Agtech - So What?

2022 was a wild year– both in the world of agtech broadly, and for us here at Tenacious Ventures. We’ve covered a lot of ground, spanning everything from scaling soil tech, to the future of ag marketing, to alternative protein, novel investing tactics, and most recently, the next generation of farm inputs.
Today, we’re taking some time to reflect on the most important lessons we’ve learned on the podcast this year– and for us, it all came back to the question of how tech can help mitigate risk in agriculture. You’ll hear snippets from five episodes that we found particularly thought-provoking in relation to the risk question.

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There is a lot of momentum in agtech right now around investing at the intersection of ag and climate– and inevitably, many conversations start with a focus on how to measure impact. The problem we’ve been thinking about lately-- this conversation often gets stuck on the measurement challenge. In our perspective, the real opportunities go beyond just measuring the impact of decisions like practice changes. The future is in taking actions that meaningfully mitigate climate risks to agriculture.

To dig into this challenge, we’re joined this week by Cullen Gunn, CEO and Executive Director of Kilter Rural, which has been operating in the natural capital space since 2004, specifically investing in rural landscapes, water, and ecosystem protection.

For more information and resources, visit our website.

We’ve talked and thought a lot about autonomy this year, and despite what we think are some promising developments, overall, we continue to be struck by just how hard it is to bring solutions to market. From the technology to the use case, from the regulations to data, there are barriers and problems to solve in every direction.

So today we’re covering a ton of ground to understand why bringing autonomous solutions to agriculture is so hard. First, we talk to Connie Bowen of Farmhand Ventures, who is not particularly bullish on the near term viability of full autonomy, and has instead chosen to focus on what she calls “collaborative robotics”. Then we check in with Ray Russell, Principal Hardware Engineer at Locomation on specifically why technical problems stand in the way of progress in the autonomous space. Finally, we check in briefly with Kevin Andrews, Strat Marketing Manager for Autonomy at Trimble Agriculture to understand how more established equipment players are thinking about tackling autonomy’s biggest challenges.

For more information and resources, visit our website.

The information in this post is not investment advice or a recommendation to invest. It is general information only and does not take into account your investment objectives, financial situation or needs. Before making an investment decision you should read the information memorandum and seek financial advice from a professional financial adviser. Whilst we believe Information is correct, no warranty of accuracy, reliability or completeness is given, except for liability under statue which cannot be excluded.

We’ve been thinking a lot recently about how much the world of agtech has changed over the last two decades, and how companies, and more importantly, their customers, are adapting to an increasingly digitally native world. For years, the focus was on educating farmer-customers and post-sales training. But today, sophisticated growers tell their tech partners, and their peer networks, what they want, need, like, and dislike about their tools, often in real time.
Today we dig into this transition, which we think of as the shift in agtech from ‘buyer beware’ to ‘seller beware’. First, we talk to Leet Wilksch of Agbyte, who sits on both sides of the buyer/seller table as farmers have evolved from tech skeptics to discerning buyers. Then, we gain some industry perspective from Jason McNeice and Darren Walford of Trimble Agriculture.

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Today we're tackling part two of our future of Nitrogen fertilizer discussion, focusing on the realm of business models and strategies. We chat with two companies exploring how we might reimagine the way farmers around the world buy and sell this critical input, including through distributed, rather than centralized, supply chains.

We’ll continue our conversation with Bill Brady, CEO and Director at Kula Bio and Charlie Day, CEO at Jupiter Ionics*We also add in some on the ground perspective around how farmers are handling the pressures of the fertilizer market right now by chatting with Jason McNeese, software specialist for the Asia Pacific region at Trimble Agriculture, and Darren Walford, APAC Sales Manager for Trimble Global Positioning.
In this episode, our guests speak about:

A future of small scale production of N, and how farmers have reacted to potential changes away from today’s centralized model
What benefits, especially in terms of Scope-3 emissions, might be realized by thinking differently about how and where fertilizer is made
How new N companies are tackling the challenge of creating trustworthy brands and products in the face of the many false starts in the fertilizer space.

For more useful resources please visit our website.

*Disclaimer: Jupiter Ionics is a portfolio company of Tenacious Ventures

This episode is brought to you in partnership with Trimble Agriculture, who are building technology to make farming better through precision.

This is the first episode in our series on the future of fertilizer, starting with Nitrogen - the N in NPK.

