Ag-tech Industries owner Vernon Suckling wins Golden Standard Award

A design to improve quad-bike safety based on the Roman arc principle has won the Golden Standard Award in the Fieldays Innovation Competition.

Ag-tech Industries owner Vernon Suckling, from Dargaville, played down his achievement as he competed against 65 other innovations with his idea of a safety arc linked to ATV quad-bikes called the Lifeguard ATV roll frame.

“I guess it would be a great help for advertising and publicity for it. I don’t like publicity I’d rather just keep out of the limelight, keep out of sight.”

Suckling’s innovation of an arc attached to an ATV quad-bike would prevent serious injury in the case of an accident and has received strong support from ACC and Landcorp.

The concept of the Lifeguard eventuated from a conversation Mr Suckling had with someone based on the Roman arc principle and he wanted to develop the idea further.

“I made a little prototype, a very rough one, to prove to myself whether or not it would work. It actually did work quite well…and then developed from there myself.

“I got up to about number seven (prototype) now, just improving them and refining them each time and it’s pretty well ready to start production of them now.”

From here, Suckling said that preparations for final testing would be done to make sure the product is up to international standards and begin production.

Fieldays Innovation committee member Tony Smith said the judges were impressed with the safety aspect of Suckling’s product and felt it had a lot of potential to succeed overseas.

“It’s a nice clever design that is likely to go beyond and actually succeed and grow.

“It would be good for New Zealand agriculture because it’s likely to get out there and be there. So it’s a solution that will get out and about and it’s got an international possibility- it could easily go international.”Smith was pleased with the quality of entrants in this years competition and admired the hard work gone into their innovations.

“Everyone has actually got pretty good quality stuff, I’m quite impressed with it all. A lot of work goes into things and some people actually have a lot of clever ideas. The quality is definitely there.”

For his achievement, Suckling will receive $5000 to assist with launching his product along with a trophy and certificate.