I’ve built an agtech platform before. It was called Grown Not Flown. It grew. It worked. It had more than 2,100 growers and 7,000 users across 37 countries. And then I shut it down.
Now I’m building another one, AgSide, and before we’ve even properly launched, we’re seeing huge interest. So I’ve had the slightly unusual experience of seeing agtech from almost every angle.
I’m a founder. I’m a farmer. I’m a business owner. I’ve built technology for agriculture, sat through accelerator programs, spoken to investors, worked with industry bodies, applied for funding and had hundreds of conversations with the people these platforms are supposedly being built for.
And there’s one thing I keep coming back to. Agtech doesn’t have an ideas problem. It has a problem-understanding problem.
Too many people are solving agriculture from the outside
I’ve been in a lot of rooms where decisions are being made about what farmers need. Funding decisions, program decisions, innovation priorities, startup support, technology adoption strategies.
And surprisingly often, the people making those decisions have very little direct experience of running a farm, building an agricultural business or trying to implement technology inside one.
That doesn’t mean you have to be a farmer to work in agtech. Of course you don’t. But it does mean we need to stop confusing knowing about agriculture with understanding how agricultural businesses actually operate. There’s a big difference.
You can interview 20 farmers and still misunderstand the system. You can run a workshop and identify a pain point without understanding why that pain point exists. You can produce a beautifully designed piece of technology that solves exactly the problem described in the funding application — and still build something nobody wants to use.
Because what people tell you is the problem isn’t always the problem. Sometimes it’s just the most visible symptom.
The problem underneath the problem
Imagine a farmer tells you: “I need an easier way to manage bookings.”
Great. You could build them a booking system.
Except maybe the real issue is that their internet connection is unreliable. Or their customers mostly book by Facebook message. Or the person running the tours is also lambing, answering emails, fixing fences and doing the school run. Or the business only runs experiences three months of the year, so another $100-a-month software subscription makes no commercial sense.
Or bookings aren’t actually the bottleneck at all. Maybe the real problem is discovery. People simply don’t know the experience exists.
Suddenly, “farmers need better booking software” looks very different.
None of that is hypothetical. It comes from my own experience.
And this is where a lot of agtech gets into trouble. We see a problem. We isolate it. We build something to fix it. Then we wonder why adoption is low.
Farms aren’t problems. They’re systems.
One of the biggest changes I’d like to see in agtech is more systems thinking.
Agriculture is an interconnected system of people, land, weather, regulation, supply chains, technology, cash flow, labour, family, infrastructure, biology and risk. Change one part and you often affect five others.
That matters when you’re designing technology. Take something seemingly simple like introducing a new piece of software.
- Does it integrate with what the business already uses?
- Who enters the data?
- Where does that data come from?
- What happens when the person responsible is in a paddock rather than behind a desk?
- Does it create another login? Another subscription? Another system that needs maintaining?
- Does using it require behaviour change?
- Who benefits from that behaviour change?
The farmer? The processor? The government? The technology company? Because those are not always the same thing.
You cannot separate the technology from the environment it needs to operate in.
Adoption isn’t a farmer problem
One phrase I hear regularly in innovation circles is some variation of: “Farmers are slow to adopt technology.”
I think we need to be much more careful with that assumption.
Farmers adopt useful technology all the time. They adopt technology that saves money. Technology that saves labour. Technology that reduces risk. Technology that clearly makes their business easier or better.
What they are understandably less enthusiastic about is technology that gives them another administrative task, requires duplicate data entry, creates questionable ROI or solves a problem they weren’t particularly worried about in the first place.
Sometimes what gets labelled an “adoption problem” is actually a product problem. Or a business model problem. Or an implementation problem. Or a trust problem. Or simply a wrong-problem problem.
Telling the customer they need to become better at adopting your solution is a fairly convenient way of avoiding the harder question:
Did we build the right thing?
Education is one part of the solution
At events, workshops and mentor programs, I see the same thing. Everyone talks about the problem, and nearly everyone thinks more education is the solution.
Education is one part of it. But the thing we actually needed help with was education, plus the tactical, plus the technology. And I say “we” wearing both hats: farmer and founder.
The tactical is the understanding and experience to actually do the do, in a way that takes an individual’s circumstances into account. Instead of “this is how you do it”, it thinks about the ecosystem the doing happens within. The permits, the logistics, the skillsets, the funding, the resources. Everything that sits around “this is what you need to do”.
It’s the showing and supporting part, instead of the telling.
Funding can accidentally reinforce the problem
There’s another uncomfortable part of this conversation. The way we fund innovation can encourage founders to fit messy agricultural problems into neat boxes.
I’ve lived this one. A big part of why I shut Grown Not Flown down was that it was impossible to convince the people who held the power that what we did mattered enough to fund. It grew, it worked, it had growers in 37 countries, and that still wasn’t enough.
A grant wants a defined problem. An accelerator wants a scalable solution. An investor wants a large market. A program wants measurable outcomes.
All reasonable things individually. But agriculture rarely behaves neatly. And when funding structures start defining the problem before founders have had the opportunity to properly understand it, we risk building solutions backwards.
- Start with the funding category.
- Find a problem that fits.
- Design the innovation.
- Then try to convince farmers they need it.
It should be the opposite.
- Start with the system.
- Get uncomfortably close to the problem.
- Understand the people living with it.
- Work out why the current situation exists.
- Then decide whether technology should be involved at all.
Because sometimes the best solution to an agricultural problem isn’t more technology. That should be allowed to be an outcome too.
Lived experience matters — but so does curiosity
I have an advantage building in this space because I sit across several worlds.
I know what it’s like to build a technology company. I also know what it’s like when there are jobs on the farm that cannot simply be moved to next Tuesday because your calendar is full. I understand business models, operations and technology. But I also understand that every farm is different.
My experience doesn’t mean I automatically know the answer. It means I know enough to ask better questions. That distinction matters.
We don’t need agtech dominated exclusively by farmers. We need multidisciplinary teams. Technologists, researchers, designers, founders, farmers, industry, commercial operators. People who understand behaviour. People who understand systems.
But we need the people closest to the problem involved early enough to influence what gets built — not invited in at the end to validate something that has already been decided.
Maybe the question needs to change
Because agriculture does need innovation. There are enormous opportunities ahead of us. AI, automation, robotics, marketplaces, sensors, data, logistics, new business models and better digital infrastructure can all play a role.
But more technology does not automatically mean more innovation. Sometimes innovation starts much earlier. With understanding. With curiosity. With getting close enough to the problem that you stop seeing the obvious answer.
I learned an enormous amount building my first agtech platform. I’m carrying all of those lessons into the next one. And perhaps the biggest is this:
Fall in love with the problem if you want to. But before you try to solve it, make sure it’s actually the problem.