Ruminati
Ruminati Platform
- Product Strategy and Development
- UI/UX Design
- Testing Validation
- Commercial Advice
Ruminati is a new climate solution tool built by farmers, for farmers. It gives producers the power to quickly calculate their emissions data on a single platform, and share it with organisations across the supply chain. Working closely with founders and cattle farmers Will Onus and Bobby Miller, we’re spearheading a sustainable agricultural movement to propel Australia towards Net Zero.
Problem to solve
As the world moves toward climate neutrality, the government has placed pressure on farmers to reduce their emissions. But the path to Net Zero in agriculture is ambiguous, and the inability to accurately calculate environmental impact across the supply chain leaves businesses disconnected in their efforts.
Bold idea
Australia’s simplest and most intuitive tool to measure, reduce, and report environmental impact across the supply chain — allowing businesses servicing it to support climate-friendly producers.
"Working with Nakatomi has supercharged our progress and impact without a doubt. Our business is the first in this category so we had to conceptualise a product and service in the absence of comparables and in a changing landscape. Nakatomi took our ideas, anecdotes, beliefs and hypotheses and turned them into a great product."
Bobby Miller
Farmer and Founder
How we got there
Shaping the business.
There are many effective solutions to mitigate climate issues in farming, from upgrading equipment to revegetation. Australia’s emissions reduction strategies are viable and admirable, and have been adopted by many producers across the country.
But the real challenge quickly became apparent: producers needed a way to calculate emissions in the first place so they could actually measure the impact of their efforts. And the lack of transparency in the supply chain meant there was no way to identify, encourage, or incentivise businesses to improve their practices.
To make a real difference, we needed to demonstrate and educate farmers on the size of the problem, and provide those within and servicing the supply chain with total visibility of their carbon footprint.
Crafting an instant product-market fit.
Australia’s ambitious path to Net Zero by 2050 included emissions reduction targets by 2035. As a major source of greenhouse gas emissions, the agricultural sector faced pressure to become climate-neutral, faster.
The problem was, many emissions-reducing technologies in farming are less developed than alternatives available to other sectors, like energy or transportation. One of the major tools farmers are encouraged to use is a calculator to help understand the emissions and carbon footprint of an enterprise. An Excel-based system called the Greenhouse Accounting Frameworks (GAF) has been the default for many farmers, but this incredibly complex and convoluted spreadsheet takes months to fill out, and sometimes requires external help.
So Ruminati made it their mission to help farmers like themselves by creating a tool that cuts down this process to just thirty minutes. Together, we built software that utilises more intelligent formulas and data sources, and paired it with a user-friendly interface.
Designing a platform especially for farmers.
The first version of Ruminati proved that anyone can baseline their farm and feedlot in thirty minutes. The interface design was an interesting challenge in itself, as we couldn’t necessarily rely on standard best practices. Our target users are time-poor and less tech-savvy, so we spent most of our time working and testing specific features with a range of farmers in NSW — ensuring that it’s incredibly frictionless for everyone.
Our efforts worked, and the novelty and speed at which they can create an emissions report meant we immediately gained traction from other farmers and the industry. Ruminati was a vast improvement from the confusing spreadsheets supplied by government agencies.
This marked the moment when Nakatomi opted to invest in the company.
Now that farmers could track their footprint, the next logical step was to integrate the Reduction Planner, an intelligent service that provides tailored advice for each farm. After accurately baselining their farm, farmers can model the impact of methane and CO2-e abatement options, set and measure against individual emissions reduction targets, and create plans to improve their impact.
Transparency for all.
As interest continued to surge, it was clear that this emissions data was not only valuable to businesses within the supply chain, but also to those in service of it. This led to the creation of Ruminati VISION, a customisable dashboard for organisations to monitor and compare detailed agricultural emissions data of their customers, suppliers and partners.
From McDonald’s to Commonwealth Bank, many Australian businesses are now on their journey to creating measurable pathways to meet climate goals through Ruminati.
