If you’re following the Young Entrepreneurs Challenge then you’ll have seen our five finalists announced recently. These talented young entrepreneurs will go head to head at our Grand Final on 1st March, competing for the £10,000 Grand Prize!
We wanted to get to know our finalists a little better, and allow you to get an insight of who they are and what they’re about.
Today we talk to our first finalist, Nick Cotter from Ireland. Nick tell us a little bit about yourself!
“Hi i’m Nick, co-founder of Cotter Agritech. I grew up on the family sheep farm which is just outside Abbeyfeale, a small town in the South West of Ireland, in county Limerick. I’m in my third year of studying Law and Business in University College Cork.
I was awarded a UCC Quercus Innovation/Entrepreneurship Scholarship in 2019 for my entrepreneurial activities and most recently, I was awarded a 2022 Nuffield Scholarship which will enable me to travel (in particular Australia and New Zealand after college). This allowed me to research my chosen topic within farming which is ‘Getting off blanket worming: An evaluation of current best practice and newer tools to reduce anthelmintic use and anthelmintic resistance on ruminant livestock farms’.
Nuffield sponsors potential leaders to bring innovation, ideas and better ways of doing things home to the Irish agriculture industry, so it’s the essence of giving back and helping solve some of the big challenges facing agriculture at the moment.
I co-founded Cotter Bros Firewood in 2011 with my older brother Jack, which is an industry leading, Wood Fuel Quality Assured (WFQA) certified, professional firewood supplier selling nationwide which now employs 8 people.
I also co-founded Cotter Organic Lamb in 2019, which direct sells the organic lamb we produce at the home sheep farm, to homeowners and local hotels and restaurants through our website.
We won an Irish Quality Food Awards in 2019, featured on Irelands biggest talk show RTE’s The Late Late Show in 2020, and won an award at the 2021 Blas na hEireann Awards.
I am working on our current start-up Cotter Agritech since 2020, and this business has been bootstrapped via funds from our other two businesses, with the help of grand aid support from our Local Enterprise Office, and prize money from start-up and entrepreneurship competitions.”
This is all very impressive Nick, you’ve achieved so much already! What are your future ambitions?
“We want to scale our business to be global, delivering this greener solution to as many farmers as possible. Agriculture has taken criticism on the climate and biodiversity crisis, so it’s crucial we demonstrate that agriculture is innovating and tackling these big challenges.
What we want to do is protect farmings social license to operate. Innovation is the key to moving to a sustainable model of food production that can feed 10 billion people with a gentle carbon footprint, and I think it’s great if you hold this view of innovation because it’s better for the farmer, for society and for the environment.
My Dad has a great saying: ‘if you’re the smartest person in the room, you’re in the wrong room!’. I want to find the right room. I need an environment where I get exposure to the expertise around the world in agriculture, agritech, and entrepreneurship to enlarge my knowledge. I want to surround myself with giants, and this will speed up my learning through exposure to the best people in my domain and by traveling the world.
The world has become a smaller place but google can’t tell you everything, and 100 people can look at something but only one can see the significance, to be that one you need to travel and get exposure to broaden your mind and I want to be that one in a hundred.
In 2019, I had the absolute privilege of meeting Sir David King, and discussed climate change and agriculture with him, and it inspired me to focus my career on having an impact in the area of ag sustainability and helping to solve these challenges.
I don’t know what I don’t know, so this journey will be a huge learning experience, but I think doing these things is vital for the achievement of my goals over the next 5-10 years.”
How did you hear about the Young Entrepreneurs Challenge?
“I was looking online for opportunities on Google and it happened to come up!”
Did you find the Young Entrepreneurs Challenge application process easy?
“It wasn’t too bad actually! It’s a brief application, that was good as it creates focus and gets you to practice communicating your idea efficiently and effectively without losing the audiences attention.”
What inspired you to come up with your business idea?
“The founders are myself and my older brother Jack. We grew up on a sheep farm, and this has encouraged us to be curious and innovative. It really all started when we were having trouble vaccinating and worming our young lambs back in 2016. So we devised the hardware and when a family friend, Paddy Halton, was visiting the farm. Paddy suggested we take it to the Innovation Arena at the National Ploughing Championships in 2019 and we won the Best Overall Start-up.
Spurred on by this, we began commercialisation and developed the software, which was an idea we came across from being an organic farm at home. We are encouraged every year by the Organic Trust who inspects us to try reduce our chemical inputs, so we did some research and found some farmers were practicing a policy of leaving some animals untreated (usually the best performing 10%) to try mitigate against the development of resistance to the anti-parasitic drugs we use to control parasites. We implemented some of the practices at home and eventually developed the software to complement our hardware.
Parasite resistance is a sleeping giant just awakening. And we’re passionate about this because I believe every farmer around the world would be better off if this invention is available to them. So really what the vision here is future proofing animal production.
We’re breeding the animals that will thrive on the farms that produce our food in the future – that leave profit, will perform, are more carbon efficient and productive, and will feed the world.
We’ve recently concluded trials with University College Dublin and Queens University Belfast that have validated the product, and we’re now very excited to be launching in Ireland and the UK in Spring this year.”
If you win this year’s competition, how will you use the £10,000 prize money?
“If we win, the prize fund will be put towards the production of video testimonials with test farmers to help drive adoption when we launch in Spring. The test farmers who used our solution in 2021 are some of the most respected sheep farmers in Ireland and the UK, the leading individuals who the community look to for best practice and for what farmers should be considering doing to improve their farm business. These individuals have large followings on social media, and regularly contribute to major farming publications (Farmers Journal, Farmer Weekly etc) and their influence is important.
Historically, farmers have not responded positively to top-down communication, for example when electronic ear tagging was brought in by the Irish government as mandatory in early 2000s, farmers were very resistant to adoption as this extra cost was being forced on them with no clear on farm benefits demonstrated.
We have instead focused on communicating the benefits of our solution through the test farmers, and other farmers can then see the benefits of the solution on a real farm themselves and see how it might fit in their system. They’ll know it’s genuine testimonies from trusted professionals in the industry, rather than actors or people being paid to promote a product.
We will also host regular demo days on the test farms to demonstrate the product to groups of farmers to drive sales and adoption.”
Nick thank you so much for being so open and talking about all your achievements and aims. We wish you the best of luck in the Grand Final on the 1st March!
