The Silicon Review - Best Business Review Magazine 50 Most Trustworthy Companies 2019 | Page 106

An Interview with Ollie Roberts, Pasture.io Pty Ltd Founder and CEO: ‘Our Satellite
Imagery, Weather Data, Farm Records, and Machine Learning Environment Disrupt
Remote Pasture Measuring’
“We remove the constant stress of where to graze livestock 365 days of the year.”
dairy farmers record pasture
mass or growth rate objectively.
Keeping that in view, a system
using satellite images has been
developed to measure pasture
biomass at a paddock-scale in
Australia. The system has borne
fruit in empowering farmers to
be the best at what they do with
leading AgTech.
Ollie Roberts, Founder & CEO
Ollie Roberts: A Formidable
Leader
Ollie Roberts, founder, serves as the
Chief Executive Officer of Pasture.
io. His background is in agriculture,
working predominantly with dairy farmers
and AgTech. He has founded two AgTech
web platforms including Pasture.io. The
other one is called Milkflow.io. He has
worked with the University of Tasmania in
delivering phone and tablet-based pasture
modelling apps and with the University
of Sydney overseeing its robotic dairy
operations. Mr. Roberts continues to work
with universities on several projects such as
the Smartfarm, run by the University of New
England, and The Women in Agri-Tech, run
by the Central Queensland University.
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A
ustralian dairy farms rely
on grazing pastures as their
primary source of feed.
Accurate and timely measurement
of pasture biomass is integral for
effective grazing management
practice, however few Australian
In light of the foregoing, we’re
thrilled to present Pasture.io Pty
Ltd.
Pasture.io is an online web
platform that compiles and
crunches farm pasture data and
ruminant nutrition giving a simple
yet powerful pasture management
solution for increasing farm
productivity and profitability.
The company was incorporated
in 2014 and is headquartered in
Hobart, Tasmania.
Ollie Roberts, Pasture.
io Pty Ltd Founder/
CEO, spoke exclusively
to The Silicon Review.
Below is an excerpt.
Why was the company
set up? And how did you
expand your company and
its offerings over the years?
Pasture.io was initially set up
to solve an issue on my family
dairy farm. This issue was
underutilizing farm data to
optimally feed cows and grow
pasture for profit. The first
iteration of Pasture.io was in
a spreadsheet format from
2006 to 2014. By 2014, there
was a pressing need to convert
the program into a web-based
platform. This allowed a wider
spread of adoption with farmers.
The initial platform was built
to handle manual data inputs
by farmers, which proved to
be a barrier to adoption. In
2018, we had a breakthrough
with our proprietary remote
pasture measuring models.
This breakthrough meant that
we were able to overcome the
limitations of satellite imagery
for measuring the quantity of
pasture in a paddock and deliver
accurate pasture measurements
automatically, thus removing the
barrier to customer uptake.
How successful was your
first project roll on? Share
the experience.
The first project roll-on taught us
a lot in terms of listening to the
audience and understanding the
drivers of traction; through this
learning we experienced success.
This success paved the way for our
team to deeply understand our
customers’ painpoints and to build
the foundations of the platform
we have today. I am not saying the
early years were easy, it has been a
hard-long road of reaching where
we are today and I thank the early
years for guiding us here. It is true
that you learn from your mistakes
and that is what drives us and our
company’s success today.