Driving Innovation in Agri-Tech

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.

What trends you have seen in over the past 10 years?

 Ten years is quite a long time in technology!  The continued emergence of robotics, the use of drone technology and the ongoing development of plant sciences have all been areas of significant growth in the past ten years.

There has also been an encouraging proliferation of accelerators and incubators for agri tech with researchers being given much needed space and support to develop their ideas and technologies.

We are also seeing an increasing number of international collaborations – the UK is good at developing world class agri-tech!

What support does your area need to enable advancement in agriculture in the coming 10 years?

There needs to be greater collaboration between research and developers as we come across so many people trying to do the same thing. If we could find a way to efficiently optimise the use of brains and money we would be propelled into a completely different level of innovation.

There is also the age-old challenge of translating and commercialising that science and currently a significant amount of UK research is being commercialised overseas due to a lack of the entrepreneurial skills needed to achieve this successfully.

Alongside all of this that there needs to be more engagement with grass root farmers, agriculturists and advisors as to what they actually need rather than what people think they need – less blue sky and more brown earth!

There is also the challenge of deployment as cost can be a significant factor in farmers and landowners being able to embrace and commercialise at scale the technologies being developed to, for example, address climate change. One way to achieve this would be if supermarkets offered longer term contracts to farmers, then it would enable producers to invest at the required scale.

In terms of regulation natural capital solutions need to develop strong robust models to give confidence to investors in those markets, underpinned by strong codes and regulations, for example an equivalent of the peatland/ woodland code for soil carbon.

What trends are you hoping to see in the future?

Diversification of funding is necessary to continue to retain world class science in the UK.

The government has already identified unlocking money held by pension funds as a potential source of financial support but the means and mechanisms to actually deploy those funds is yet to be identified and delivered.  However, diversification of funding can come from many sources including Family Offices, many of which have agricultural land amongst their asset class, as well as sovereign wealth funds.

It would be great to see the realisation of the vision of the UK as a Science Superpower by not only starting companies here but retaining them as they scale.

Nicola McConville, Partner

Mishcon de Reya LLP