Agritech business Onside has seen a better way and turned it into a successful product and a business with its digital check-in check-out app which has seen Onside named as one of 13 nalists in the Growth and Scale category at the 2022 Fieldays Innovation Awards. Onside is a digital farm management app in your pocket, supporting farms, orchards, and vineyards by simplifying visitor management, onsite communication, health and safety compliance, and on-farm bio-security, reducing the paperwork and keeping everyone in the loop at the touch of a button. Onside was co-founded in 2015 by Ryan Higgs, a farmer from the Waikato who studied at Massey University and then on to post graduate studies with a PhD in animal science and mathematical modelling from Cornell University, New York. Coming home Ryan went to work in an operational role for a large corporate dairy farming business with 13 farms, a large team of sta , and hundreds of contractors coming and going to and from the farms. “The pain we felt there was we never knew who was on our properties,” Ryan says. “We needed a solution that could tell us who was there and when, making sure they had all the information they needed, and doing it in a scalable way. Paper doesn’t work so it had to be digital, it had to be mobile, and it had to be able to connect with our sta and the people coming onto our farm. There was nothing on the shelf at the time.” Ryan started here and developed a check-in check-out solution which was focused mainly on health and safety compliance. In response to feedback from the market, Onside has continued to develop and expand its app with an operational e ciency task manager, a risk and incident manager, and on-farm bio-security excellence. “It was feedback from the market that helped us improve into a comprehensive system, so the growth of the product has been based purely on what our customers want.” Onside is continuing to develop and innovate as it works its way towards achieving its vision. “The vision for our company is to power the world’s biosecurity. If we look at some of the incursions that have happened in New Zealand’s primary sector, Psa, M. bovis, and even tuberculosis is still rolling around our primary industry. They are hugely costly and they a ect the resilience of the agricultural sector in New Zealand and also around the world. After a couple of big scale up years in 2022 and 2023, Onside has made its way to Australia where it is providing Australian farmers, growers, and contractors with a great and comprehensive experience. Next year Ryan is planning a big execution year, with plans to launch into another market. Keeping everyone in the loop onside.co
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