Good AgTech Doesn't Happen in Isolation: Inside the Agora-Scopious Partnership
Good AgTech doesn't happen in isolation. It takes the right technology, the right people, and the right partners in the room, and that's exactly what's behind one of Terravest's most important technology relationships.
Agora, Terravest's real-time telemetry business, has spent the past two years building its vat monitoring platform alongside Scopious IoT — a New Zealand IoT specialist that's quietly become one of the most important names behind the scenes of Kiwi AgTech. The partnership recently earned recognition on a global stage, and it's worth understanding why it works.
Why Agora Needed a Technology Partner
Real-time vat monitoring sounds simple in principle: put sensors on a vat, send the data somewhere useful, alert the farmer when something's wrong. In practice, building that reliably, at scale, across thousands of New Zealand farms with patchy rural connectivity, is a genuinely hard technical problem.
Agora needed on-farm technology that was cost-effective, transparent, resilient, and simple enough for any farmer to use without technical hand-holding. That meant getting the hardware, connectivity, and platform capability right from day one, not something Agora needed to build entirely from scratch.
What Scopious Brings to the Table
Scopious IoT, through its sister company Go Wireless NZ, brought an established technology partnership with Milesight and deep experience deploying LoRaWAN, a long-range, low-power wireless technology built specifically for rural and remote conditions, exactly the environment New Zealand dairy farms operate in.
Together, Agora and Scopious built a system where:
● Radar-based sensors track vat fill levels in real time
● Temperature sensors monitor both incoming milk and internal vat temperature
● Smart current transformers confirm agitators are cycling correctly
● A LoRaWAN gateway securely carries all of that data across the farm, even in areas with limited connectivity
● Smart alarms flag agitator faults, temperature peaks, and cycle issues the moment they happen — not the next morning
The result is a system farmers can deploy with minimal training, scale across multiple vats or sites, and manage entirely remotely.
Recognised on a Global Stage
This partnership didn't just produce a good product — it won an award for it. The Agora–Scopious vat monitoring solution took out the IoT Award at the Milesight IoT 2025 Impact Awards, recognised globally among IoT deployments across every industry, not just agriculture.
It's a meaningful marker. Being recognised at that level confirms what Terravest has believed from the start: that world-class AgTech doesn't require reinventing the wheel from zero. It requires knowing which parts to build in-house, and which partnerships will get farmers better technology, faster.
Why Partnerships Like This Matter for Terravest
Agora is growing fast as part of the Terravest group, and moments like this are a reminder that strong technology partnerships are just as critical to that growth as the technology itself.
Having partners who genuinely understand both the technical challenge and the practical, on-the-ground realities of scaling AgTech across the dairy sector, rural connectivity, seasonal pressure, farmers who need things to just work, makes all the difference. It's the difference between a system that looks good in a pitch deck and one that actually holds up on a working farm through a wet, muddy calving season.
What's Next
Building on the success of the vat monitoring rollout, Agora and Scopious are continuing to expand what the platform can do — extending monitoring across more farms, integrating with existing farm management systems, and exploring predictive analytics that could flag equipment issues before they even happen.
For Terravest, it's a clear example of what “teat to tank” actually looks like in practice: hygiene, refrigeration, and data, backed by the right partners at every step.
Learn More
Want to see how Agora's real-time vat monitoring, built on this partnership, could work on your farm? Get in touch with the Terravest team to find out more. You can also read the full Scopious case study on the technology behind the award.
Kip Bodle
Founder & CEO, Terravest
Kip writes on dairy systems, infrastructure and the future of milk integrity in New Zealand.