Russia’s war in Ukraine has collided with natural gas supply chain disruptions and sent the price of fertilizer skyrocketing. But, this isn’t the least of the crop nutrient industry’s problems. It’s a space renowned for being complex and confusing. It also relies on an emissions-intensive value chain that has been around now for more than a century.

Today’s episode looks at two different visions for the future of nitrogen fertilizer. Our guests are Charlie Day, CEO of Jupiter Ionics, and Bill Brady, CEO of Kula Bio. Both lead teams that are attempting to bring cutting edge nitrogen production methods to market.

Charlie and Bill join to speak about:

• Reducing the chemical intensity of production - How new approaches to producing nitrogen work and why they are key to a cleaner industry.
• Reinventing nitrogen fertilizer - Why reinventing fertilizer production makes sense
• Scaling the science - Why scaling production from grams to tonnes is so tough, let alone trying to get it into the hands of customers.
  
• Designing for adoption - What Charlie and Bill have learned from other novel ag inputs that failed to fit into the production systems of farmers.

We’ll follow up with a Part 2 on the future of N - stay tuned! For more useful resources, visit our website.

For a year that has already seen so much downside for US farmers in the form of extreme weather - from droughts to soaring temperatures - there’s another risk looming: rising interest rates.

Adapting to an increasingly unpredictable and extreme climate is not cheap or easy. For farmers planning for the resilience and longevity of their business, the intersection of climate and fiscal risk has us wondering: how are farmers financing future growth, and where does resilience to climate change factor in?

This week’s bonus episode gets into the details of how one farmer is planning for growth in the midst of enormous uncertainty. Clay Govier is a multi-generational farmer in Nebraska growing a diversified mix of grains, and he joins to speak about:

• Extreme weather in 2022 - What Clay’s exposure to heat and drought has meant for his business this year
• Financing resilience - What financing options Clay and his family have used for generations, and what is driving change in the future
• Generational transition - Why the $500B of US farmland changing hands in the next 10 years is driving new strategic thinking from farmers
• Alternative financing models - What the risks, opportunities, and skepticism looks like toward new modes of finance

For more useful resources, visit our website.

While early-stage agtech tends to play in the venture world, it pays to check in with how folks sitting in banking think about their role as partners to startups. Traditional lenders can draw on the best part of a century of connection to agriculture, and potentially offer significant options for financing the growth of later-stage companies.

This week we heard from Romie Basra, Senior VP, National Sustainable Tech Practice Leader, and Karol Aure-Flynn, Food and Agribusiness Industries Advisor at Wells Fargo. As investors and lenders in traditional agriculture, as well as to other tech movements that have boomed (and busted) in recent memory, Romie and Karol joined to speak about:

• Cleantech vs. agtech. How investors in the previous waves of cleantech think about the challenges facing the new generation of startups in ag
• Financing options for startups. What role a legacy provider of finance like Wells Fargo wants to play for growing agtech companies
• Scaling in indoor ag. How a bank thinks about the barriers to scale for companies in a space like indoor agriculture
• Value props to institutional lenders. Why the “unsexy” elements of startup scale matter most to institutional lenders

For more useful resources, visit our website.

The decisions by major food companies impact consumers, farmers, and the environment at every stage of the agrifood value chain. But the status quo strategies of ‘Big Food’ don’t always acknowledge the complex, interconnected systems at play around the world.
Our guest this week is Dr. Nigel Hughes, Senior Vice President of Global R&D at Kellogg. After spending a career in what he would unwillingly call Big Food, Nigel now advocates for the urgent recoupling of the many smaller systems, from farming to processing to distribution, that have become detached as they’ve been optimized over decades.

For more information and resources, visit our website.

We recently launched a three-episode deep dive into the future of risk and insurance in agriculture. Over the course of the series, we heard from one listener who offered to share his experience using novel insurance products to manage the risks of both too little and too much rainfall in his own farming operation. This from-the-field perspective was packed with insights, and was such a powerful contribution to our learning that we asked his permission to use the audio for this episode.

Tom Ferguson is a farmer in Northern New South Wales, Australia, and this week you’ll hear a conversation between him and Tenacious Ventures Co-Founder Matthew Pryor. They speak about:

• Tom’s specific exposure to climate-risk, and why this has led to him exploring new options for insurance
• His process for collecting data, identifying high-impact risks to hedge against, and using this data to strike tailored, parametric policies with insurers
• What the impact of using more data on the farm can be for new insurance products, and what’s holding back the integration
• His adoption of new agtech on the farm, and what factors enabled or inhibited uptake within the business.

For more information and resources, visit our website.