Data is the Greatest Accelerant in Ag-tech Innovation

As part of our “Back to the Future” project, we’re asking Agri-TechE members to reflect on how the agri-tech industry has evolved over the past decade and to share their vision for the next ten years. By compiling these insights, we aim to create a powerful outlook on the future of agriculture, a compelling call to arms for the industry driven by the diverse perspectives of our community.

This submission is part of the collection of reflections and predictions from our members, offering unique perspectives on the industry’s past milestones and future directions. Each contribution adds to a broader dialogue about the innovations and challenges that will shape the next decade in agri-tech.

Data is the greatest accelerant in ag-tech innovation

Agrimetrics is a software services business operating across agri-food, environment, and government. As our customers are responsible for critical infrastructure, we work by providing them with the most advanced expertise in software services to help them build pioneering systems, unlock insight and manage information.

Our customers are faced with significant and consequential challenges; population growth is stretching food production, net zero policies are of increasing impact, consumer attitudes to food and the environment are evolving, and information management is stretching legacy systems.

Data drives innovation

The greatest response to these challenges hasn’t been an individual piece of technology, but rather a cultural change in attitudes towards data. Sharing and utilising data has had a revolutionary impact on the speed and sophistication of innovation in ag-tech. Understanding what is happening on farm at scale allows us to monitor, report and verify the impact it has on the environment. Utilising sophisticated satellite imagery, on farm data collection, and cutting-edge software development, and data science means we are beginning to be able to measure the environmental impact of production with greater accuracy and speed so that we can begin to map whole supply-chains. These trends are set to continue and open the possibility of, for example, management of pest and disease risk at the landscape scale as well as improving sequestration of soil carbon.

Competition for investment

Our desire for a healthier and more sustainable planet has rightly captured the attention of a variety of industries, governments, and sectors. All these areas are competing for funding to help them accelerate towards a more sustainable future, be it for research, machinery, or technology. Identifying the most impactful solutions is paramount in securing funding and so the ag-tech sector needs to continue providing the explicit evidence of how its solutions and research is helping to increase sustainability. Many of the challenges faced are at a scale transcending the small businesses that make up the industry. Raising investment at the level required for transformative change is therefore a challenge, particularly in an environment of high interest rates.

Despite a weaker appetite amongst private investors, the government’s ag-tech strategy alongside its broader Net Zero strategy, which was published in 2022, highlights its commitment to investing in sustainable solutions. Organisations like ours are helping to develop further cooperation by developing world-class knowledge through a network of like-minded organisations. Through research & development as well as the implementation of pioneering technology, we are demonstrating how collaboration on sustainable solutions provides meaningful impact. We have has also recently taken responsibility for the significant upgrade to Defra’s Data Service Platform, which makes large volumes of data openly available, and are adding value to it by making it interoperable so that data from different data sets can be used together easily.

Innovating our way to a sustainable future

The UK’s Net Zero strategy and its ag-tech strategy have the same defining purpose: to lead the world in ending our contribution to climate change, while turning the mission into the greatest opportunity for jobs and prosperity since the industrial revolution. Through the innovation in the ag-tech sector, we can identify ways we can almost double our food production using less land, energy, and water. By ensuring data is easy to find, use and interpret we will be able to digitise our food system, ensuring its security whilst protecting our planet.