Christine R. Gould is the founder and CEO at GIGA Futures, which works with food and ag companies on strategy, partnerships, and market positioning.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of AgFunderNews.
“This industry is dead. I’m out.”
An ag biotech founder I’ve admired for years said this to me over a drink in Davos last month. They had just come from the J.P. Morgan Biotech conference in San Francisco, and the culture shock was real.
“In other parts of biotech, founders get money to grow. They build teams. They actually get to build their product. I spend all of my time raising measly amounts from investors who don’t really understand what we’re doing and an industry that doesn’t understand the potential we have.”
They’re exactly right.
I’ve spent the last decade working with some of the world’s smartest, most mission‑driven entrepreneurs. Right now, many of them are over it. They can’t get investment that matches their vision, or prove their solution past pilot phases. There are almost no scale‑up success stories they can point to as proof that the pain is worth it. Some are giving up. Others are dying a slow death by a thousand cuts. The rest are trimming their ambition to fit neatly into “safe” exit pathways with incumbents who don’t actually want to be disrupted.
We’re underplaying our industry’s potential and exhausting the talent that is supposed to be feeding the future. Everywhere I look in agriculture and food, innovation feels stuck. The problem is: that’s by design.
A culture of resignation
In food and ag, incumbent companies hold the keys. They own the distribution channels, the regulatory muscle, and the customer relationships. If you want to scale, you have to go through them. Inside that reality, most corporations are behaving exactly as their incentives tell them to: protect the core business, avoid surprises, outsource risk.
When Leaps by Bayer released its Ag Playbook a couple of years ago, it was framed as a way to help startups and investors understand the long, expensive road to market for a disruptive technology space, biological inputs. On one level, it is genuinely helpful: it lays out the phases, costs, and hurdles that many innovators underestimate. But read it as a founder and the underlying message is clear: “this is our game, so follow our rules.” It’s a manual for fitting into the system we already have, not a blueprint for building the system we actually need
One startup I worked with put it bluntly: “In this industry, our only path forward is to be acquired by an incumbent. Realistically, that means our tech will either be slowed down or shut down.”
That’s not a culture of innovation. That is a culture of resignation.
On the capital side, the pattern is similar. When FMC shut down its CVC arm, FMC Ventures, in early 2025, it signaled that even one of the more forward‑leaning strategics was retreating back to the core. Other CVCs responded by narrowing their aperture to “adjacent and obvious.” The irony is that since shuttering its innovation arm, FMC has been squeezed by generic competition on its flagship products and has struggled to point to a convincing next wave.
Generalist VCs, already nervous about ag exits, take their cue from the industry players and slide toward later, safer bets. None of this is irrational. But taken together, it drains risk capital out of the very spaces where the next generation of solutions has to be built.
The same old game
Government funding and policy aren’t filling the gap. This past July, I joined the business delegation at a major UN food‑systems gathering in Addis Ababa. We spent months organizing an investment “deal room” with hand‑selected startups and SMEs from around the world who needed funding and partners to deliver on the very commitments governments keep announcing. Not a single investor or government leader came to that room.
Publicly, leaders talk about urgency and transformation. Privately, the focus is on the next summit, the next white paper, the next declaration. The work is optimized for moments on stage, not for pulling real innovations through the system. Even when the entrepreneurs are in the same building, the machinery that could connect them to capital and contracts doesn’t engage.
It’s hard to admit, but farmers are also not passive victims in this story. Under thin margins and volatile prices, they do what the system incentivizes them to do: invest in the cheapest production system that keeps them alive this season, even if it erodes resilience over the next. When millions of decisions tilt toward “cheap now,” they are sending a clear signal up the chain, leading to markets and companies organizing themselves around that model.
From a founder’s point of view, it all adds up to the same experience: an industry that says it wants change, but keeps everyone locked into playing the same old game.
If we were serious about the future
Before working in agrifood innovation, I studied security and defense economics. One core lesson from that world is simple: serious systems plan for bad futures, not just good ones. Militaries invest in redundant systems, simulation, intelligence, and scenario planning so they can absorb surprises and come out smarter on the other side. Volatility is treated as a reason to add capabilities, not cut them.
Agriculture, for the most part, doesn’t operate this way.
We behave as if our current model of the world – synthetic chemistry, commodity exports, abundant fossil energy, relatively stable trading systems – will hold, perhaps with some ESG tweaks around the edges. When black swans like Covid‑19, or grey swans like GLP‑1 drugs, show up, we treat them as anomalies rather than as evidence that the game board itself is shifting. We respond by trimming risk, not by upgrading the system’s ability to adapt.
Meanwhile, the backdrop is getting more turbulent: more climate volatility, more geopolitical tension, more digital rewiring of markets, more consumer pressure, more regulations, more technologies. The status quo we’re relying on is already structurally unstable. What are we doing to prepare?
Anyone who has ever grown food understands inputs. If you don’t invest in the right seed, understand your soil or manage water well, you can’t be surprised when the harvest disappoints. The outcome is baked into the set‑up.
Right now, the way we are setting up agriculture practically guarantees fragility. We are cutting back on the very inputs that would make our innovation systems stronger under stress. Funding is far below its peak, and what remains is largely pointed at defending existing product lines, not building new ones. On a quarterly P&L, that looks prudent. At a macro level, it means we are starving the entrepreneurs, capabilities, and solutions that could become tomorrow’s core business.
