Let’s put our useful agritech channel thinking caps on

The problem is, as SF luminary William Gibson once so well put it, it’s a future not evenly distributed. The sector’s struggling with limited infrastructure, low farmer awareness, and difficulty proving ROI.

That’s a real pity, as agritech could help food producers in everything from production to irrigation, supply chains and marketplaces, make farming methods more sustainable, improve financial inclusion, streamline the route to markets, manage risks, and even help with climate adaptation challenges.

And, agritech is an area in which we have an interest, because it was a natural evolution from our work in IoT – using remote connectivity and devices to collect data, make better decisions and drive enhanced productivity, so we pay a good deal of attention to this field and the way in which tech is evolving to support food production.

But as it stands, there’s a lot more take-up in bigger operations than the folks out in the sticks who maybe could use just as effectively. (Just take a second to look at something like Map My Crop to see – a company whose platform we recently reviewed together with others for an assignment for a client interested in platform best-practice).

Possibly, that’s not too surprising: agritech is for sure starting to have some positive impact in the developing world, but as a recent study shows, “While more innovations are expected, a lack of access to capital is holding back growth for [agritech] startups and farmers alike”.

Challenges to useful agritech growth (in both senses)

The market seems to be splitting into solutions for big commercial farms and smaller (smallholder) users, with the latter being offered subscription-based services mainly through cell phones and the former being more easily able to invest in more on-site installation. 

For large-scale farmers, Connecting Africa reports, most of the time agritech solutions are homegrown, address specific areas (e.g. tea plantations, dairy farms) and are not always fronted by agritech startups, while the smaller end of the market is more typically where mobile access to start-up ideas is concentrated.

An interesting (and, we think, potentially very significant) extra factor, though, is “the long-standing presence” in the African farming picture of trading and cooperative players. Why this could be important is making agritech and all it could offer the market, including accessing markets, supporting farmers and financing.  

Why not use existing channels and folks farmers already trust?

Not everyone’s a fan of this class of market player, as they obviously have their own agenda and P&L to take care of. But for the purposes of our discussion, if they have access and influence over the more financially constrained part of the market, then it may make sense to use them as a channel to make it easier for family and subsistence farmers to access the power of connectivity, AI, IoT and whatever other interesting tools that may be out there.

But there’s yet another player here that could help: the supply chain—the providers of the mechanised tools and implements that the farmer will either need to buy or lease. smaller farmers can already benefit through partnerships that are mutually beneficial. 

Many farmers depend on agricultural factors and wholesalers, and as “middlemen” can bring tech innovations in reach of their producers, spreading efficiencies into the supply chain and encouraging their producer partners with innovation. 

Cargill, a privately held, global food and agriculture corporation, is already doing this, offering everything from Nutrition Cloud, a precision nutrition platform that helps livestock farmers optimise feed formulations and reduce costs, as well as a solar-powered sensor that accurately tracks feed bin levels, as well as an AI-driven, 3D computer vision system (‘Birdoo’) that estimates chicken weights in real-time.

Essentially, Cargill has recognised that equipping its suppliers with tech that enhances production benefits all stakeholders. After all, wholesalers and commodity brokers depend on their suppliers – so it’s in everyone’s interest to drive efficiency through the chain.

These types of solutions, as well as its other services like drones that help you monitor cattle health and behaviour, are just the start, though. The firm can also hook you up with a mobile app helping over 40,000 Indian farmers access markets and weather data (‘Digital Saathi’), and Chekt, a contactless food locker system improving takeout efficiency, and so on.

Let’s find better ways to connect users with useful agritech

Connectivity could play a huge integral role in enabling many of these kinds of useful agritech ideas and apps to get out into the (figurative) field, with mobile and satellite among the core technologies used to connect devices and transmit data.

Ultimately, while in some parts of the world agriculture is becoming a smaller and smaller part of overall national economies, in the Global South it is still a huge source of income—and not just on the actual farm but downstream in the manufacturing, processing, packaging and export of agricultural goods.

And there just aren’t many industries bigger than this, which is already $4.8 trillion and which is set to rise to more like $5.5 thousand billion by 2029.

Time, we think, to have a think about how to leverage the agricultural supply chain — upstream and downstream — and mobile to help make all this as efficient and digital as we can. After all, it would be something that would help all of us—Mother Earth most of all.