HortPlus: Transform Crop Protection Decisions with Integrated Weather and Disease Intelligence
Opportunity for
Integration partners, distribution and channel partners, trial partners, and investors to help HortPlus bring its proven New Zealand weather and disease decision-support platform to Australian high-value horticulture.
Opportunity description
Industry challenge
Growers in high-value horticulture spend thousands of dollars per hectare on crop protection every year. Much of it is insurance spraying: applying chemicals by default because growers lack the data to time decisions with confidence. Weather data, disease risk models and spray records typically sit in separate systems, leaving growers and agronomists to piece the picture together by hand.
For corporate growers running operations across multiple sites, this creates real risk. Delayed decisions, missed spray windows and inconsistent management hurt crop quality and profitability, and the stakes keep rising as regulation tightens, resistance grows, and crop protection expertise gets harder to scale. There is a clear need to bring weather intelligence, disease modelling and on-ground data closer together so growers can act with confidence.
Current opportunity
HortPlus is expanding its MetWatch crop protection platform into Australia and is looking to connect with partners who can help. HortPlus is particularly interested in:
Integration partners: hardware, sensor and weather station providers and agritech companies whose data becomes more valuable when it drives a decision. Connect your feeds and tools into a platform that turns them into crop protection actions growers trust, proven in New Zealand and now expanding into Australia.
- Farm management system providers who want to connect their platforms with weather and disease intelligence to deliver a more complete solution for growers.
- Distribution and channel partners: agronomists, consultants and crop protection advisors with existing relationships in Australian horticulture.
- Trial partners: corporate growers in berries, grapes, summerfruit, apples, and cherries interested in trialling the platform on their own crops and conditions.
Investors interested in supporting HortPlus’s Australian expansion.
Opportunity background
HortPlus has been operating for more than 25 years, working closely with Plant and Food Research (now the Bioeconomy Science Institute) and others across New Zealand's horticultural research sector. The MetWatch crop protection platform by HortPlus is the New Zealand industry standard for weather and disease decision support, used by corporate growers and organisations such as Zespri and New Zealand Apples & Pears.
The platform is SaaS-based and hardware agnostic. It integrates data from weather stations, sensors and other monitoring hardware, and combines these with disease models to deliver decision support for agronomists and growers. It also provides a pathway for researchers and companies to develop and deploy new decision-support models and research through the platform.
HortPlus has begun its Australian market entry, building on relationships with multinational clients and early engagement with industry bodies.
Potential other applications
HortPlus is focused on high-value horticulture crops, but the platform has broader applications. Its ability to integrate weather, disease and sensor data into a single decision-support layer can apply to tree crops such as macadamias and avocados, and to vegetable production, where disease and climate variability are key risks. There may also be opportunities in protected cropping and other production systems where timely, data-driven decisions matter.