There is a groundswell of startups and technologies emerging to help smallholders increase efficiencies and hopefully move many from subsistence farming to farming for profit.
Blockchain alone doesn’t make growers more money, but it does provide the technology infrastructure for things like digitization, automation, and tracking, all of which drive farmers’ bottom lines in modern agriculture, writes Remi Schmaltz.
Professor Louise Fresco, the president of Wageningen University & Research and former Assistant Director-General of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) addressed delegates at the AgriVest conference in Tel Aviv last week.
The Bushel mobile app platform integrates into grain elevators’ accounting systems to provide growers access to their contracts, scale tickets, prepays, cash bids, and markets.
A new coalition of agriculture and finance industry players is working together to find new ways to get technology into the hand of smallholders farmers
A rising chorus of investors and stakeholders, along with some farmers, are beginning to spread the message that the health of the soil is just as important as the health of the plants growing in it.
Biologicals startup Inocucor has acquired ATP Nutrition in the opening salvo of a plan to become a “selective consolidator” in the premium crop inputs space.
HarvestPort wants to take over the task of “shopping around” by offering growers unique deals through an agricultural inputs marketplace.
AgNext has created a suite of tools, including hardware and software, to leverage data to improve the efficiency and profitability of farmers and processors.
Farmers Business Network makes an acquisition in Canada while Bayer sells assets to get ready for the big takeover, plus more in this week’s brief.
Though the price of the acquisition was not disclosed, DTN SVP Ed Mattix offered that DTN is a conservative buyer looking to directly profit off of its acquisitions and that there would likely be more to come.
At Asilomar Bio, we’re creating crops that produce more grain using less water and fertilizer. Our team has pioneered a new approach to agriculture, applying
Beta Hatch cultivates mealworms for animal feed using patent-pending equipment, a trade-secret process and unique genetic stock, developed by entomologist and founder Virginia Emery.
AgVend is the latest entrant into a small set of players vying for the so far small community of farmers looking to purchase online – all banking on the expectation that that community will grow.
Bayer and Ginkgo Bioworks announced the partnership in September 2017. The partners jointly invested $100 million in the venture, making the deal the second largest deal from an Ag Biotechnology startup in 2017, according to the AgFunder data.
Though Hummingbird began as a drone-focused precision agriculture company two years ago, it evolved beyond just drones as the team realized that the method of data collection is secondary to the data itself.
Indoor farming startup Bowery is opening a second farm while chef Dan Barber starts selling seeds and JUST creates a product just for Africa, plus more in our weekly brief.
We caught up with Joy Basu ahead of the World Agri-Tech Innovation Summit, to discuss how she approaches impact investing in agriculture at The Rise Fund and how agtech can fit into an impact investing thesis.
Mavrx founder Max Bruner said that the change isn’t necessarily about boosting the registered user count, as one might guess, but more about paving the way for more custom and ‘white label’ requests in the future from a more diverse set of customers.
The New Zealand agtech ecosystem is starting to gain recognition for its innovation well beyond the boundaries of New Zealand.
