AgriTech Speakers Panel
Our annual AgriTech Conference returns this year as fully online event. Join us on 3rd March 9am - 2:30pm
Keynote Speaker: Aidan Connolly
Aidan is President of AgriTech Capital, a resource for new and established companies working at the interface of agriculture and technology. AgriTech Capital has aided governments, fortune 500 food companies and large agri-businesses on their AgTech strategy.
Prior to this, Aidan held the position of CIO at Alltech. With 30 years of experience in strategic analysis and planning, Aidan adds the innovative thinking and capital investment needed to go from possibility to reality. He has a strategic understanding of the marketplace and the regulatory parameters that set the environment.
Aidan has worked in over 100 countries and speaks five languages. He has worked in political associations, with state and national governments in the US, China, Europe and Brazil, international organizations such as the European Union and the United Nations. Aidan also contributes to a wide range of publications in agriculture and business, including Forbes.
Since January 2019, Aidan is also CEO of Cainthus, a computer vision and artificial intelligence company specialised in monitoring.
Barbara Bray MBE MSc, FIFST, RNutr
Barbara is a food safety consultant and Registered Nutritionist driving and delivering food safety in food supply chains and developing nutrition strategy for businesses. Her latest initiative is the Healthy and Sustainable Food platform created with two fellow consultants Jacqui Green and Mark Driscoll. It brings together people from sectors including finance, food industry, health, agriculture, pharma and education to collaborate on solutions for sustainable nutrition. In conjunction with Beanstalk Global, 3 broadcasts have been made this year about healthy and sustainable food.
In 2017, Barbara was awarded a Nuffield Farming Scholarship and travelled on Global Focus programme to Singapore, Indonesia, Japan, Israel, UK and USA to study international food and farming systems. Her Nuffield Farming project on ‘Vegetable Production For Specific Nutritional Need’ looked at international food policies and private initiatives to promote consumption of vegetables which benefit our health. She was awarded an MBE in 2019 for services to food and nutrition.
A professional speaker, Barbara speaks at food and agriculture events including debates at the UN Committee for Food Security in Rome on Nutrition and gave a TEDx talk on “Diet, diversity and the Future of Food” in February 2020.
John Garvey
John is CEO of FarmHedge, a technology company that works with more than forty companies across Europe and the UK. FarmHedge helps agri-companies and cooperatives communicate and trade with farmers. FarmHedge is building a white-label app for a UK animal feed company that will provide its customers with a mobile feed ordering app (UK) and recently launched a B2B seed trading system for the CEE Region.
Upcoming projects include a large client in Romania that is seeking to digitalise their business - selling farm inputs and buying crops from farmers. John's family are beef farmers from County Clare. He has a PhD in Finance and prior to founding FarmHedge he published more than twenty academic papers in economics, finance, and risk management.
Jack Crotty
Jack began his career with The Rocket Man which was a plant-based fast-food company that trades in the Cork County. The Rocket Man continues to trade today.
NeighbourFood was created by Jack in 2018 from the experience of seeing shoppers to farmers markets decline although markets were growing in popularity. Jack believed that the shopping experience of the farmers market was just too slow and saw an opportunity for technology to streamline the experience for both buyers and sellers while creating a digital hub for small-scale food producers to be assisted in reaching a market.
NeighbourFood currently trades with 64 locations live across Ireland and the UK.
Jack lives in Northern Italy with his family.
Micheal McInerney
Micheal McInerney is the CEO and Co-Founder of StrongBó Agritech Limited. An experienced leader with a demonstrated history of working in various tech industries, Micheal is driven to apply technology, IoT, and Machine Learning to help farmers increase their economic efficiency, reduce the associated environmental impact while improving transparency within the beef supply chain.
Dr. Sara Morrissey Tucker
Dr. Sara Morrissey Tucker is the Centre Manager for the AgriTech Centre of Excellence (ACE) at Munster Technological University - Kerry. ACE is a new andciting
approach to AgriTech sectoral learning, development and research. ACE uses immersive learning technologies such as e-learning and virtual reality platforms to deliver excellence in learning and development for the AgriTech sector. Industry-led, ACE works to enhance the capabilities of Ireland's AgriTech companies, enabling them to expand their reach and global ambition.
Sara has a BSc. (Hons) in Applied Computational Linguistics from Dublin City University. Passionate about research and assistive technology, Sara was awarded joint research and industry funding from IRCSET and IBM to undertake a PhD in Computing on Sign Language Machine Translation in the prestigious Machine Translation research group in Dublin City University. She followed this with a post-doctoral researcher position in the SFI-funded Centre for Next Generation Localisation (now ADAPT Research Centre).
Sara is driven by projects with clear, practical applications and working with and for people to ensure the best and most effective user-experience.
Dr Fiona Brennan, Teagasc
Dr Fiona Brennan is a research scientist within Teagasc (The Irish Agriculture and Food Development Authority) where she is the director of the 
Soil and Environmental Microbiology research group and leads the Soil Microbiome programme. She also holds an adjunct lecturer position in the National University of Ireland, Galway (NUI Galway). She completed a BSc in Environmental Biology (University College Dublin) and a PhD in Microbiology (NUI Galway) prior to holding postdoctoral research positions within Teagasc and INRA (The French National Institute for Agricultural Research). Previous to her current appointment she was a lecturer in Microbiology in NUI Galway and a research scientist in the James Hutton Institute, Scotland. The key focus of her research team is assessing the impact of agricultural practice on soil health, microbial-soil-plant interactions and microbial functioning, particularly with respect to the role of functional microbial communities in soil biogeochemical cycles, greenhouse gas emissions and plant health
Ellen Ní Chléirigh
Senior Commercialisation Specialist at Enterprise Ireland driving the commercialisation of state-funded science in Ireland to build the next generation of agri-food
spin-out companies or license opportunities from research. Ellen has been entrepreneur, worked for a large multinational company and now seeks to build new companies from Irish research in Agri-Food. She is passionate about technology enabling the transition to a more sustainable food system.
Geoff Dooley, Consultant
Stephen Fagan, MooCall
Conor Mulhall, The Little Milk Company
Kevin Murphy, EuroJet
