Rabobank recently announced the expansion of its food and agriculture innovation team in North America with the appointment of Anne Greven as the global co-head of F&A Innovation. We caught up with her and head of Terra Eline Boot to find out more about the platform.
Welcome to MALI, January 4, 5 & 6, 2019
– Success stories celebration
– Incubation academy for 3,000 young and female Startups
– Bitikini Climate & Impact Venture Capital launch
– Conference: What investment for African Startups?
Innova Memphis, a Tennessee-based venture firm, has announced the winner of its first $100,000 Row Crop Challenge powered by AgLaunch as part of the Farm Journal Expo last week. After pitching in the final four, selected from a group of national applicants, Kopper Kutter was voted by a panel of farmers as the lucky inaugural winner.
Alltech does not take any equity from the startups and instead focuses on helping them with their business development and route to market, a big challenge for agtech startups. Deadline to apply is December 31, 2018.
This will be the first time National Pork Board has dedicated resources to focus on new innovation, including the creation of a new job role internally.
“I think the whole business model of just make more, sell more is broken; that’s not going to be a sustainable business model," says Karin Schofield at Sprout Accelerator.
Food System 6 is a non-profit food-ag accelerator working to stimulate food system change by surfacing, supporting and scaling innovators and entrepreneurs who are transforming the way food is grown, produced, and distributed.
“Our networks are so tied in that in that it’s easy for us to go to our corporates and partners and ask them what they are looking for,” says Sprout Accelerator business strategy advisor Stu Bradbury.
Maersk is accepting applications for the second edition of its FoodTrack accelerator program, which will place an added emphasis on connecting startups to relevant partners and experts in the company.
The Yield Lab LATAM will be based in Buenos Aires and will take on six startups in total for the first cohort. Each startup receives up to $100,000 in capital for varying amounts of equity.
From a total 310 applications, of which they evaluated 188, startups from 10 different countries operating across the food chain were selected to join the program next month.
The 2018 competition (The TFF Challenge) will close applications on May 4 after which 10 finalist teams will be selected from thousands of entries from around the world to compete for the chance to win up to $25,000 in cash grants and a trip to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil for the TFF Summit.
The USDA makes multiple impactful rulings while Food System 6 Accelerator chooses a new cohort and BayWa announces an agtech competition in this week's brief.
Amos Peterson is founder and CEO of FarrPro. After realizing that keeping piglets warm is an essential and challenging issue in hog rearing, Peterson, who grew up inventing ways to get out of chores on his family farm in Iowa, invented technology to better manage the heating of farrowing crates for the hog industry.
The Hatch accelerator will start its first cohort this spring and CEO Carsten Krome says the effort is a response to the holes he has seen in the current ecosystem for aquaculture technology startups.
2017 was a year of extremes in agrifood tech investing. Large deals pushed the total investment volume up to post an encouraging 29% growth, but deal count fell by 17% to 949, with the most dramatic contraction at the crucial seed stage.
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.
