Descriptive: What current AgTech innovations are being successfully implemented? How are successful AgTech innovations currently being implemented?
Explanatory: What are the key characteristics of successful AgTech innovations? What are the best ways to market AgTech innovations?
Evaluative: How can breakthrough technologies make farming more efficient? Can private sector innovations be effective in causing large-scale impacts?
Instrumental: How can entrepreneurial methods be used to better implement AgTech innovations?
A common illusion for many people is that agriculture should be pure, traditional, and fit conceptions about what is natural, yet the Green Revolution in the 1960s completely transformed traditional methods for what is now considered modern agriculture. It introduced and popularized of pesticides and herbicides while also developing high-yield crops (Evenson et. al, 2003). In the time since, the population doubled while the food supply tripled with only a 12% increase in arable land (Dutia 2014). Recently however, growing concerns about needed to produce 70% more food by 2050 have been vocalized, the limits of the Green Revolution have been felt, and people have begun worrying about feeding the growing population once again (Dutia 2014).
Agricultural Technology, or AgTech, is a growing economic sector for technological innovation in the field of agriculture. Just in 2014, AgTech startups gained $2.36 billion in investments, surpassing well-known fields of Financial Tech and Clean Tech (Tilley 2015.) AgTech represents a revolution towards sustainable agriculture with ecological, social, and economic values (Dutia 2014). While this can hold different meanings for different people, this concentration will focus on increasing the productivity in high-yield, mainstream agriculture through technological innovation. Specifically, I am interested in technological innovations in the high-tech fields of biotechnology, nanotechnology, and information systems. I will be studying how these technical innovations can use entrepreneurial methods in order to disrupt the agricultural status quo.
The huge variety of AgTech innovations, from precision agriculture to in vitro meat, is exciting, but no end-all solution exists. Farms will have to figure out which technologies to implement for their own specific needs (IFPRI 2014). This means that AgTech innovations will need to be easy to implement, easy to use and manage, and easy to identify to fit specific needs (Aubert 2012). This is especially important in the field of agriculture because it is often steeped in traditional methods and values, particularly smaller and older farms (NRC 2002). Many current researchers are accomplishing this by becoming startups and going through the entrepreneurial methods of gaining investment, crowd funding, and extensive marketing (Tilley 2015).
This concentration will be situated in three different contexts. First of all, I will look at AgTech innovations in the Western United States. It will be useful to look locally because there is a huge influx of AgTech startups in the area, particularly in the Silicon Valley, looking to make big agricultural changes (Tilley 2015). Then, I will discuss AgTech in Southeast Asia, where agricultural innovations are starting to pick up, but it is still a largely untapped market (Frieschlad 2015). Finally, I will look into the uses of AgTech in Sub-Saharan Africa to show how AgTech may be used to build agricultural systems from the ground up in an area that has the most available, arable land (Juma 2010).
Citations:
Aubert, Benoit A., Andreas Schroeder, and Jonathan Grimaudo. “IT as Enabler of Sustainable Farming: An Empirical Analysis of Farmers’ Adoption Decision of Precision Agriculture Technology.” Decision Support Systems 54, no. 1 (December 2012): 510–20. doi:10.1016/j.dss.2012.07.002.
Dutia, Suren G. “AgTech: Challenges and Opportunities for Sustainable Growth.” Innovations: Technology, Governance, Globalization 9, no. 1–2 (January 1, 2014): 161–93. doi:10.1162/inov_a_00208.
Evenson, R. E., and D. Gollin. “Assessing the Impact of the Green Revolution, 1960 to 2000.” Science 300, no. 5620 (May 2, 2003): 758–62. doi:10.1126/science.1078710.
Freischlad, Nadine. “Agriculture Tech: Next Big Opportunity in Southeast Asia?” Tech in Asia, September 15, 2015. https://www.techinasia.com/agriculture-tech-big-opportunity-southeast-asia/.
Juma, Calestous. The New Harvest: Agricultural Innovation in Africa. Oxford University Press, 2010.
National Research Council (NRC). Publicly Funded Agricultural Research and the Changing Structure of U.S. Agriculture. Washington, DC: The National Academic Press, 2002. http://www.nap.edu/catalog/10211/publicly-funded-agricultural-research-and-the-changing-structure-of-us-agriculture.
Research Institute (IFPRI), International Food Policy. “Food Security in a World of Natural Resource Scarcity: The Role of Agricultural Technologies.” Washington, DC: International Food Policy Research Institute, 2014. http://www.ifpri.org/sites/default/files/publications/oc76.pdf.
Tilley, Aaron. “Forbes AgTech Summit: The ‘Connected Farm’ Is Still In The Pre-Internet Age.” Forbes, July 9, 2015. http://www.forbes.com/sites/aarontilley/2015/07/09/the-connected-farm-is-still-in-the-pre-internet-age/