Award winner reduces labour costs and maximises product efficacy

Patented technology designed to reduce on-farm labour costs and maximise product efficacy in the paddock has received the prestigious Henty Machine of the Year Award.

Loam Bio, of Orange, NSW, collected the award for their new product, FurrowMate®, which works with most air seeders to deliver biologicals into the planting furrow easily, safely and accurately.

FurrowMate is the world’s first direct air injection unit enabling large scale biological additive application and impressed the Machine of the Year judges to win the award on Tuesday, September 23.

As the first technology to provide broadacre farmers with a scalable solution for application of dry powered biologicals, FurrowMate® represents a significant milestone in the industry.

Loam Bio Mechanical Engineer Andrew Godwin said the machine was developed to deal with the fine powdered form of commercial biological products.

“Personally, I have been on a design journey of 18 months with this product and for the industry this award is a way to get the product recognised,” Mr Godwin said. 

“It is a real olive branch to the ag industry here at Henty and is an opportunity for other businesses to get involved and get their products out there.”

Mr Godwin said FurrowMate eliminated seed treatments that traditionally use pumps or auger application systems. 

“Once the Furrowmate is fitted to your air seeder, it is literally fill the hopper, hit run in the cab and away you go. There are quite specific labour savings.” 

In designing FurrowMate, Loam Bio aimed for an improved process of applying biological products out into the field at scale. Traditionally those products are applied as a water-based flow similar to a rhizobia application.

This water-based seed treatment process has proven to be effective but is quite laborious and carries risks in terms of machinery break down or weather delay as the biological product can die. 

“The FurrowMate really was born out of the need of what we can do differently to address that, and it is essentially an accurate metering system allowing the operator to meter the fine, dry powdered product directly into the airstream of the air seeder,” Mr Godwin said.

“The operator then relies on the existing metering of the air seeder to distribute the product.”

Mr Godwin said FurrowMate removed the labour involved and gave the operator confidence of reliable accurate rates.

Priced at $24,990, FurrowMate was initially developed for use with Loam Bio products, but testing has begun on other commercially available products while the company is also partnering with other organisations to act as sales agents. 

In the 2025 winter cropping season, Loam Bio had 24 FurrowMate units in operation across wheat, canola and barley cropping systems in Queensland, NSW and Victoria. Next season the FurrowMate will expand into legume and pulse products to complete the full crop rotation. 

“We already have quite a bit of interest coming into next year’s cropping season, so we are expecting to get another 20 to 30 units out,” Mr Godwin said.

“We are expecting a 10-year life – the return on investment will depend on the application, the size of the enterprise and what you are putting out with it. Most growers will pay it off within two seasons.”

FurrowMate is not brand specific and can be adapted to any make of air seeder. 

“There is no reason why it can’t be used in summer cropping but will depend on the product being applied. Our products are designed to be distributed at 20 grams per hectare and the machine itself can go higher or lower beyond that, depending on the specific product, machine width and ground travel speed,” Mr Godwin said. 

“We talk about how many grams per minute of product and that will correspond to a particular machine width at a certain ground speed.”

Loam Bio’s next focus is developing a second hopper with a slightly larger capacity to handle rhizobia.

“The number one question we get asked by growers is can we do rhizobia with this. Fundamentally the answer is yes but it is limited by the capacity of this unit so we will be putting forward another design,” Mr Godwin said.