‘Bundling’ is a well-known business strategy, especially in tech, where it’s not only used to increase sales and move slow-selling products, but also to tie customers into an ecosystem (such as Apple or Microsoft).

So what about all the unbundling that’s been happening in agtech recently? While historically we’ve seen seed companies offer bundled options, such as seeds, crop management, and data products, there is now a trend towards ‘unbundling’ in agriculture. This is exemplified by Corteva’s recent decision to unbundle its seed and crop protection divisions into two publicly traded companies. Similarly, Farmers Business Network(FBN) has also spun off its global crop solutions business from its digital marketplace. 

In this episode, Sarah Nolet unpacks the bundling/unbundling dilemma in agtech with Shane Thomas, founder of Upstream Ag Insights and Matthew Pryor, Founding Partner at Tenacious Ventures. They discuss:

• The strategic impacts of unbundling for companies such as FBN and Corteva, as well as the broader impacts on farmers and markets.
• The market dynamics that encourage companies to bundle or unbundle.
• How Large Language Models (LLMs) are being used in agtech, including Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) and other AI frameworks.
• Shane Thomas’ new AskUpstream AI tool.
• Recent acquisitions in agtech, such as the Growers Edge acquisition of FarmTest

Useful Links:

• What Corteva’s Seed and Chemical Split Could Mean For Your Farm, Successful Farming 
• Growers Edge Acquires FarmTest, Growers Edge
• Farmers Business Network the latest to spin off company, following Corteva, Kraft Heinz, AgFunderNews
• DTN acquires Grain Discovery, DTN
• AlphaEarth, Google DeepMind
• Kraft Heinz to split a decade after merger in a bid to revive growth, The Guardian

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 seek financial advice from a professional financial adviser. Whilst we believe the information is correct, we provide no warranty of accuracy, reliability or completeness.

The biggest issue facing the cotton industry isn't fast fashion or water consumption. It's that the people growing cotton have been rendered invisible. The industry fixates on fiber quality and commodity pricing while the farmers themselves– and their role in determining sustainability outcomes– get lost.

Marzia Lanfranchi, founder of the global community Cotton Diaries, is a strategic consultant working to improve supply chain sustainability in the cotton industry. She argues that cotton is viewed first and foremost as ‘a cheap fiber,’ instead of a commodity that is grown in the field. 

She has seen that when cotton is treated purely as "a cheap fiber" rather than an agricultural product shaped by farming practices, the entire system suffers, including the sustainability frameworks fashion brands are trying to build.

In this episode, we discuss why putting farmers at the center changes everything.

Sarah and Marzia discuss:

• What fashion brands miss or overlook about regenerative agriculture
• Why cotton is often perceived as a ‘water thirsty crop’ (and why that is not always the case)
• How stories are useful ‘tools’ to help people visualize solutions to problems
• How traceability can be built into supply chains to help fashion brands improve sustainability

Useful Links:

• Cotton Diaries “Manifesto”
• Veja
• Landfill to Farmfill: rethinking cotton waste (podcast)
• Promises of premiums won’t cut it to scale sustainable agrifood supply chains

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 seek financial advice from a professional financial adviser. Whilst we believe the information is correct, we provide no warranty of accuracy, reliability or completeness.

As the world’s largest agricultural economy, when China makes a move, the world pays attention. China has just unveiled an ambitious plan to accelerate its development of ag machinery by shortening its research and development cycles. So will China dominate the future of agricultural machinery, and what does this mean for dealers, farmers, and agtech companies?

Lachlan Monsbourgh, Global Rural Agricultural and Environmental Lead at Rabobank, joins us to discuss China’s pivotal role in global agriculture. This includes China’s rapidly developing ag machinery industry, which can manufacture tractors and equipment for about half the cost of the other major players in the US, Europe and Japan. While the products currently face quality, durability and serviceability challenges, Lachlan argues it is only a matter of time before these are overcome. 

Lachlan and Sarah discuss:

• The price point difference between Chinese agricultural manufacturers and other big OEMs
• The impact of cheaper tractors on agtech adoption and autonomy
• How China is moving to ensure sustainable supply chains from countries such as Brazil.
• Global biodiversity targets and the role of autonomous robotics in helping to achieve them.

