My Agtech Evolution

I have long been concerned with food production. Years have talking to people at various parts of the chain have led me to believe that we are stuck in many local minima. It seems like our food system destroys the planet to make food that destroys us.

A few years ago, after facing some burnout from yet another company that talked about using their data far more than they were willing to actually invest in doing it, I started thinking seriously about food production. My idea was to work on it with my brother, who was living in the Australian countryside and already consulting in agtech. I changed my profile name to “AndyAgtech” and wanted that to be the way the world found me. My goal was to learn as much as I could while saving money doing data stuff to eventually get out of the increasingly scammy conventional “tech” world.

From a young age, I would browse the websites of nurseries and imagine growing all the fruit we wanted and more. When I was in high school, I remember making use of their greenhouse to grow peppers from Peru for my Mom. Years later, I made a garden at my desk that gradually expanded around the office. When I purchased a house near Seattle, I quickly converted the yard into a food forest, made with permaculture principles.

During the pandemic, I had the opportunity to live in Turkey. Over there, I had a chance to meet growers, researchers, and equipment manufacturers. I had a chance to visit a connected farm and village near Aydin that Vodafone helped create. I saw how tomatoes and peppers were grown in hothouses in south Turkey, and witnessed the infrastructure to quickly ship them in huge quantities around the country and to Europe. I witnessed how the dense country was able to produce large amounts of meat, with far less land available to them than the US.

I have been very interested in the Gulf since my early 20s, and living nearby gave me the opportunity to see some of what they were doing in the Controlled Environment Agriculture (CEA) space. They have abundant power and strong incentives to increase their local food production. Humans have been trying to control the environment ever since we first tried to farm the same plots repeatedly. As far back as Roman times, people built walls and ditches to grow plants that were found in warmer climates. Nowadays, CEA presents an opportunity for year-round local production, reducing shipping and increasing food sovereignty.

I looked for opportunities to apply my experience in signal processing, data science, cloud computing, and botany in the field. Yes, it seemed ridiculous that people in the US were shipping something as basic as salad greens thousands of miles, and people like those at AppHarvest saw that. I arranged appointments to visit vertical farms and to talk to people in the space.

While observing an impressive site, I remember having two strong realizations:

• We have parametrized and programmed the growth of many plants. Some crops, like peppers, are a solved problem, and will become even more programmable with CRISPR.

• Why am I studying salads, vegetables, and fruits? The most interesting things to me and human nutrition are meat and milk.

So I started looking at those supply chains and investments to see where things were going over the next few years. Naturally, the idea of a "connected cow" is very interesting, and people have always prized the genetics of superior animals, but it seemed that this things had very linear limits and investors had little interest in them. But I did notice that investors were very interested in something that was called "cellular agriculture", "precision fermentation", or "cultivated meat".

I made a deep dive into this area, and did my best to evaluate it.

I spent a non-trivial amount of my own money to go to industry events and investigate it. I enlisted the help of a friend with a PhD in Chemical Engineering and another friend with expertise in genomics to help me understand what I was reading about and seeing. But it was my training understanding social and investor networks that really helped me understand the dynamics.

I wrote some of my thoughts in my substack. I went to events around the world to talk to the researchers, founders, and investors. I met many researchers who dreamed of a better world, some vegan ideologues who dreamed of punishing farmers and the “racist rednecks who run the factory farms”, investors who saw an opportunity for the ultimate subscription product, and bureaucrats who saw a chance to become environmental heroes with little actual work of their own.

The last two groups intrigued and scared me the most.

I met some investors who were convinced that this would be their best investment yet. They were looking to enlist celebrities for their campaigns and lobby politicians to put even more pressure on farmers who already were facing death by a thousand cuts. This was the investors’ juiciest chance to get in on a monopoly. Some even saw it as their chance to get back at those inconvenient “country people” who voted for people they didn’t like.

And it is all quite ingenious. They can spread FUD with no consequences on the real product, pointing to the very real problems of long supply chains, microplastics, disease resistance, and many more challenges faced with traditional food production. With this iteration of synthetic meat and milk, they can call their product “molecularly identical” to the original, and they wouldn't be strictly lying.

As someone who used to go with my grandfather to a raw milk pick up point (which was raided by US authorities on multiple occasions), I grew up with a deep interest in food sovereignty. I brought this up to people at a Rogue Food Conference and messaged people from beef industry marketing boards. A lot of people were in denial about the possible future of their industry being made impossible, but legislative action in Europe and recently in the US convinced me that people were starting to take it seriously.

I am certainly not against novel foods and the development of bioreactor produced proteins and fats, but I think there should be greater public transparency about the future of the food system and more openness discussing the data.

Our technology should make it easier to have healthier local food.

When it comes to agtech, I am always looking for ways to contribute, and I continue to be alarmed by the cartelization and foreign control of much of the American food supply. While there may be a massive winter in funding for agricultural tech, our food supply affects everyone on a daily basis.

I continue to think about land use and our environment. I used to pick Labrador Tea (Ledum groenlandicum) at a park just south of Seattle. When I returned there last winter, I saw that everything had long been covered by invasive blackberry, ivy, and a thicket of English holly was forming. Apart from the tasty tea, it is a genetic resource that seems like it disappeared, and this is happening around the world. It is easy for many people in the Seattle bubble, where there is constant rain for months, to miss that much of Washington state is actually desertifying at an alarming rate. And this desertification brings cascading effects, like the increase in salinity of the groundwater (something that Iyris is addressing out in Saudi Arabia). Environmental degradation is a real thing, and it sometimes gets missed with all the other issues we face.

AWS and other vendors of imagery data are making it possible for people like me to do our own analysis. The gatekeeping on this used to be massive, but now someone like me can do something like recognize fires on a massive dataset from my desk.

So I am not actively working in the field, but it is a topic that I have given a lot of thought to and an area where I would like to contribute. I am not interested in working to further monocultures of crops that aren't even that good for humans (wheat, corn, rice, etc). But I am always looking for opportunities where we can use our increase in available data to contribute to a more robust and healthier food supply.

Please do not hesitate to reach out if you are hiring in this space.