Agriculture startups doing interesting work?

I am the founder of Optimal: http://optimal.ag.

We are a team of engineers and scientists from DeepMind, Palantir, Oxford and MIT. Our mission is to grow safer, healthier food by deploying fully autonomous greenhouses outside every city on earth. We are backed by leading deep technology funds, including Founders Fund.

We believe that high-tech greenhouses will be an important part of our agricultural future, for improved human nutrition and as a hedge to climate change, and we are doing everything we can to accelerate the deployment of new farms around the world.

We are in stealth mode right now so there's not a huge amount about us online but we've made strong progress with the core technology and I would be happy to speak more about our work privately.

I've been working on a hardware data logger device and web software platform that monitors soil moisture and other environmental metrics that produce-growers care about – soil temperature and conductivity (which indicates salinity or fertiliser penetration), air/canopy temperature, rainfall, irrigation, humidity, solar radiation, etc.

We've been working on the product for about 4-5 years (as a side project while working on other things to pay the bills). Initially it was a smartphone-connected device using Bluetooth and manual data retrieval, but we've just reached production-ready stage of a newer version that uses the new LTE Cat-M1 cellular data protocol (which uses existing 4G cellular infrastructure but is optimised for lower power and longer range).

So we now have a whole lot of these devices sitting in crops (E.g., grapevines, wheat, fruit/vegetables, nuts, sugar cane), some of them over 20km from their nearest cell tower (you can extend the range further with high-gain antennas but we haven't had to do that yet), automatically uploading all this data and generating various data views (time series graphs and dashboards) to help growers make decisions about when/how much to irrigate etc.

It can also do reactive/proactive stuff like detect when temperature close to the surface drops to near 2°C overnight and send out frost warning alerts, and over time we intend to make the data platform powerful enough that it can do things like automate the switching on/off of irrigation pumps in response to soil moisture level trends.

I don't have a website to point to yet. I'm working on a demo site now.

But I'd be interested to hear from anyone who is working on tech like this or is interested to work on it or partner in some way (email address is in my profile).

Despite having worked in the space for nearly 5 years, I'm still not sure why this tech isn't more commonplace – i.e., why every professional grower isn't already using something like this. This kind of tech has been around for a long time, so we're not doing anything completely new, just doing it more affordably and hopefully making better use of modern tech.

From what I've been able to learn about the market, it seems that the big industrial-scale producers use this type of tech, though what they use is costly and sophisticated to install/maintain. But for many smaller growers, it's considered not important enough to make the investment, and they're happy doing things the way they and the previous generations have always done it.

But with water scarcity becoming an issue in many parts of the world it will become increasingly important for growers of all scales to use this kind of tech to avoid water wastage.

We've also had the opportunity to trial the equipment with growers in Far-North Queensland, inland from the Great Barrier Reef. The government and industry bodies in that region are interested to see how this kind of tech could be used to minimise over-watering leading to fertiliser run-off into the sea, which is a contributor to coral bleaching.

So, yeah, that's what I'm doing. Happy to hear from anyone interested to know more or work together.

This is exactly what I am working on. Using climate data for more efficient farming, in a nutshell.

Established players are like sledge hammers. They are successful if they are hard working and have some competitive edge (could be labour cost, could be local knowledge, could be profit reinvestment, could be rights to varieties).

Farmers are the most efficient managers you'll ever find. They don't need management, so IMHO any startup that tries a "smart farm" is underestimating the intelligence of the farm managers.

The sweet spot is immediate deliverables in terms of cost saving or other forms of optimisation. In the time of my grandfather, the profit margin was 50% and a flip of the coin whether you'll actually get anything to the market. Today it is <10% and you better know what you are doing.

The retailers are the real money spinners; if you want to make your money at the primary level you better like the social aspect of farming as well.

Don't misunderstand, there is plenty tech, but it is probably more important whether you are willing to work on a Sunday. Take from it what you will; my opinions tend to somewhat unique (in this regard). For example, don't waste your time with "organic farming". It's a marketing term and actually not very descriptive (vs. "organic chemistry"). Sure, you could make money, but in marketing.

The toughest problems are pretty damn interesting though and are basically going to cross polinate with the most cutting edge climate change research.

I'd recommend following AgFunder News: https://agfundernews.com (RSS, Twitter, whatever you like). I find that they cover the industry fairly well (or at least link to enough interesting things to get you a foothold). You're totally right that this is an overlooked industry, though make no mistake, many of the big players (your John Deeres and such) have very sophisticated R&D and engineering initiatives pursuing market opportunities in a variety of ag tech realms.

