She's the founder and chief executive of a ground-breaking company which uses maggots to process food waste. The maggots eat the food which humans throw out. The maggots then get turned into feed for cattle, hens and fish, and then the waste the maggots excrete becomes fertiliser. What could be more brilliant than that?

Another great innovation of Olympia Yarger's company Goterra is that the idea is "scalable" and mobile. It can be used for big generators of food waste like a local council or smaller ones like a restaurant. Maggots in containers work in airports, supermarkets, restaurants and anywhere else which has food waste to process. The market is global.

The founder is now on the short list to be Canberra's Citizen of the Year (and, therefore, in the running to be Australian of the Year) - but it's not been easy.

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She first got mud on her boots in Canberra on a family pig and chicken farm on Yamba Lane. She loved it. And when she wasn't at her boarding school in Yass, she would also spend as much time as she could on a fine-wool sheep farm near the town.

"I'd go there at weekends and that was the best life ever," she told the Life on the Land podcast.

"That's all I wanted to do. I loved cold rainy days working. And then you come inside and the house is warm, and then you have food with lots of butter on it."

This was her future, she hoped. It was her ambition. She was a driven young woman with a clear vision.

But pregnancy at the end of her school years prevented it. She did do TAFE courses but the juggling of study and child-rearing was too much. She was too young to manage any of it, she said later. "You don't know who you are. You don't have a strong self when you are 20."

And tragedy struck. Her child died at the age of two-and-a-half so her life was in turmoil. When she talked about it on the podcast, she was in tears.

She wandered, living for a while in Darwin, and then to the United States where fate intervened in the shape of love. She met a US Marine who was on active service in Iraq and Afghanistan - through twelve hard tours.

He proposed to her. She said "yes" providing that at the end of his military career, they came "home" to Canberra.

"Canberra is the most beautiful capital city in the world. It's the only Australian capital with a 360 degree view of agriculture," she said.

And home is where she found her business feet.

She started Goterra in 2016. In a way, it's the fulfillment of her schoolgirl ambitions. It's true it's not traditional farming of pigs, sheep or chooks but it is farming nonetheless - farming maggots (the larvae or hatched eggs of the black soldier fly).

It sounds basic but it's a actually a high-tech marriage of robotics and other cutting-edge technologies. It is the future.

As she told the Australian Financial Review: "This is a biological solution, but it's a technological conversation - using tech to better manage biological solutions. There's something really cool about what we're doing."

Since the company's founding, she's taken on more staff. According to the AFR, the initial grant was $30,000 from the ACT government.

Since then, more outside funding from venture capitalists has been raised.

Wasted food represents a big global problem.

According to the UN's Food and Agricultural Organisation, "17 percent of our food ends up being wasted in retail and by consumers, particularly in households". The FAO reckons that "the food that is lost and wasted could feed 1.26 billion hungry people every year".

Olympia Yarger and her Canberra company are developing machinery and techniques to address that problem.

She told Forbes business magazine: "Growth is steady, it's ongoing - we're going from zero to hero."

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