPort Bio.
Its invention GasAbate is a manure management system that cuts emissions while also reducing agitation time for farmers.
Independent trials have shown that when injected into stored cattle and pig slurry, it reduces methane emissions by 80%, hydrogen sulphide by 80% and ammonia by 50%.
The company began its commercialisation journey this year and is on track to deliver projects that will remove 12,000 tonnes of carbon from EU food production on an annualised basis.
The Cork based company ScanInsights won the ‘Start-Up Innovator of the Year Award’, including a €10,000 prize, for their innovative technology which utilises AI to give real-time information on bovine scanning.
The ScanInsights App makes scanning dairy and beef cows more accurate and more efficient.
Its built on a database of 2.5 million scans from bovine scanning in dairy and beef markets, and provides a real time estimate to the operator while the scanning process is ongoing.
