AgriTech Trends in 2022: Technologies to Boost Your Startup`s Success

The agricultural market has made a great leap over the recent years. With the help of cutting-edge monitoring and biotech solutions, farms are becoming places of the future with advanced care about animals and plants.

Today we`ll overview the key tendencies of the agritech industry and hot startup technologies to increase your chances to succeed on this market.

What Is AgriTech?

Since traditional approaches in agriculture no longer provide the necessary volumes of products, agrotech is committed to solving this problem. By combining nature with modern technologies, this industry can reach the needed amount food to keep the world`s population healthy for centuries ahead.

The agritech market`s solutions are aimed to increase the performance, product quality, and economic efficiency of production, aligning with the requirements of environmental safety.

How Big is the AgriTech Market?

Back in 2019, the global volume of the agritech market amounted to roughly $17 billion. It is projected to hit $40 billion by 2027, growing at a skyrocketing CAGR of 11-13%. In the first three quarters of 2021, 440 startups raised over $8 billion funds worldwide.

The major market share is occupied by North American region, accounting for $6,7 billion. Some of the key growth drivers are the development of IoT and blockchain solutions.

According to PwC reports, the fusion of farming and digital solutions allows businesses to reduce costs by 10% and increase yields by the same amount. In the meantime, the use of IoT solutions in animal husbandry and agriculture can decrease the expenditures by 15-20% and lower the rate of livestock deaths by 15%.

AgriTech Trends in 2022

To increase your chances of success in the agritech industry, you should be aware of what is trending here. Here are the major tendencies that are expected to remain for the nearest future.

Agricultural Marketplaces

These are online platforms offering agricultural products both for businesses and customers. Some of their tasks are assistance to farmers in purchasing raw materials and equipment from manufacturers, search for sales channels for agricultural products, and logistics partners for shipments.

FinTech in agriculture

This is a combination of fintech solutions with agritech ones. Its aim is to improve credit opportunities for farmers and agricultural enterprises, as well as implement farm activity analytics systems for cost optimization.

In addition, fintech in agriculture empowers startups with marketing tools to boost their sales channels and expand customer audience. Finally, it provides alternative sources of monetization for farms like provision of carbon credits.

Farm managing software

Many agrotechnical startups are developing digital systems in order to make the operational process smarter by analyzing data from numerous sensors and even satellites.

Such tools help farmers determine how fertile the land plot is, foresee what climatic changes are expected in the near future, and see if the plant is healthy or not. These technologies allow startups to calculate the number and frequency of watering plants, the amount of fertilizers or feed required, the cost of maintaining a land plot by area.

Synthetic biology

This field uses the genetic material of an object as a structure that can be programmed like a computer. Thus, it is possible to give new or strengthen the current DNA qualities of a certain crop or breed of livestock to improve parameters such as yield and fertility, growth rates, resistance to severe climatic conditions, and more.

Robotics

Autonomous machinery and robots have a number of advantages over traditional tools. First, there is no need for an operator to control autonomous equipment, since the equipment is able to work independently at any time of the day and under different climatic conditions. Second, there is no risk of human injury when working in difficult conditions like mountainous areas. So only one specialist will be required to control an entire farm complex.

Modern drones, robots and unmanned vehicles are equipped with sensitive sensors, cameras, and computer vision technologies that allow them to deftly navigate in space, carefully harvest crops, accurately carry out irrigation and processing of the site.

Farming as a service

Vertical farms are high-tech agro-industrial complexes for growing crops that are gaining momentum on the market. Basically, they take care of micro-greens, lettuce, and a number of vegetables and berries. Due to their high yield, unpretentiousness, and resources economy, vertical farms enables businesses to solve the issues of availability of fresh vegetables, berries, and greens in megacities.

Startups focused on vertical farms either grow their own products and act as a high-tech farm, or supply equipment to those who want to become a farmer themselves.

Alternative food

The production of alternative food is mainly associated with ecological analogues to meat and diary products. Typically, these are animal products made with vegetable and mushroom protein.