Resilience is a buzzword in sustainability circles. But it’s not enough. If we were designing for an uncertain century instead of the last one, we’d be investing in antifragility. Coined by Nassim Taleb, antifragile systems don’t merely absorb shocks or bounce back from them; they use uncertainty and volatility to improve. In agriculture, this is the opportunity we’re sleeping on.
What antifragile agriculture would actually fund
An antifragile innovation strategy would be thinking about multiple futures, not only the next quarter. It would build the support structures that make the whole system smarter and more adaptive to any pressure it is under. That means, at minimum, four kinds of investment:
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- Engines of new growth, not just efficiency: Treat uncertainty as a mandate to explore new revenue lines in under‑served crops, regions, and business models, instead of only squeezing more margin from existing ones. That requires teams whose brief is to find new value, not just cut costs.
- Portfolios instead of single bets: Shift from asking, “Will this one product be a global blockbuster?” to asking, “Does this portfolio of diverse, context‑specific solutions cover enough of our risk and opportunity space?” Some assets will fail; that is the point; learning and optionality are part of the return.
- Scaling infrastructure instead of endless pilots: Invest in connective tissue: shared trial networks, living labs, consortiums, market‑entry programs, regulatory sandboxes, and new distribution partnerships that help good ideas move from 10 farms to 10,000, fast.
- Systems to recycle what we usually throw away: Build “circular innovation” mechanisms to reuse IP, data, teams and relationships from projects that don’t make it, instead of letting them sit as zombie assets. That could mean shared data pools, venture studios or structured second‑life programs that deliberately recombine what has been learned.
Antifragile agriculture would treat these four things as core architecture, not side projects. It would also use AI in a completely different way to today: not just to squeeze a bit more efficiency out of the old game, but to stitch these pieces together – spotting where hidden problems and opportunities lie, and helping capital, capabilities, and attention move there faster and with more confidence.
The design choices others have already made
We haven’t chosen to build – or wire – the food system for antifragility, at least not yet. But there are examples from other companies and sectors that provide ideas and blueprints we can steal from:
- From 2018 to 2022, AB InBev ran a global disruptive growth engine, ZX Ventures as a separate, well‑resourced organization. ZX had its own C-suite leader, budget, and decision rights, explicitly mandated to build “what’s next” – including bets that could cannibalize its core beer business.
- Amazon gave Amazon Web Services room to grow as a distinct business that leveraged internal capabilities but wasn’t constrained by the original retail model. It now underpins the company’s profits.
- Cisco’s Hyperinnovation Living Labs (CHILL) used 48-hour “living labs,” to convene senior leaders from its large customers and partners to prototype solutions around shared industry challenges (supply chain, retail, health, future of work, etc.) with the explicit goal of leaving with validated concepts, partnership agreements, and sometimes even new ventures and patentable IP.
Inside Syngenta, my last role was to build and lead a function called Next Generation Innovation. Our job was to look beyond the core product pipeline and find people and technologies that could shape the next curve – then plug them into investment, business development, or sustainability agendas instead of letting them sit at the edges.
We also helped launch one of the first truly open innovation platforms in food and ag, Thought For Food, designed not just to solve Syngenta’s brief but to explore the solution space broadly and openly – under the simple admission that “we don’t know what we don’t know.”
These examples represent deliberate, structural commitments to disruptive growth, not just incremental innovation.
So here’s the question for agriculture: where is our ZX? Where is our AWS? Where is our version of those shared living labs? Where are the structures – inside companies, across coalitions, and in policy – that are explicitly mandated to build the businesses and models that can drive future growth and, one day, make today’s core business look small and outdated? That’s the Ag Playbook we need to be writing!
Better success stories
If we want antifragile agriculture, we have to change what we celebrate too. Right now, most of the praise still goes to the biggest rounds, the safest partnerships, the neatest fit with the existing value chain.
The stories that would really move this sector are different. They sound like: “We open-sourced this discovery and the whole category shifted,” “Five unlikely partners created a market that didn’t exist three years ago,” “We turned three failed projects into one business that now pays for itself.”
When those are the examples people hear on stages and in boardrooms, it sends a clear signal: this is a field that backs courage, learns in public, and treats intelligent risk taking as the job, not the exception. That is the narrative that will keep our talents motivated and inspired and is the ground an antifragile agriculture can actually grow from.
The choice in front of us
At this point, the choice isn’t between “innovation” and business as usual. It’s between designing a system that gets weaker every time it’s hit, and one that gets sharper and more capable.
On one side is the path we know too well: treat every shock as a reason to cut growth budgets, demand “price parity on day one,” let zombie IP and burned‑out founders pile up, and hope the old model holds a bit longer. That path ends in a sector that feels tired, brittle, defensive, and permanently behind the curve.
On the other side is a deliberate decision to build for a volatile century. This means ringfencing engines of new growth, developing real scaling infrastructure, mechanisms that turn failure into feedstock, and wiring that helps us see stress early and move money, talent, and attention to where they can do the most good. That is what antifragility looks like in practice.
No one is going to make that shift by accident. It takes boards that are willing to be measured on the businesses they build beyond the core, executives who are prepared to let some of today’s products be cannibalized, and investors who are honest about whether their portfolios are underwriting fragility or future options.
The work I do now is about helping visionary leaders design and run those antifragile architectures in the real world, with all the constraints and politics that come with them.
If you recognize your organization anywhere in this piece – stuck in the old game, talking about transformation while optimizing for safety – then your next move is simple: pick one place to start building the new architecture, and let’s make it real.
