Setting out on a new direction in life can be daunting, entrepreneur Sam Duncan today told students freshly arrived at UNE, but only on new paths will they find new experiences.
Mr Duncan, who delivered the keynote address at UNE’s Orientation Week commencement ceremony, has had some experience of fresh starts.
He too has taken the leap from school and into the wider world, which in his case was initially the Royal Australian Air Force, where over 12 years he specialised in logistics and rose to the rank of Squadron Leader.
On leaving the RAAF, he took another leap that had its origins in his Air Force experiences.
Image: Sam Duncan welcomes students at UNE's 2023 Commencement Ceremony.
On a posting to South Sudan, a new country and one subject to recurrent conflict, Mr Duncan found himself struck by the contrast between the fertility of the region’s soils and the intractable poverty of its people.
There, and in another posting the Middle East, he also saw how climate change-driven droughts drove people off the land and into conflict.
“Yet back in Australia, a world-class agriculture sector has been built on the continent with the world’s poorest arable soils,” Mr Duncan observes.
“It got me thinking about how soils and their productivity can drive both prosperity and conflict.”
One of the most important variables in soils is the amount of carbon they contain. Some farming techniques lead to losses of soil carbon, others lead to gains – but farmers need to understand whether they are losing or gaining carbon before they can do anything about it.
Soils also contain more carbon than all the world’s plant biomass. If agricultural practices were able to increase the amount of soil carbon – and in doing so, increase productivity – the world might be able to go some way towards mitigating climate change.
This train of thought led Mr Duncan to the idea of greatly simplifying soil testing for farmers and other land managers.
He held onto that idea when he left the RAAF, which meant leaving its security and the identity he had forged there, and in 2018 followed his wife to her new position as a UNE academic in Armidale. They lived for a while in an AirBNB rental. Mr Duncan’s capital was a laptop on the dining room table, and his ideas about better soil testing.
It wasn’t much to start a new life with, and Mr Duncan felt the fearsome depths of the chasm.
“To say that I was anxious about what we’d just left behind was an understatement,” he told the Commencement Ceremony. “A week after arriving in Armidale I left the house to go for a run. I thought of all the things I’d just given up, and tried to weigh it up against what the future would hold. The fear of this chasm I’d just leapt into started to set in.”
Chasms have two sides, though. Sustained by a long-held ambition to be an entrepreneur, and by becoming a Founder in UNE’s SRI along with others taking similar leaps of faith in the dreams, Mr Duncan soon found his ambition taking on substance.
In 2019 he and co-founder (and fellow Air Force Officer) Shahriar Jamshidi formed FarmLab, which Mr Duncan describes as something like an Uber for soil testing.
Soils are complex, and soil testing and interpreting the results can be complex too. FarmLab works with service providers to coordinate all the moving parts of soil testing – gathering soil samples, delivery to labs, testing and interpretation of results – in a way that minimises friction for farmers and provides them with something they can act on.
In late 2022, FarmLab was named as a partner in an $8.4 million Federal project to assess soil carbon levels across a broad swathe of Australian agriculture. The business, which now has 10 employees and is hiring more, will coordinate 20,000 soil carbon tests in 18 months.
The evolution of FarmLab is far from over, but it is a real business doing the work it was built to do. It is a long way from Mr Duncan’s first weeks in Armidale, alone with his laptop and ideas and doubts.
“The one piece of advice I have for you here as you begin this degree is to keep an open mind,” he told students at the Commencement Ceremony.
“Look for the opportunities that exist, take in all the new experiences you can. Leap into new experiences with your eyes open and arms out, and you’ll quickly find you’ve landed on the other side.”
FarmLab was built within UNE’s SMART Region Incubator, a connected community of founders and innovators who share a deep commitment to seeing new and existing enterprises flourish in the New England North West region of NSW.
The SRI has to date hosted 64 startups on behalf of 70 business founders.
In 2022 the SRI:
- Brought 6.2 million investment into the region through its startups;
- Created 146 jobs, and;
- Built six research partnerships.
