GrowLab Case Study: Moisture Planting Technologies

How did the owner of a small engineering design firm from Orange end up founding one of the hottest up-and-coming agtech startups in Australia?

I sat down with GrowLab Crop 2 graduate, Dave Finlay of Moisture Planting Technologies (MPT), to find out.

How it all began…

Dave has spent his life in farm country, eventually settling in Orange NSW where he, along with his wife Wendy, started their design and engineering company, Trang. Being very much an ideas man, Trang gave Dave the chance to put his inventor’s brain to work to solve tough problems, many of them agricultural.

In 2014, for example, they had a client whose planter for sowing seed was constantly breaking. The client came to Trang to design a solution to this problem, the crux of which was the large amount of force required to drag the planter through the soil, which caused the machinery to break.

The birth of the war room

Over the years, Dave and Wendy noticed a frustrating trend: Their clients would come in asking them for expensive designs but with little or no idea about how to take the finished products to market. As a result, a lot of Trang’s promising designs ended up going nowhere.

That was when Dave’s war room started to take shape. Each time another innovative design came to nothing, Dave refused to let it die, continuing to tinker on the ideas, evolving the concepts behind them and looking for potential in the market in his spare time.

Over time, the war room grew until it had over 20 product ideas on its walls. One of these was the Tech-Enabled Broadacre Planter, born out of the 2014 client’s need to prevent his machine from breaking. Dave realised that if he could measure where the optimum amount of moisture was sitting in the soil, he could adjust the machine to place the seeds into the shallowest available moisture, reducing the depth at which the tines had to drag into the ground — thereby greatly relieving the force on the machine as a whole. The result: a machine that wouldn’t break, and better yet — one that would help farmers increase their yield through a revolutionary planting technique.

Enter… GrowLab

It was a quiet afternoon in the office when Dave decided to travel down to Sydney to attend the GrowLab info session in early 2018 with the moisture planter idea in his back pocket.

When he was accepted into the program, he persuaded Wendy to join him. “I didn’t even know about all this until we were accepted into GrowLab!” Wendy exclaims, but she’s grinning as she adds, “But once I did, I realised we were suddenly on a journey”.

Dave and Wendy came into GrowLab acutely aware they had large gaps in their knowledge. Despite having run a successful business centred around highly complex and inventive engineering design, they were still new to the startup ecosystem and were unsure how to identify and interact effectively with potential customers — a crucial step on the way to building up MPT as a business.

They had learned from their experiences at Trang that technical excellence only got them so far: the best ideas they saw were from technically brilliant people but those were also the very same ideas that generally never made it off the page. It was usually the less technical people with less inventive ideas but the added ingredient of sales savvy that saw their ideas become commercial successes.

A crucial pivot

In the early days of GrowLab, Dave and Wendy were intent on building smart farming equipment to be sold to farmers at a one-off cost.

But context is everything. 2018 was dry — really dry. So much so that MPT’s customer interviews revealed that many farmers didn’t even try to put a crop in the ground. In one case, a brand new $700k planter was sitting idle in the shed whilst the owner was still paying interest on a machine he couldn’t use.

Dave and Wendy realise that they needed a better approach: What if farmers only paid for what they used?

This would mean less on-boarding, a cheaper option for customers, an easier model to scale, and therefore more profitable for MPT in the long term.

Where Dave and Wendy benefited most from GrowLab was in developing that path to market strategy, which included being coached on how to identify their customers and make those key connections and critical decisions early in the game.

“A great learning from GrowLab was on how to formulate a customer theory and how to go and test that so you’re putting your time, your money and your investors money in the right place” Wendy says. Dave agrees that doing that analysis first and having the results inform their first full-scale prototype was a more efficient way to ensure they were on the right track and building a product that could address a real problem and be a real benefit to farmers.

What Lies Ahead

So what’s next for MPT Technologies? Having graduated from GrowLab Crop 2 in December 2018, they are now proud members of the Cicada Innovations Incubator. Dave has been across Australia connecting with customers preparing to kick off commercial planting trials in April this year.

All of this momentum is creating quite a buzz around MPT, punctuated by being chosen to pitch at Sydney’s Tech23 in October 2018 and being featured in The Australian and Business Insider in December 2018.

“We have the confidence now that we are onto something — something big” says Dave.

By gauging the best moisture profile in soil and placing crop seeds accordingly, a lot of the guesswork and uncertainty that plagues a typical farmer is removed from the equation. In other words, they will be able to obtain a significantly higher yield using their current resources. We are going to need to feed 10 billion people by 2040. By enabling us to maximise our finite resources, technologies like MPT’s will be a critical part of meeting that challenge.

Want to know more about MPT? Check out their website!

Want to know more about GrowLab? Get in touch!