Welcome to the intersection of Agriculture, Startups, and AgriFood.
Welcome to the “front door” of my AgTech blog. I am putting this post together to organize the rest of my blog posts so it’s not just a stream of consciousness with no over-arching themes (or at least making that reality a lot less obvious …) This will help me to stay focused on a few big themes, primarily the big trends impacting the AgTech ecosystem and new innovations that are helping to solve some of agriculture’s biggest problems. Hopefully it helps readers see the bigger picture, because they will routinely enter via one of the “side doors” — an individual blog post without all the right context.
A good amount of blog content will focus on Lean Startup principles and how they apply to AgTech. One of the big messages is that every AgTech entrepreneur needs to have an in-depth understanding of the farmer’s problem to effectively develop, sell, and support the solution for farmers. It’s not about knowing every problem the farmer has, it’s about having a deep understanding of the exact problem your solution needs to solve, so that every piece of the product roadmap ties exactly to that problem and only to that problem. It saves startups from building extra “stuff” that doesn’t add any value to solving that problem.
A related problem (aka opportunity) is for AgTech startups to work with farmers to pick the right targets for evaluating AgTech innovations and their impact on the farmer’s business. By choosing farmer-focused targets, AgTech startups can turn a technology evaluation into an economics evaluation, which is a more effective way to sell to farmers. In this blog post, I note that as strawberry harvest robot startups are beginning to change the key evaluation criteria from speed and harvest efficiency to a price per harvest weight for harvest services, the ability to get robots into the field earlier and more often and the farmers get to decide how much harvest to perform with the robot harvesters and how much harvest to perform with labor harvesters.
I tell AgTech startups often that their best friend is a farmer, preferably one who can help test and improve their product. But there’s an equally important potential best friend, and that’s the person who sells AgTech solutions to farmers. This person can get a meeting, a demo, and a test moving quicker than many startups because they have an existing relationship with the farmer that in some cases extends over decades. The startup with a brand new product that is untested and a sales rep that us unknown to the farmer, along with an active fundraising campaign, and no customer testimonials has a difficult task in getting a farmer to sit for an initial meeting. The short version for AgTech startups is that by working with AgTech partners that sell to farmers, they can accelerate time to market and sales results.
My opening post speaks to the intersection of Agriculture, Startups, and AgriFood (aka AgTech). It’s where I’ve spent much of my career, and it is a fascinating intersection to be at, filled with real problems (labor, water, food safety), and real innovations that can have a big impact on farmer productivity to enable farmers to feed a growing population with fewer resources every year.
One of the trends I see is the likely emergence of private equity firms as a larger player in the AgTech space. The over-weighting towards early stage AgTech startups means that mid-stage and later-stage startups will have a harder time fundraising. This creates a great opportunity for PE firms to find some acquisition and investment “value plays.” But in the long term this can be a good thing because wins for PE firms generally mean that copycat PE firms are likely to enter and help lift up the entire AgTech segment.
Another investment trend is that institutional investors are increasingly buying a lot of farmland, and trends in farmland and water values make it clear this trend is likely to continue, and that they will buy (not build) innovation solutions to solve ag’s biggest problems. This has some implications for AgTech startups.
As AgTech startups are building pitches, I see some founders that handle the deck and pitching exercise better than others. Here are a few thoughts on a potential problem area that really doesn’t have to be — how founders can get the TAM slide and narrative done right.
I will be writing a lot of posts that focus on one specific ag problem, with some of the challenges and economics involved. For example, one of the problems that needs to be solved is the food safety problem around field perimeters. Farmers are solving it with traps and people, but it’s an expensive solution and with some innovation farmers would be able to divert some of those funds to solving other problems (and believe me, there are plenty of problem areas that need to be solved in ag these days …)
There are some AgTech unicorns ($1 billion valuation startups). I’ll be writing about some actual unicorns, and about AgTech moonshots that want to be Unicorns. A great example of a moonshot is Blue Ocean Barns, which wants to reduce methane emissions in cattle by feeding them … seaweed.
I will update this narrative as new blog posts get written. I will also add new posts to the chronological list below.
Here’s a list of the blog posts in chronological order (newer posts at the top)
Solving the livestock methane problem with seaweed — moonshot, unicorn, or both? (Nov 6)
Field perimeter food safety is a farmer problem that needs an AgTech startup solution … (Nov 3)
How will the growth in institutional investors in farmland impact AgTech startups? (Oct 21)
Why AgTech startups should push for farmer-focused targets. (Oct 9)
AgTech Startups — Your best friend is not who you think and they might not be that into you! (Oct 3)
Meet Me At The Intersection of Agriculture, Startups, and AgriFood. (Sept 28)
I hope you enjoy reading these as much as I enjoy writing them :)
