HomeEducational ResourcesAgTech News Roundup – 6 February

AgTech News Roundup – 6 February

Feb 06 2025

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In this issue

• A look at the patent portfolio of Deere & Company
• What do the vast majority of agtech companies have in common? 
• Funding opportunities you might have missed
• Has Australia’s agrifood sector lost its competitive edge?

News & Insights

• A new series from Upstream Ag, ‘Patent Analysis: Uncovering the Innovations Shaping Agribusiness’, shines the spotlight on the patent portfolios of agribusiness innovators, and what this means for farmers & the industry. They start with one of the most influential players in agriculture; Deere & Company. (Subscriber content)

• If stock performance, valuation & revenue growth for the publicly traded agtech companies is your bag, PitchBook’s public comp sheet and valuation guide for agtech companies in Q4 2024 is essential reading.

• Here’s something you might not know. Many of the digital platforms used in agriculture rely on one of three ‘Big Tech’ providers for essential infrastructure like cloud computing and storage. Three researchers from the University of Bonn in Germany published this paper looking into the pros and cons of that arrangement, which is represented in the graphic below.  

Funding & Opportunities

TEKFARM

Led by Farmers2Founders and the Future Drought Fund Better Practices Program, TEKFARM provides support & funding to advisors, farmers and technology companies on Extension and Adoption of Drought Resilience Farming Practices. Find out more and register here.

MLA

Meat & Livestock Australia have 20 tenders and EOIs open for application, including agtech specific opportunities for the Australian goat industry, pasture biomass, Feedlot Cattle heat load forecasting, and sheep productivity. 

AgriFutures

AgriFutures Australia have a range of open call, EOI, and quote opportunities for initiatives ranging from chicken meat, emerging industries, honey and bees, and deer. 

Go Deeper

Has Australia’s agrifood sector lost it’s competitive edge? 

According to 44% of farmers who participated in Deloitte’s recently released positioning paper, titled Land of Plenty: Transforming Australia into a Food Superpower, it has.

Authors Vanessa Matthijssen and Ben van Delden suggest Australia’s food system is at a “tipping point”. This is due to the “increasing frequency and severity of climate events, trade tensions, a shifting geopolitical environment and an evolution of global markets at different speeds fuelled by regulation and government subsidies, creating an unequal playing field.” 

But there is hope. Change, new investment and a coordinatored approach can “propel the sector’s evolution”. Without it, “Australia’s food system faces the prospect of falling behind its international competitors.” The sector, writes Matthijssen and van Delden, is “at risk of not just stagnation, but a loss of resilience, global relevance and economic strength.”

The paper reccommends industry-wide change on the following three levels:

• Climate-smart farming
• Sovereign Supply Chains
• Global Markets & Competitive

Click here to download the paper, and if you want to go even deeper you can watch Ben van Delden’s keynote presentation at the Digital Agrifood Summit on the topic of Verifying Sustainability, recorded in October 2024.

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