Opinion: Tiny tech now dominant in agriculture

A giant hole was punched through the berm around the dam on the Maitland River in Gorrie during a flood a few years ago. 

I grew up on my family’s farm near Gorrie and it’s strange to see the whole dam now gone as the decision was made to remove it instead of rebuild it.

At the same time the husk of the old wooden mill that was once powered by the millrace around the dam was also demolished, closing a phase of history that was a revolution in food production.

It allowed farmers to have their grain milled locally and dramatically changed markets.

That revolution required the damming of rivers and the construction of large, heavy and dangerous machinery.

That’s in large contrast to the technologies of companies now working to change agriculture. The Agri Tech Venture Forum in Toronto brought together agriculture startups, venture capital funders, researchers and other interested parties.

The technologies pitched to change the future of agriculture are now much tinier than damming a river and building a large mill with serious machinery. In fact, some of the molecules and technologies are so small we can’t see them.

Until recently, technologies that influenced farming and food were large and involved ever-larger power plants to make them efficient.

Now, billions of dollars are being bet on new technologies driven by information – digitized for the potential of aggregation for better decision making, or for the dramatic improvement in processes.

I think the transformative nature of data in agriculture is being oversold, but I have no doubt that incrementally, data tools will be as important to the way we farm as the 9/16s wrench.

Companies that were early to the data game are struggling to maintain customers and market value because investors need to see continued growth. 

Farmer’s Edge, an agriculture digital tools company, recently announced a reduction in acres covered by its tools, resulting in the resignation of its founder and CEO Wade Barnes and the appointment of new leadership. The battlefield is immense for these companies as they aim to have their tools used on hundreds of millions of acres.

No one has found the sweet spot yet in farmer data delivery. Remember, Apple wasn’t first to the music player or cell phone market, but they were the ones who defined what the consumer actually wanted.

At the recent Agri Tech Venture Forum, there were several companies from Canada and other parts of the world that pitched to venture capital companies in hopes of gaining interest and raise their profile.

Clean Seed Capital was the only company that dealt in traditional agriculture technology, although it uses language like planting tech and calls its seeder/planter with 300 different control points “the world’s largest printer”.

Others are focused on using digital technology to improve processes, such as managing indoor agriculture with Elevated Signals, data that impacts marketing with Combyne, livestock disease outbreaks with Farm Health Guardian, spray and equipment data with Intelliculture, and dairy cow internal information with Cattle Scan.

There were also companies with biological breakthroughs including RNA technology with Greenlight Biosciences, derivatives of sweet cherries which improve nitrogen efficiency in animals from Psigryph, and Boost Biomes, which produces microbial products while accounting for the complexity of soil biomes.

Ag tech has been one of the hottest investment areas in the past few years. According to AgFunder, $18.9 billion was invested as venture capital in 2021 in agriculture technology worldwide. Throw in food technology and some giant investments in grocery technology in China and that number balloons to $51.7 billion.

The expectation is that the general decline in the stock market will mean less money available to be invested in agriculture in the coming year or so.

But there will continue to be a lot of interest and the money will flow to tiny data bytes and nanotech biology as agriculture continues to evolve.