Best of 2018: AgFunder’s Top 3 Guest Articles

The AgFunder Network grew to nearly 60,000 in 2018 as a combination of entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, multinational corporate executives, government officials, institutional investors and more continue to turn their attention towards the need for innovation in food and agriculture.

We want to make the most of the expertise in our network and are grateful that some of these members contribute guest articles to share their insights with our readers.

In 2018 we had over 40 guest writers contribute – here’s a look at the top 3 best read.

Interested in sharing your views on the food and agriculture sector with our audience? Get in touch [email protected].

How Beer Revolutionized Math — and Just Might Save Humanity 

Joseph Byrum wrote another guest post favorite in 2018 by looking at how Irish beer making Guinness used statistics to save costs and ultimately lay the groundwork for data analytics in the sector. This catchy headline picked up lots of interest on social media from agrifood tech entrepreneurs as well as beer enthusiasts and more! Joe enjoys the odd pint of Guinness but has no association with the company otherwise.

Joe is a geneticist, chief data scientist at Principal Financial Group and a regular contributor to AgFunderNews. He also used to work at Syngenta as a senior R&D and strategic marketing executive in Life Sciences – Global Product Development, Innovation, and Delivery.

You can find more of his writing on AgFunderNews here.

Blockchain is Coming for Agriculture and You Might Not Even Notice

Remi Schmaltz is another regular contributor to AgFunderNews and wrote this piece about Blockchain in August, offering a high-level look at how blockchain can be applied to agriculture. Blockchain was a key buzzword across industries in 2018 as technologists look at how they can improve processes using this distributed and incorruptible ledger. It is early days in agriculture, where the main promise comes for traceability, and we hope that the industry doesn’t get carried away with the hype until the technology has proven its efficacy.

Remi is CEO of Decisive Farming, a Canadian software program for farms offering precision agronomics, data management, crop marketing, and telematics services. He has extensive agriculture knowledge after taking over his family’s ag retail company Dynagra Corp with his brother where he started incubating new technologies in farming resulting in the launch of Decisive Farming in 2011.

You can find more articles from Remi here.

What’s Next for Agtech?

2018 was a big year for the agriculture industry overall as the dust started to settle on the consolidation that’s taken place among the large agribusinesses. DowDuPont created Corteva Agriscience as its agricultural division and Bayer’s acquisition of Monsanto finally completed. Barclay Roger wrote a two-part series for AgFunderNews about how agtech fits into the changing dynamics of the industry. Part one explored the current state of the agricultural economy and described the embrace of data platforms by the major players. Part two was the third best read guest post, looking at the future for agtech.

Barclay is head of business development at Ceres Imaging, the remote sensing startup.