Indigo Agriculture (indigoag.com) - Boston/Memphis/Remote

Shameless plug for Indigo Agriculture (indigoag.com). We're expanding on a number of different fronts with the central goal of increasing farmer profitability while reducing the environmental impact of production. Here are some of the groups at Indigo that are hiring: - Marketplace: matching growers producing high quality crops with buyers who need that quality. Giving farmers a reason to produce crops that are better than commodity standard, produced in better ways. - Transport: contract trucking services to allow farms to sell their products, efficiently, well beyond their current reach - Agronomy/Precision Agriculture: giving farmers the tools and expertise they need to improve their efficiency while reducing environmental impact. - Remote Sensing: supplementing Indigo's and growers' knowledge of fields with continuously updating global observations from satellites - Carbon Sequestration (terraton.org): sequestering a trillion tons of carbon dioxide into agricultural soils to improve soil quality while slowing the march of climate change

If you are interested, please apply on our website or feel free to reach out to me directly at jmcdonald@indigoag.com. I'm a software engineer who works across a number of the above groups. I'd love to chat or put you in touch with the right person.

http://growbot.online (GrowPotBot) YC W2018 is an open source positronic (AI) aeroponic residential and lightweight industrial gardening appliance.

the tech stack fits into multiple platforms, we spent the last few years in China and Malaysia understanding value engineering, manufacturing logistics.

we're hoping to ship in major retailers starting in 2020 with an incredibly low < $100 'in cabinet' unit that can produce peppers, tomatoes and cannabis (or whatever you want). the primary differentiator is the cost and intelligence of the unit targeted at high yield strains of food and medicine in small spaces.

we're hoping to make them so cheap we can nearly give them away and make indoor urban farming "a thing" before climate change really kicks into full gear and destroys outdoor gardens.

positronic "closed loop" garden, happy to share what we're working on with other like minded people and collaborating with other growers internationally on open-data standards for storing this data and compiled models.

FBN was recently started in 2014 by 2 guys from the Silicon Valley area. So far, they focus on data analytics (e.g. seed yields).

There are various articles about them and youtube videos:

https://www.google.com/search?q=FBN+"farmers+business+networ...

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=fbn+farmers+bus...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oML9yLjTfk8

I think we're doing interesting work at Apollo Agriculture (https://apolloagriculture.com)!

We work with smallholder farmers in subsaharan africa (currently Kenya) to help them transition to commercial farming. Basically, we sell them a package of the seed, fertilizer, advice, insurance, and training that they need to substantially improve their yield and profits. We're moving towards helping farmers shift to a diversified blend of crops and providing market access.

(In most of the developed world, these are all provided by different players, but the challenges of a developing market push us to offer them all together.)

If you're interested in chatting, either drop a comment here or shoot me an email at (earl at apolloagriculture dot com).

I'm the data science lead at http://agrian.com. Shoot me a message if you want to chat (email in profile). I love talking about this topic and trading notes.

Opinion coming from someone who studied Agribusiness but works in high technology.

Farmwise.io is doing some really excellent work. We have a big problem these days with getting low cost labor in California that our Ag producers have traditionally relied on. I also find the team at planet.com to be doing incredibly valuable work that has some really profound and broad applications for agriculture.

You need to look north:

https://www.farmersedge.ca/ ; precision farming, exited by Kleiner Perkins via sale to Prem Watsa of Fairfax Financial

https://seedotrun.com/ ; autonomous farming

https://www.seedmaster.ca ; precision farming

These companies actually have customers and / or are well on their way to commercialization

I know of two:

https://artemisag.com/ — Artemis (previously Agrilyst) won TechCrunch Disrupt SF a few years ago, and is building a management platform for enterprise-scale indoor farms.

https://farmtogether.com/ — FarmTogether is a platform that allows anyone to invest in US farmland

(Source: I was an early employee at Artemis, and a friend from high school is a cofounder of FarmTogether)

FarmLogs (YC W12). It was the site of my first internship and I really couldn't have had a better experience.

https://farmlogs.com

Agriculture is the single most destructive human activity. It is the primary cause of the extraordinary biodiversity loss we had the last 80 years.

We lost half of all life in numbers https://www.cbc.ca/radio/quirks/oct-19-2019-understanding-th..., agriculture is the primary cause of that.