Useful Links:

• How China is reshaping Global Food Systems for the Climate Change Era, World Economic Forum
• Target to accelerate agriculture machinery development, AgTechNavigator
• Kunming Montreal Biodiversity framework
• The Three Categories of Autonomy in Agriculture, SwarmFarm Robotics

For more information and resources, visit our website. 

When the agtech is not working in the field, we can be quick to search for answers in the product itself. But sometimes, the solution is not there. That’s because it’s not a technical problem, but rather a social systems challenge.

Kevin Boyle is the Director of Organizational and Workforce Development at the Equitable Food Initiative (EFI). He argues that a key component of the farming and food system is often overlooked; and that’s the people who work on the ground. Farm workers can be seen as low-skilled, with little more to offer than the set tasks they perform. However, Kevin is seeking to change this approach, to better recognize the knowledge these workers have, and to create recognizable career paths for them.

Kevin also believes that focusing on the workforce will ultimately benefit the development and adoption of agtech. He spent much of his career in telecommunication tech, where he helped integrate the new digital technologies of the 1990s into the system, including the workers.

Sarah and Kevin discuss:

·  Kevin’s unique career background, from growing up on a farm, to working in telecommunications tech, and consulting across Europe and the United States.

·  How the perception of farm workers as ‘tools’ rather than humans with skills, knowledge, and desires has hindered tech adoption.

·  How to better recognize the skills and knowledge of farm workers, to build high performance farming businesses

·  How applied university research can be used to test a product in the broader system before it goes to market.

Useful links:

·  Can robotics solve the farm labor problem? With Connie Bowen and Sophie Thorel

·  How policy hamstrings agtech in California - Walt Duflock

Ask any farmer what their biggest challenge is right now and most will say ‘labor’. But what if, instead of trying to get more farm workers, we focused on changing the types of jobs available on farms? That’s where robotics comes in.

Unfortunately, successfully commercializing robots in agriculture has been extraordinarily difficult, especially relative to sectors like healthcare, defence and warehousing.

We break down the problem into three key challenges, based on research by Sophie Thorel, robotics expert and researcher at CREO Syndicate. Sophie argues robotics in agriculture needs to overcome the technical challenge of varied, uncontrollable environments; the cost and capital challenges that often comes with hardware; and the social stakeholder challenge of getting farmers and farm workers involved in the design process. Connie Bowen, GP at Farmhand Ventures, also joins us, drawing on her expertise in understanding and investing in agtech from a labor-first perspective and how all of these challenges intersect.

Connie, Sophie and Sarah discuss:

• Sophie’s journey into robotics and why a family office investment platform cares about robots in food & agriculture
• How we can overcome the time and cost it takes for on-farm robotics to develop to a stage where it’s actually useful for farmers/growers
• Why it’s so important for farmers and farm workers to be involved over the long term in a robotics program- from design into implementation
• How overcoming the key challenges in ag robotics could lead to a revolution in farm labor– more attractive and skilled farm opportunities

Useful Links:

• Agriculture Robotics: Technologies Enabling the Fourth Industrial Revolution" - CREO report
• Ag Launch
• Pete Nelson on partnering with growers to build better agtech
• Beyond VC: Redeemable Equity in Agtech, with Connie Bowen
• The Three Categories of Autonomy in Agriculture, SwarmFarm Robotics
• Burro
• TRIC Robotics

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 seek financial advice from a professional financial adviser. Whilst we believe the information is correct, we provide no warranty of accuracy, reliability or completeness.

The term ‘agtech’ now encompasses so many different types of businesses and innovations, that from an investment perspective, it can look overly complex. However perhaps the opposite is true?

Mark Kahn, Managing Partner of Ominvore, shares his ‘agtech-agribusinesss convergence theory’; where agtech startups eventually grow to look like a more conventional agribusiness company. He argues that if an agtech startup can’t see a pathway to either becoming an agribusiness or at least complementing one, then it’s likely to fail. The recent agtech startup failures in animal protein and vertical farming are an example of this.

So what does this argument mean for venture capital, which is all about high growth potential, disruption, and of course, high risk? Are VCs likely to invest in startups which are going to become ‘just another agribusiness’? And does that even matter?

For important context, Mark Kahn is based in India, which has a vastly different investment landscape compared with western countries. India has an incredibly large agriculture economy,  worth about $US600 - 700 billion, with about 50% of the Indian workforce employed in agriculture.  If you compare that with Australia, only 2.5% of the national workforce is involved in agriculture. In the United States, it's around 10%. 

