Big Data, Robotics and Synth Bio: Driving “The New Agriculture”

by Jim Lane (Biofuels Digest) ... If you haven’t been to an LP meeting before, they are generally intimate gatherings of venture capitalists, their underlying investors (the Limited Partners), portfolio company CEOs, and some thought leaders invited to share their perspective on sector opportunities and challenges.

BioGreenTech? Consider it a spectrum including plant and animal agriculture; food, feed, and nutrition; bio-renewable chemicals and materials — and the “big data” analytics, robotics, production, harvesting and use of natural resources, and synthetic biology that provides the transformational science disrupting traditional markets in ag, food and materials.

The drivers are as new as the technologies to solve them — many of them were front and center at the Paris Climate Change talks, and discussions at FAO and the World Economic Forum — and just about everywhere else.

1. Climate change and a heightened interest in sustainability and natural resource management including water and land.

4. Regulatory uncertainty that impacts gene modification and markets for renewables.

1. Plant improvement, from genotype enhancement to phenotype selection and deployment.

2. Automation, from self-driving tractors to unmanned aerial robots that replace scarce labor and bring new complex real-time data.

3. Transformed pest management, moving from traditional chemicals and biologicals, to more integrated pest management, including microbials as well as new chemicals and breeding — and opportunities in the plant’s micro-biome.

4. Data science — big data management allowing for faster, better cheaper decision-support tools.

5. PrecisionAg — more targeted delivery of water, crop protection, and seeds to optimize yield and minimize inputs.

“VCs have stepped into agriculture and food in a big way, in part because of the rise of the importance of protein but also because of the convergence of data technologies which have brought synergies with traditional high tech investment in digital technology — it can make for strong syndicates through partnering,” (MLS Capital II Fund co-chair Roger) Wyse added.

We see very limited grasp of marketing amongst the companies in this space — an almost laughable naïvete on how to build brands, enter markets and crash through barriers that incumbents raise. It’s a faith in the power of technology alone, and a curious attachment to “success stories” in new foods and materials that have generated sub-5% market shares. It was the hallmark of Apple between 1985 and 1997 — technological prowess, a cluttered product set and low-wattage design and marketing, and the same hubris that condemned ethanol to its present fuel ghetto. But, it’s early days — we’ll mark that as a point of future concern. READ MORE and MORE (Singularity Hub)