Will AgTech be the next FinTech?

For sure. Always amazes me that we still rely on commercial fishing. I think there will be massive strides made in aquaculture. Margins can be fat. Disease is an issue.

maybe but it has been talked about for years. do you know any interesting companies in the space?

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Population is growing, available land is getting smaller. Plus, you have tech to help you. Seems like a formula for future growth.

I don't know about FinTech per se, but this could have profound effects on real estate in cities, and with the growth of blockchain technology it would help with being able to track where agricultural products come from, catch germs/disease/issues in the supply chain, etc.

Yes.

A very simple yes.

No. I think fintech through its many verticals is extremely disruptive, and will have a greater impact on the world as a whole (1) disrupting the major banks, (2) changing the way we use money/transact (3) crypto/blockchain. 

With that being said, AgTech will probably be hugely impactful & is a really interesting space. But for many reasons that I'm too lazy to state, I don't think the two are really all that comparable (outside of disruption potential). 

Yes, I don't mean to wax all tech-broey here, but I genuinely think the agricultural industry is one of the last frontiers of innovation/wholesale disruption. Smart money has already been circling the space since mid-2010s, but the valuations are not yet out of whack if you look at VC investments. People talk a lot about vertical farming but there's so much that's already taking place in the space that is largely ignored for whatever reasons. Here's a few off the top of my head:

- Cultivation advancements & CRISPR in agriculture. The most commercially available banana on a global scale, the Cavendish variety, is on the verge of extinction largely due to a disease that rendered its predecessor, Gros Michel, extinct. It's still very early but there was a scientific breakthrough a couple months ago where some Aussy scientist was able to demonstrate through field trials that a Cavendish line, resistant to the disease, can be developed. CRISPR will help to actualize this breakthrough and help to hopefully bring this variety at commercial scale after 5+ years (Fresh Del Monte has already jumped on this & partnered with the scientists involved with the breakthrough so it's pretty serious). Another accomplishment that no one mentions is how England, France, and Holland have been growing quinoa, at admittedly relatively small scales, for several years now thanks to creation of new Quinoa varieties that are able to be grown in those environments.

  - We hear a lot about the Teslas, Waymos,and the whole self-driving cars shabang, but what about autonomous tractors? Some form of autonomous tractors have been around for at least a decade thanks to NASA's nearly-two decade collaboration with John Deere on GPS technology. We are at the point where John Deere unveiled a fully autonomous tractor since 2019. Like self-driving, we're still a bit far away in terms of having fully autonomous tractors, but the progress we've made so far is encouraging. Besides autonomous tractors, I won't even get into the robotics stuff they are trying like laser robots as an alternative to use of pesticides.

- Big data/Analytics will eat farming. The potential of space is not just limited to rare earth mining and assessing the viability of colonization.  Check out the concept of precision agriculture. Some farmers are already receiving real-time photos of their farms from satellites in space that give them insight on crop yield, crop area, and the EXACT required amount of fertilizer. All of this helps with financial planning, sustainability, and productivity for farmers.

 There's a lot more I could point to in terms of experimenting with seaweed as cattle feed to drastically reduce methane emissions, machine learning in Agriculture, even more on precision agriculture like hyperspectral imaging (& its implications for food distribution), shelf-life extension developments, etc. but I won't bore you and much of this stuff is still not at meaningful scale. The point is the industry is ripe for innovation because there are many challenges to overcome, and there are some who are already positioning themselves to find, fund, and scale solutions. Happy to share news resources.

My nephew is studying Agribusiness/ agricultural business operations at Cal Poly - it seems interesting.

I’ve thought about trying to do something in this space, but never got beyond idle speculation (story of my life, right?). The need is there and growing rapidly (and will accelerate if climate trends hold), and the addressable market is absolutely massive. 
 

Unfortunately, the price and margin on most ag products is low, while the capital requirements for tech development are high, which suggests that unless you can provide meaningful improvement and eat a large loss while you scale, the juice may not be worth the squeeze… probably a worthy target for someone like Softbank though (or at least a more interesting money pit than micro-offices for tech bros)

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What coverage group would cover Agriculture Technologies? Nat Res? Tech?