Mark and Sarah discuss:

• Omnivore’s investment thesis and how it has evolved over time to focus on food security, agricultural prosperity, resource efficiency & rural resilience
• The unique agtech investment conditions in India and how it compares with markets in western countries such as the US, Canada, and Australia 
• Whether we are starting to see a global uptick in agtech investment
• Why Mark believes there is an agtech-agribusiness convergence
• How the Indian agtech market can be overlooked by western investors, because they do not take the time to understand it

USEFUL LINKS:

• Value creation in Indian agriculture - McKinsey and Company, 2025
• DeHaat - the largest farmer platform in India and portfolio company of Omnivore.
• What caused the farmer protests in India and what does it mean for innovation in Ag?- Agtech… So What? episode, featuring Mark Kahn and other investors.

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 seek financial advice from a professional financial adviser. Whilst we believe the information is correct, we provide no warranty of accuracy, reliability or completeness.

“Food is Medicine” is extremely popular right now, and a few facts suggest it might be more than just a trend. The U.S. alone spends something like $1.5 trillion annually on diet-related diseases, and key issues like diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, and other diseases are on the rise around the world. There are costly interventions available to manage many of these problems, but an increasing body of research suggests that some of the least invasive (and most affordable) interventions don’t come in a pill or vial, but in a grocery basket. 

Agrifood tech is definitely not sitting on the sidelines. We’re seeing a new wave of startups emerging in this space, building on the lessons of food businesses of the past. To explore this trend, we spoke with one such founder– Brad McNamara, CEO and Founder at Morrissey Market, a “food is medicine” distribution startup. Brad was formerly at Freight Farms, a vertical farming company that strove to sell, not the produce, but the farm itself, in the form of a tech-enabled shipping container-sized farm.

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 seek financial advice from a professional financial adviser. Whilst we believe the information is correct, we provide no warranty of accuracy, reliability or completeness.

When it comes to the production of high-value food crops, California is, without question, a global leader. Plus, much of the state’s thousands of acres of farmland lies within close proximity of Silicon Valley, where high-tech tools and solutions are endemic. And yet, many California farmers are struggling to continue their work, and agtech startups are increasingly looking beyond the state for customers and sectors to serve. 

So what gives? 

To answer this question, we asked Walt Duflock, Senior VP of Innovation at Western Growers Association on the show to help us connect the dots on why California’s world-renowned ag and its state-of-the-art tech sectors are struggling to align. Policy plays a big role here, but shifting tides around agtech funding are also having an effect. 

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 seek financial advice from a professional financial adviser. Whilst we believe the information is correct, we provide no warranty of accuracy, reliability or completeness.

Finding the right solution often starts with finding many, many wrong solutions. When it comes to some of agtech's most beguiling challenges, like real-time, granular soil testing, many startups have found the wrong solution– either ones that simply don’t work, don’t work at the right price, or don’t work in a way that makes them useful enough. 

But just because a problem hasn’t been solved yet doesn’t mean it’s unsolvable! And with the recent leaps made in artificial intelligence, a new startup– Soil Action– is taking another crack at this problem, hoping that a novel approach will help align the stars of effectiveness, usefulness, and affordability. 

The co-founders at Soil Action, Jack Oslan and Nate Storey, also know a thing or two about tackling big challenges in agtech. They both were also co-founders at vertical farming startup Plenty, and this week, in addition to hearing about Soil Action, we’ll also hear about lessons learned from that journey. 

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 seek financial advice from a professional financial adviser. Whilst we believe the information is correct, we provide no warranty of accuracy, reliability or completeness.

Longtime listeners have heard Sarah and Matthew talk about ideas like “ecosystem disruption” and “adoption chain risk” and “value architecture,” all of which stem from the works of Ron Adner. Ron is a researcher, strategist, and professor at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth University, and the author of two books, The Wide Lens and Winning the Right Game, both of which have been influential at Tenacious. 

So this week, we’re going straight to the source as Matthew sits down with Ron for a wide ranging discussion of how fundamental business strategy has changed in recent decades, and how agtech companies and investors can learn lessons from other sectors to inform their business models, go-to-market strategies, and the very way they understand the spaces where they play. 

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 seek financial advice from a professional financial adviser. Whilst we believe the information is correct, we provide no warranty of accuracy, reliability or completeness.