Students come up with a winner

Young innovators (from left) Kinneir Groube, Scott Spence and Jess Crow at Fieldays. The St Paul's Collegiate students won the James & Wells IP Service Award and Young Innovator of the Year Award.

Dean Taylor revisits the innovation centre at National Fieldays

Considering the success of James & Wells clients at the Fieldays, there's no denying that agriculture is still a huge part of New Zealand's economy.

But it's not necessarily agriculture as we used to consider it -- traditionally farming, machinery and fruit growing -- but innovation in agriculture that is allowing wealth to be created from ideas.

In the 27 years James & Wells have been involved with Fieldays we've seen plenty of innovative agricultural ideas -- and, having our roots in Waikato since the 1970s, we know a good idea when we see it.

This year's James & Wells IP Service Award was won by a group of enterprising young students from St Paul's Collegiate School, who also walked away with the Young Innovator of the Year award.

The "Easy-Use Feed Bin Wires" is the idea of Kinneir Groube, Scott Spence, Jess Crow and Sarah Collinson-Smith, who are part of the school's Centre of Excellence in Agricultural Science and Business programme.

The two-year agribusiness programme is designed to expose and inspire tertiary-capable students to the wide range of skills required and opportunities available in pastoral agriculture and its associated career pathways.

Kinneir says the idea for the system came from Scott's family farm, where they wanted to be able to feed out into feed-pad bins before the cows arrived at the milking shed, but limit access to the feed until after milking.

The system allows for a barrier wire to be moved from a lowered position along the side of the bins to a central position which allows the cows to reach the feed.

Feedback from Fieldays has given the group ideas for how to develop the product even further, including how it might work with different kinds of feed systems, and potentially automating it -- their prototype is manual.

"That was the main purpose of going to Fieldays, to see what people thought of it and what else could be done with it," says Kinneir, who is from a dairy farm herself.

The James & Wells award win has given the St Paul's Collegiate group $3000 of intellectual property advice, which will help them secure ownership of their intellectual property for the feed-bin system and investigate options to leverage it.