To state the (painfully) apparent: The fates of agriculture and local weather change are inextricably linked.
The climate dictates what grows the place and when, however because the Earth warms beneath a wool blanket of extra carbon, agriculture is particularly weak in methods you may not count on.
Document-setting warmth and droughts fry grasses that farmers depend on to feed cattle, hotter temperatures are a boon for pests and fungi that hurt crops, smoke from wildfires taint harvests, and excessive climate and rising seas make it more difficult to move everything (together with meals) round. The threats to meals safety and livelihoods go on and on.
Undoubtedly, this has some deal-makers in tech salivating. As startups search for methods to adapt the worldwide meals system to the chaos of at the moment, we reached out to seven agtech investors to get a greater understanding of how the local weather disaster has knowledgeable their methods to this point.
“Local weather challenges should not new to anyone working within the broader meals and agriculture area, so our strategy is to put money into options that may assist mitigate and adapt to local weather change,” Yield Lab associate Camila Petignat instructed TechCrunch.
Themes the agency appears to be like at “embrace soil and water conservation, improved use of crop inputs, the shift from chemical to organic crop safety options and discount of meals waste,” Petignat mentioned.
“We may argue,” Petignat added, “that the elevated consciousness of carbon markets in recent times has triggered new alternatives on the intersection of agtech and fintech, an area that we’re enthusiastic about.”
“India is among the most weak nations to local weather change,” Omnivore managing associate Jinesh Shah instructed TechCrunch. “Agriculture represents 20% of India’s GHG emissions, however the sector can also be extremely weak to the impacts of local weather change, which can start to threaten Indian meals safety within the coming decade.” he mentioned. Agriculture is liable for about a quarter of global greenhouse gas emissions, per the EPA.
Shah added that the agency’s technique is to “put money into startups that align with a number of of our 4 key pillars — rising smallholder profitability, enhancing smallholder resilience, enhancing agricultural sustainability and catalyzing local weather motion.” The investor went on to state that agtech in India should “evolve past digital applied sciences (farmer platforms and B2B marketplaces), and we glance to agrifood life sciences for long-term options to local weather change.”
Read the full survey to be taught the place traders need to make investments, what’s on their minds proper now, the easiest way to pitch and phone them, and perceive which rising applied sciences have captured their consideration.