Look with your own eyes what is left only 150 years after we arrived in Western Australia, https://earth.google.com/web/@-33.86075979,117.66498741,330.... and most of that happened in the last 50 years.

So anything we can do to increase yield, and restoring current agricultural land to original habitat, as far as that is possible, is a very worthy cause.

Check https://www.tend.com/ out, this startup has gone public since 2016, I'm one of their beta users. Its a suite that help you make growing plan, keeping track of almost everything needed during your farming processes, your plants, your tasks, when to harvest, your soil test records,... They've been developing some other tools that will eventually help you sell your farm produces. Here's what they say "We’re a small startup that’s passionate about building tools to help organic farmers grow quality food and run successful farming businesses. We started Tend with farmers in mind, and are proud to have team members who’ve farmed throughout the U.S. and Latin America. We’re also fortunate to have a first-class technology and engineering team who’ve spent many years working in startups and larger tech companies. Most of all, we’re proud of our close relationships with the organic and diversified farmers who use Tend to manage their farm."

The worst part about startups and agriculture is trying to bridge the two. I spend a LOT of time thinking about the shortcomings in agriculture and how I'd do it better. So many areas for advancing a current technology. But then I'm often hindered by a simple question -- "Can I turn this into a startup?" I use Paul Graham's definition [0] as a litmus test and always fail to complete the necessary circle.

I've recently decided "to hell with it" and am diving in. I'm hustling as a hemp farmer now. Learning a lot. Especially about how to actually become a farmer. The different types of farmers. How other conventional farmers can actually make it.

I'm coming up with lots of ideas, but still no silver bullets. No unicorns. I see all these companies posted here and agree that most will be very beneficial and influential in the future. But will any see 10% weekly growths? Unlikely. But I'm always enthusiastic and hopeful that they will.

Right now the average age for a US farmer is 59 [1]. Assuming they can make it to retirement, we'll begin cresting in farmer turn-over in 5 years. The problem is many will be selling out to the highest bidder if they don't already have somebody lined up to take over the reigns. That will be the already established, large, industrial scale commercial farming operation.

So back to my original point, how can we bridge the startup world with agriculture? No idea. But I'm hopeful one of these companies do.

0: http://www.paulgraham.com/growth.html

1: https://modernfarmer.com/2018/06/by-the-numbers-state-of-the...

HN-style site for agtech and foodtech: https://feedit.agfunder.com/

Im with Agfunder, we built this with Django, with thanks to https://github.com/nikolak/django_reddit

I did some interesting work in this space. With several thousand seasons of data I used an MLP network to visualize phenotypic plasticity (how plants react to a range of environmental conditions).

Accurately cleaning the input data proved to be extremely important, because there's a tremendous amount of "noise" at the individual level when dealing with living organisms, so lots of high-quality data is necessary to tease out relationships. Establishing causality was also important, considering the potential for confounding variables.

It also gave me a chance to brush up on my React/front end skills, but that was more ancillary.

https://sproutling.ai/blog/harvest-simulations?jm2

https://sproutling.ai/blog/growth-simulations?jm2

You might be interested in IronOx: http://ironox.com/

Indoor produce grown "by robots with love"

I'm an application developer at Semios (Vancouver, BC).

Semios has one of the largest IoT networks in agriculture to gather and analyze data to help farmers drive data-driven solutions. The network collects micro-climate data to predict disease and pest risk, alert growers of risks in real-time, and help improve water efficiency.

We have a complex stack composed of hardware, embedded, applications, data engineers and data scientists. We're hiring!

As an example, Semios helps growers reduce pest populations organically by disrupting the insect communication channels using pheromone released by IoT devices in the field. We track the effectiveness of pheromone using cameras in the field, and machine-learning algorithms to count pests.

https://www.semios.com

Take a look at the comments in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20910845 (36 points, 44 days ago, 19 comments) , perhaps the farmers use more technology than you think.

I worked for The Climate Corporation when it was acquired by Monsanto (now Bayer) for $1B.

There is certainly plenty of potential for innovative tech in agriculture, but it’s a really tough space. Machine learning and big data are not magic bullets. The level of noise in experimental measurements is very high, which makes it difficult to prove the effectiveness of almost any intervention.

