Rainstick: Improving canola establishment

• Riverine Plains (NE Node lead)
• Agtech

Start date: July 2024

Expected end date: June 2025

Canola establishment and germination rates vary significantly across farms due to a combination of factors including sowing times, sowing depth, soil moisture, inputs and seed.

Riverine Plains is supporting Rainstick, a novel bioelectrical technology startup, through early-stage problem and market validation. This technology has the potential to increase crop resilience through increasingly variable climate conditions, including unfavourable sowing conditions.

Rainstick is an innovative Australian biotech startup that merges First Nations knowledge with modern bioelectrics to enhance seed germination. The company, co-founded by Maiawali man and third-generation farmer Darryl Lyons and technologist Mic Black, focuses on using electricity to improve crop yield. Their key technology, the Variable Electric Field (VEF) treatment, mimics the natural effects of lightning, which has been traditionally associated with boosting plant growth.

Initial lab results from horticultural crops have been positive, and now the Rainstick team is exploring how this technology can be applied to canola to decrease production risk during crop establishment.

By working with Riverine Plains early in their technology development, Rainstick is ensuring it understands canola establishment from different stakeholder perspectives, including farmers, agronomists and seed manufacturers.

Project focus areas

Understanding the problem: Riverine Plains is providing valuable connection to growers, seed distributors and agronomists to better inform the ‘problem’ that the Rainstick technology is looking to address.

Early-market validation: Rainstick’s technology is in early development stages, with one season in-lab for canola trials. It is critical to connect with the ‘problem owners’ in early stages of technology development to ensure this development process aligns to real-world conditions and cropping logistics. Examples include, understanding when and how seed is treated before being distributed to growers, or the germination rates that local growers are currently experiencing.

Stage-gate support: understanding measures of success that need to be achieved at each product validation stage-gate is key. Riverine Plains is supporting the Rainstick to develop robust stage-gates to ensure grower and industry confidence can be gained through lab results, through to glasshouse, small plot, and then paddock scale validation. For this technology, this also includes understanding not only technology efficacy in-paddock, but technology scalability to be able treat seeds at broadacre scale.

Rainstick is a part of Riverine Plains’ SCOUT program which is designed to support high-potential technologies through early-stage validation to local case studies that asses the return on investment (ROI) of these technologies for Riverine Plains farm businesses.

Rainstick is additionally participating in the Future Drought Fund-supported Beanstalk Venture Studio program. The Australian Government’s Future Drought Fund also supports the Vic Hub.