Wei-Chi Lee still remembers a conversation he had with one farmer he contacted in the early phases of PHNXX's development.
"This farmer said to me, 'I can't go green if it puts me in the red'," the co-founder and chief operating officer of the Melbourne-headquartered company told AAP.
"That's been our guiding light."
Farmers avoid an upfront financial hit by accessing finance for the company's modular, quick-to-install solar and storage systems designed for rural and remote environments.
"All they're doing is they're taking what they're already paying for energy from the grid or from diesel, and they're shifting that across to a monthly repayment for this system," Mr Lee explained.
Power bill savings of about five per cent to 10 per cent are promised from day one and even bigger benefits once the system is paid off in seven to 10 years.
"For a small dairy farmer, once it's paid off, it's saving him $25,000 to $35,000 per year in energy costs."
PHNXX's agriculture customers include a dairy farm in Colac, Victoria, and a vertical farming operation in Singapore.
The solar provider was one of many entrepreneurs pitching their climate solutions to the agriculture sector at the AgriFutures Australia's evokeAG event in Melbourne on Tuesday and Wednesday.
International attendees included Suneet Shivaprasad, co-founder and chief technology officer of UK-based hemp technology company Rare Earth Global expanding into the Australian market.
Hemp is a highly versatile plant with promising sustainability credentials, consuming less water, fertilisers and pesticides than other crops and sequestering more carbon than trees as it grows.
Mr Shivaprasad's business is focused on three bottlenecks holding hemp back from flourishing into a major global commodity; farming, processing and customer scale.
Aquaculture and construction have been identified as two promising bulk markets for hemp, and the company has since developed a seed protein for salmon that outperforms many competing products on nutrition and effectiveness, including soy.
"To top it all off, it had the lowest carbon footprint of any of the established and most other novel ingredients we looked at," he told AAP.
The discovery has opened up a lucrative customer base for hemp seed, but markets for the stalk material - a part of the plant found to be an effective carbon sink - were still underdeveloped.
This prompted the company to develop a new process to add the stalk material into mainstream structural concrete for use in "just about anything".
"We've ended up with two massive volume markets that initially we think solved the customer side."
Rare Earth Global is also working to improve farming operations, with Mr Shivaprasad describing hemp as a crop that is "easy to grow, but hard to grow well".
It has now forged a partnership with a major Australian farming co-operative to provide soil management and farming procedures support to help boost crop yields and quality.
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