Climate Corp did (and still does) sell a SAS product advising growing decisions based on machine learning. But the price of that product has fallen dramatically over time, and now it’s nearly free. The premium product now has a list price of $1/acre vs. expected grower revenue of ~$700/acre (for corn in the US). What does that say about the value the software provides?

https://www.descarteslabs.com - Satellite imagery for predictive intelligence, lots of work in agtech for things like crop yields.

I’m surprised nobody has mentioned AppHarvest yet. The NYT[1] recently covered them.

Their investor list in and of itself is pretty interesting.

Plus, their building out of Morehead, Ky. Morehead was the “big city” when I was growing up, so it’s cool to see innovation there.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/03/business/appharvest-green...

I am the CTO of Grownetics and we are about to open source our stack. https://grownetics.co/

Definitely want to take the time to throw out a huge recommendation for FBN (Farmers Business Network), a KPCB/Google Ventures backed startup that's doing really cool work in data analysis + aggregation + insights for farmers.

For the sake of clarity, I was an intern there, but I objectively think that their approach is very insightful and hits a lot of key points that many ag startups get wrong. Two of my biggest personal takeaways were that obsession with farm yields doesn't actually translate very well to increased profits, because there are so many other factors and costs (and risk) in farm operations. Furthermore, because of all these other operations (e.g. researching better seed varieties, buying inputs, loans in order to buy inputs and hope that they can be repaid later when harvest time comes), there is a huge need to address pervasive and complex issues with regards to the entire farming enterprise, not just the yield portion. FBN does a really great job at tackling the holistic approach, which I think really helps increase the effectiveness of FBN's product and makes it a really powerful tool.

Definitely check it out! https://www.fbn.com

http://picktrace.com/ (YCS15) was in our batch. Both the founders grew up on a farm and build tools for people to use out in the field like how to accurately keep track the number of baskets of strawberries a worker picked so they get paid the right amount when there's no WiFi or cellular connection.

I always thought it was interesting.

I work at https://www.agrigateone.com/

We aggregate data for growers and buyers of fresh perishables to better facilitate trades.

Must say agri / food is a fascinating industry to work in.

The tech problems don't seem to be well known or often solved when compared to other industries I've worked in...which is both awesome and frustrating haha

I work at https://tech.vidacycle.com . We are a small startup building a set of tools to monitor vines, soils and fruits. We help farmers to gain knowledge about the ecosystem they manage so they can make better decisions.

What an exciting thread! I've seen really cool projects here

[edit: I overlooked the direct call-out to Indigo in the original post, my mistake. Nevertheless, I'll leave this as perhaps its helpful to others who don't know the company.]

Indigo Agriculture - https://www.indigoag.com/

I worked for a satellite imagery start-up who was acquired by Indigo in December of 2018. I'm obviously biased, but i can genuinely say that the level of innovation taking place throughout this company - towards so many different parts of the agricultural system - has not ceased to astound me since I joined.

They've managed to capture/create/cultivate one of those unique scenarios that rarely happens in any industry: a scenario where all participants benefit. They're helping consumers gain access to healthy, responsibly-sourced food, they're helping to make it profitable for the farmer to provide these foods, and they're helping to make it beneficial to the planet to produce them.

They started as a microbial seed treatment company. By coating seeds with naturally-occurring microbial organisms, these microbes would help crops by making them more resistant to harsh conditions like drought, heat, etc. Kind of like probiotics, but for plants.

Since then, they've expanded into many different parts of the agricultural system, but perhaps their most innovative & potentially impactful contribution is their most recent: the Terraton initiative. They're helping to remove a trillion tons of carbon from the atmosphere by making it financially beneficial for farmers to adopt regenerative agricultural practices to bring this carbon out of the air and into the soil.

I could go on, but the videos and content on their website describe their mission and their work better than I can. I'm really excited about the work we're doing there - I hope you'll think so too.

http://www.bluerivertechnology.com/

Now owned by John Deere. Goal is 10x reduction in chemicals while doubling yields. We’re deep in ml & robotics and our creations scale across the deere fleet touching most of the arable land in the world.

I've seen the focus on the thread, fascinating.

The major focus is: To produce more.

I haven't seen one to Waste less. Inverse the balance sheet.

https://www.parabel.com/ Florida based startup using water lentils to create a future plant-protein platform. Crop doubles in size every 24-36 hours allowing farms to harvest every day. 10x yield compared to soy or pea proteins.

I'm one of the founding partners of AgFunder. You can see see a lot of startups in our annual investor report:

https://agfunder.com/research/agrifood-tech-investing-report...