The trend has emerged due to the shortage of traditional livestock resources for sufficient supply of the ever-growing population. Plant protein and insect protein are mainly used to replenish the resource. Besides, the need to reduce the harmful impact on the environment caused by the production of carbon gas during livestock farming is also driving the growth of alternative food production.

Top Technologies to Use in AgriTech

As soon as you`re familiar with the key trends of the agritech market, it`s time to grasp the hottest technologies you can empower your startup with to boost the growth.

Drones

They enable farms to monitor crops and livestock in hard-to-reach places. Drones are also implemented to make maps based on thousands of images and measurements, spot fertilization, and tracking the conditions in which crops grow. The market of agricultural drones has already exceeded $30 billion and is expected to become more wide-spread than traditional ground mapping.

With the help of computer vision, drones are able to notice the slightest deviations in the development of the plant. In the US they can diagnose diseases of crops, while in Asia they`re used to spot irrigation of fields.

Artificial Intelligence

AI-powered systems collect data from sensors on the ground, drones, and satellites. Thanks to machine learning, the technology learns to automatically select optimal agrotechnological solutions and provide farmers with real-time recommendations. Suce systems can say when it is better to water the soil, in which place more workers are needed, and so on.

The collected information is also combined with historical data on climate change. This allows farmers to calculate the yield from each plot and even the price change for their products.

Internet of Things

The cultivation of most crops requires specially-controlled environmental conditions to guarantee the quantity and quality of products. The IoT technology helps farmers the vital parameters of crops, such as temperature or soil moisture. Sensors are installed among crops to send the collected information to the cloud for storage, visualization, and analysis using IoT platforms.

Apart from monitoring, IoT systems enables entreprises to configure alerts, which frees farmers constantly checking the data. Instead, they immediately receive an alert when a problem occurs.

Farmers can also automate different actions using such systems. Based on soil moisture, the field owner can know exactly when to water the crop, so watering can be performed automatically. On top of that, IoT applications allow startups to track the health and location of livestock, create smart greenhouses, fight pests with drones, and so on.

BioTech tools

Genetic engineering is one of main biotech segments that provides solutions related to changing the DNA sequence in cells. Crops with edited genes are the most cost-effective for organic production. Such plants are usually resistant to drought, immune to diseases, and bring a better harvest as a result. The method is also used in animal husbandry.

Now startups are trying to identify and isolate the organisms that are most useful in different environments, and create products based on them. The reason is concern about overuse of synthetic products which results makes companies explore natural biological alternatives, in particular microbial or bacterial solutions.

Satellites

The availability of stable satellite communications allows farmers to work remotely and use automated processes for agricultural activities. Here are some of the major challenges they are coping with:

• Cattle and environment monitoring. In some areas, it is almost impossible for farmers to manually track and protect their livestock from poaching, avoid herd loss and other hazards. By using remote monitoring, farms can receive immediate notifications of any threats. Besides, early warnings of natural disasters and sudden weather changes help farmers to save livestock or crops.

• Tracking of the equipment performance. Agricultural machinery sometimes fails and unravels. However, satellite systems provide up-to-date information about maintenance problems, performance indicators, fuel, and energy consumption.
• Transport and logistics. You can easily track the delivery of agricultural products from farms to processing stations and optimize transportation methods. In addition, they can control individual containers, trolleys, and even pallets with products.

Conclusion

Digital transformations are gaining the trust of investors, which has put agrotech on an upward growth trajectory. Agriculture in India has come a long way and with the advent of high-tech startups, it has the opportunity to become the worldwide leader.

The digitalization of agriculture is also facilitated by the influx of entrepreneurs who appreciate the advantages of up-to-date technologies. In the near future, we should expect further development of such segments as e-commerce, smart agricultural machinery, artificial intelligence, precision agriculture, and hydroponics. The digitalization will also affect food systems, logistics, storage facilities, quality control, as well as financial transactions.