The big ones I don't see are:

Plenty - Indoor agriculture (raised over $200m)

[https://www.plenty.ag]

Pivot Bio - Nitrogen fixation with engineered microbes

[https://www.pivotbio.com/]

I used to work here: https://www.greensightag.com/

They do autonomous UAVs for agricultural monitoring, using multi-spectral imaging and a computer vision pipeline to detect issues before farmers can.

Hey I'm the lead roboticist with https://farmwise.io/

We're building autonomous devices for sustainable farming at scale; that means weeding without chemicals, reducing fertilizer utilization and building new methods for planting/harvesting.

For a roboticist this translates to building high quality odometry, actuation and navigation stacks. We have novel backend and real time systems challenges as well. I've worked on autonomous systems for several years now and have seen how effective solid software engineers are at building solutions in the robotics space.

Our company is product focused and has devices operating on farms today, feel free to reach out with any questions.

https://en.agricool.co is a French startup perfecting its technology to grow fruit (they focus on strawberries) in containers, within cities, using very little water. They raised €25M last year.

My side project is AutoMicroFarm (https://automicrofarm.com). Currently working on https://edible.estate/

Tule helps farmers make irrigation decisions. We install a proprietary research-based sensor in farmers' fields. The sensor measures the water use and water stress of the plants in an entire field. Tule uses the field-scale plant data, as well as cutting-edge artificial intelligence models, to provide farmers with irrigation recommendations. Our customers span from the winemakers who farm California's most prized vineyards to the growers at the largest scale almond operations in the Central Valley. Tule is a profitable company whose mission is to help generations of farmers maximize production and more efficiently manage natural resources.

www.tuletechnologies.com

Hi,

I am looking for people in the image/satellite mapping industry. The idea is to map Indian farmland according to the survey no and provide the data directly to the farmer. Stack the data with the crop, soil, weather, market, buyer and it could be a solution to the whole Agri sector. If it is further mapped with land type data, Land purchase, subsidy, infra development red tape can be reduced to the extreme and the whole process could become transparent.

I have a couple of startups in mind who have the tech platform, but not the combined application stack.

I am looking for someone from a tech background to help with finalizing the whole setup. Connect me over at dishank.zala@gmail.com

You can find it all here. Definitive landscape guide maps for both Farm Agtech and Indoor Agtech. I don’t think they missed a whole lot. Pretty sure there are more than a few that are in stealth mode. But this about sums it up.

1600 companies Agtech landscape map: https://agfundernews.com/2019-06-04-agtech-landscape-2019-16...

1000+ companies indoor Agtech landscape map: http://mixingbowlhub.com/inside-indoor-agtech/

Hi, I am looking for people in the image/satellite mapping industry. The idea is to map Indian farmland according to the survey no and provide the data directly to farmer. Stack the data with crop, soil, weather, market, buyer and it could be a solution to whole agri sector.

If it is further mapped with land type data, Land purchase, subsidy, infra development red tape can be reduced to the extreme and whole process could become transparent.

I have couple of stratups in mind who have the tech platform, but not the combined application stack.

I am looking for someone from tech backgroud to help with finalizing the whole setup. Connect me over at dishank.zala@gmail.com

ecoation - https://www.ecoation.com/ - robots for greenhouses (monitoring & analytics) - vancouver

robotany / fifth season - https://www.fifthseasonfresh.com/ - https://www.cmu.edu/energy/news-multimedia/2018/robotany.htm... - vertical greenhouses - Pittsburgh

On the farmer to consumer side, I've been using marketwagon for my dairy meat and produce and really like their products and business model. https://marketwagon.com/pages/market-wagon-about-us

Its kinda a mash of Amazon food delivery and community supported agriculture. If you want to see smaller farms thrive, they have a pretty compelling service. So far they are Midwest only but hopefully they can expand, or similar services can start up in other regions.

AeroFarms in Boston are one of the foremost aeroponic indoor food growth facilities, they do some interesting software too:

https://aerofarms.com/

www.orisha.io (In french) www.products.orisha.io

We are a modest startup that aims at developping tools for smaller farmers. We developed a greenhouse growing assistant that helps the community-supported agriculture folks.

We are currently considering developping: * Automating irrigation with tensiometers (humidity sensors). And potentially use forecast and solar radiation. * A production management tool * A project to help reduce the use of fossil energy in greenhouse heating

And for the functional programming enthusiasts out there: We are currently hiring !

Contact me for more info: guillaume@orisha.io

Cover Crop Exchange https://covercropexchange.com

Providing a marketplace for buyers and sellers of cover crop seeds. We deal with licensing, shipping/logistics, ordering, payouts, etc. Diversify your farming income by growing and selling cover crop seeds.

hybrid85 https:://hybrid85.com

$85/unit Non-GMO (Conventional) seed corn. Maximize your profitability by lowering your input costs. Utilizing off-patent genetics that perform as well as "the big guys".

I run the product team for https://farmdog.ag/ Our mission is to significantly reduce the use of pesticides.

I co-founded a beehive monitor startup with my brothers in New Zealand (they run it now): https://hivemind.nz

It's an electronic device that sits underneath your beehives and weighs the amount of honey in the hive, sending data back via satellite modem (because beehives are often remote, so cellular doesn't always work). It also measures a bunch of other important stuff important for bee health: temperature, humidity, bee activity.

A long while ago I did LED lighting research (hence my name) and specialized vertical farming techniques which would drastically reduce land usage and resource usage, and could be entirely solar-powered in some parts of the world.

Too bad the owners of that business sold it for cheap and my work somehow got lost. Not like I couldn't recreate it all from my mind, but it certainly isn't in full-scale use today, just trial setups in a couple of countries which might still be operational.

https://www.agrobot.com is developing a robot to pick strawberries. Pretty sophisticated, too.

I'm doing some work for a startup that wants to automate greenhouse climate control.

The software automatically manages lighting, climate, irrigation based on long term growth strategies, real time sensor data and energy prices.

This saves time spent manually managing greenhouse climate, and money due to improved crop and energy management.

We're hiring! Looking for a data scientist with a mind for optimization problems. The Netherlands, Delft region.

Just yesterday I got invited to interview at AgriTask [1].

> An AG-management platform that turns agriculture data into smart tools for planning and decision making.

I don’t know much about them aside from this line from one of their recruiters; check them out if you want.

By the way, they are hiring a couple of remote workers if anyone is interested.

[1] https://www.agritask.com/

I'm with https://www.agworld.com - a platform that connects farmers with agronomists and other advisors and helps them manage their farm data. Everything with the aim of enabling farmers to make more profitable decisions.

We just had our 10 year anniversary.. it's been a long road but definitely very rewarding!

I'm a co-founder of biofrack: https://biofrack.com

We use fracking techniques to restructure and amend soil at shallow depths with biochar. This improves drainage, allows for deep application of slow release fertilizer, and is a carbon negative process that sequesters carbon deeper than would ever occur naturally.

Not a startup but Cisco is testing wireless-connected monitoring systems for cows and a robotic milking machine https://www.reuters.com/article/us-telecoms-5g-cows/5g-conne...

Speaking as a customer. I want an any sized farmbot. I'd buy that product in a second. I even offered a bounty in the farmbot forums recently:

https://forum.farmbot.org/t/any-size-farmbot-with-a-cash-bou...

BinMeasure is using LIDAR units and some clever feed-shape algorithms to calculate the feed volume remaining in agricultural feed bins. Instead of sending a person out to climb the bins and look in the top (the current method), you get the info on a mobile phone app.

https://www.binmeasure.com/

Looks like no one has mentioned Nori: https://nori.com/. They are doing good work around creating a marketplace where you can buy carbon credits. From their site: "Nori’s platform makes it straightforward for companies to pay farmers for storing carbon in soil."

It's worth posting this article on this thread for anybody interested why the high tech ag industry is retarded.

https://www.businessinsider.com.au/mit-media-lab-personal-fo...

Here's one I just saw: https://www.blueoceanbarns.com

Elemental Excelerator looks like it has about 10 ag startups: https://elementalexcelerator.com/companies/

One of my clients which I'm proud of, Phytech, is deploying huge number of plant sensors to measure their status and help save water by planning how much to irrigate.

They are doing very well and have huge customers in the US and Australia.

https://youtu.be/MuWRDZEJ934

https://bearflagrobotics.com/

https://boweryfarming.com/

In europe, https://eagronom.com/ is taking an interesting approach - rather than throw all existing farming practices out with the bathwater, try to build on top of them and modernize to achieve sustainable farming.

https://plantix.net/en/ plantix app, a Berlin based startup is used primarily by farmers in India. It uses computer vision to identify crop nutrient deficiencies and diseases.

https://www.indigoag.com

Here is my ad: Corang.info is the world first fully sustainable property development. It combines renewable energy with food production and housing. The project has 'negative emissions'.

If it works we plan to make lots of similar projects in Australia and Asia.

If you search for agtech you can find things like this: https://agfundernews.com/2019-06-04-agtech-landscape-2019-16...

I run www.sunnyirrigation.com in Nairobi. We originate solar irrigation loans to smallhold farmers, so it is a combination of agtech and fintech. Growth areas in credit-model building, IoT data processing, in short - we heart engineers :)

Infarm https://infarm.com/ offer indoor farming to restaurants and supermarkets. They are opening a lot of new locations in Europe right now (mainly in Germany).

My friend just started working at Agricycle global. https://www.agricycleglobal.com/

One of their products is a charcoal for your grill made out of coconut shells.

Atfarm - https://at.farm - uses satellite data to provide precision fertilization maps for farmers across the globe. (Disclaimer: involvement in the setup)

TerrAvion (W14): https://www.terravion.com

We're what happened when drone companies realized you couldn't fly the entire corn belt with a drone.

Halter.co.nz has built smart collars for grazing animals that record their data and also automatically move them. Really ambitious project that will change grass based (healthy meat) farming if they nail it.

I've been impressed by some of the computer vision work Aerobotics are doing. EG counting and sizing citrus from drones, pest detection etc. Super solid data science team, from the chats I've had.

I thought this product sounds interesting:

https://www.sprowtlabs.com/

To achieve malting (the germination and kilning of barley etc) on a small scale.

https://tanibox.com we are doing farm management and monitoring platform. We released an open-source software too called Tania.

https://www.mytrev.com/

Trev is a farm reporting tool to provide insight into farm operations and performance.

Startup based in New Zealand.

One that I heard about last year and have been following – https://www.smallrobotcompany.com/

These guys are making an apple picking robot that's pretty bad ass: https://www.abundantrobotics.com

You could look at sustainability accelerators. For example, my company participated in the Techstars - Nature Conservancy accelerator. Almost 900 sustainability startups applied.

Strider (strider.ag), where I work at, is a segment leader in Latin America, and FarmShots (YC alumn) (farmshots.com) and Cropio (about.cropio.com) are some other examples.

https://heavywateraero.com/ Heavy water aero is trying to do some pretty cool stuff.

Plenty - Indoor vertical farming that's already in the California market. http://www.plenty.ag

WaterBit — https://Waterbit.com — real hardware deployed on real farms.

https://www.agerpoint.com high-resolution crop data through LiDAR

https://www.smart-ag.com/ - Autonomous tractors

* The Climate Corporation

* Granular

* Farmer's Business Network

* Inari

* Pattern Ag

* Solum

* Arable Labs

https://gro-intelligence.com/

Farmers Business Network - https://www.fbn.com

https://pycno.co - soil sensors and IoT stuff

https://resson.com/

Us at InnoVint have made an app for wine production, as well as vineyard analytic tools.

We’re hiring too!

www.innovint.us

https://wefarm.co

Picking squishy fruits without bruising them is apparently quite difficult

www.localrootsfarms.com

Shipping container-based vertical farms, primarily for leafy greens

Check out agfundernews.com

Check out growers.

following...very, very exciting.

arable.com

I'm sure this will just get lost in, but hey I'll say it anyway.

I've worked in aquaculture science for years before I moved onto programming (Pays better / I don't have to worry about farm alarms going off at 2 am). I've worked in nearly every type of far. I've been at some of the most cutting edge Recirculatory aquaculture systems in the UK, and I've taught degree and master students in the field.

Its a dishearting situation right now. Company after company in this field seems to be going bust because they keep having their technology stolen by the Chinese state.

Other than Salmon farming the UK aquaculture industry is fucked. Even if you automated everything, it's still cheaper to produce aquaculture products in third world countries and ship it in. The recirculatory aquaculture field as it stands is dependant on EU grants. (Which have stopped because of Brexit) And also renewable energy grants. A few years back, the government would pay you money to heat water with a biomass boiler. So it was and maybe still is to run a RAS system without fish in it.

I'm currently working on some R&D with Giant freshwater prawns (Macrobrachium rosenbergii,) to hopefully farm blue claws so that they form in higher densities. But this is only a side project and until major legislative change happens warm water aquaculture in the UK is fucked.