What is AgriTech? And Why You Should Know More About It. 農業科技的未來你該怎麼參與？
- Ching Ma
- Aug 3
- 7 min read
Updated: Aug 5
In 2017, I started Hungry Food Delivery and spent months on farms and in packing houses asking naïve questions: Where does the time go? What breaks? What repeats? We sold the company a year later, but I kept tracking agtech for seven more years. The pattern was obvious: slow to adopt, huge when it lands. It’s an industry that compounds quietly and then matters to everyone.
So, what is AgriTech we are talking about?
It’s the marriage of agronomy with software, sensors, biology, and automation, transforming land, water, and labor into measurable, optimizable systems, allowing growers to produce more (and better) with less.
Agritech matters because it enables us to produce more food (and better) with fewer resources—and builds a food system that’s resilient, profitable, and sustainable.
What it enables
Higher yields, lower volatility: Sensors, models, and biotech reduce weather/pest risk and stabilize output—critical as demand rises toward mid-century.
Resource efficiency: Precision irrigation/fertilization cuts water, fertilizer, and pesticide use while maintaining or improving yield.
Climate resilience & lower emissions: Practices like regenerative ag, methane-reducing feed, and smarter logistics shrink agriculture’s footprint and buffer drought/heat shocks.
Labor gap coverage: Robotics and automation handle planting, weeding, and harvesting where labor is scarce or seasonal.
Profitability & risk management: Real-time data and marketplaces improve input timing, pricing, and working-capital cycles for farmers and buyers.
Food safety & traceability: IoT + ledgers track from field to fork, speeding recalls, reducing fraud, and meeting regulatory and retailer requirements.
Less waste, tighter supply chains: Cold-chain tech, grading/vision systems, and demand forecasting cut the ~one-third of food lost or wasted.
Inclusive growth: Mobile finance/advisory tools bring smallholders into markets with credit, agronomy guidance, and a guaranteed offtake.
From an operator’s seat, agritech is a lever for reliability, cost control, and speed across the field-to-fork value chain. It turns a volatile, biology-driven process into something you can plan, measure, and continuously improve.
Adoption & capital reality
Agtech adoption is uneven, with Europe/North America leading at ~61% of farmers using or planning to adopt tools within two years, while Asia trails at around 9%. Investor dollars skew early—seed/Series A—across five themes: alternative proteins, sustainable materials, controlled-environment ag, digital & precision ag, and sustainable inputs. The scaling gap is real: few IPOs or late-stage rounds, often because startups don’t reach sufficient customer adoption and market depth.
According to the AgF 2024 Annual Report, the 50% year-over-year funding decline is a result of fewer and smaller deals. The decline in deal activity was less pronounced than dollar investment at 26% year-over-year (and we expect more deals to come to light in the coming months).
Average deal sizes were down nearly 30%, year-over-year, and some 50% from 2021. While some deals have been down rounds, dramatically shrinking startup valuations, deal averages, and medians, there has also been a halt to dealmaking in many instances at the early stages. This is in part due to some founders’ refusals to lower their company valuation expectations, but in some cases, the correction has gone too far. Beleaguered plant-based company Beyond Meat has been trading on the Nasdaq stock exchange at a valuation of just 1x revenues; that’s far below the 3x-5x multiples you typically see with an acquisition or among publicly-listed CPG companies, let alone the 8-10x you might expect to see for tech companies. Given that VCs typically use the revenues and earnings multiples of publicly listed companies to model out an “if everything goes right” scenario when pricing early-stage rounds, “now, even a $15 million valuation for a well-performing Seed/Series A startup can look rich,” Rob Leclerc, our founding partner, wrote to investors recently.
What does the future hold for AgriTech?
Industry has an inherently different growth trajectory; mostly low margins, long R&D and sales cycles. Not a sector in which to get rich quickly! What also did not help is that government support has not materialized in a similar way compared to energy and mobility, for example. There, certain subsidy and tax
regimes effectively created a wholly new playing field. - Jaap Strengers Future Food Fund
Since 2018, when AI really started to break through, I’ve watched legacy sectors - credit, shipping, retail - rebuild themselves in real time. It made me ask a bigger question: what has driven agriculture’s evolution from ancient to modern, and how do we link those drivers across sectors to spark the next wave of innovation?
My thesis is true progress in ag comes from balancing biodiversity with ecosystem engineering—protecting what makes systems resilient while designing for scale and precision. It’s a hard, exciting problem, and it deserves leaders who invest not only for near-term returns, but for long-term balance and stewardship.
Aurora Aug.2025 Chicago
2017年創業Hungry Food Delivery的時候我就一直在思考科技的創新如何在各種物質層面提高我們的生產效率。直到一年後我們結束當時候的公司一路到現在經過快要七年的時間，我一直在追蹤整個農業科技的發展我才深深體會到，這是一個成長緩慢但影響巨大的一項產業革新。
我們對農業科技 Agricultural Technology（Agritech，農業技術的簡稱）應該不陌生。利用基因改造來提升農作物對氣候、蟲害及人為災害的應變能力。而廣泛來說AgriTech是指利用科技和創新來提高農牧業的效率、永續性和獲利能力。它涵蓋了各種各樣的工具和實踐:從無人機、感測器、機器人技術，到人工智慧驅動的數據分析、生物技術和垂直整合的農牧業系統，目的在改變糧食的種植、收穫、加工和分配方式。但，為什麼這麼重要呢？
因為它使我們能夠用更少的資源種植更多（更好）的糧食，並建立一個具有韌性、獲利能力和永續性的糧食體系。
提高產量，降低波動性：感測器、模型和生物技術降低了天氣/病蟲害風險，並穩定了產量，隨著21世紀需求的增長，光是這點至關重要。
資源效率：精準灌溉/施肥在維持或提高產量的同時，減少了水、化學肥料和農藥的使用。
氣候適應力和低排放：再生農業、減少甲烷排放的飼料和更聰明的物流等實踐可以減少農業的碳足跡，並緩衝乾旱/高溫衝擊。
勞動力缺口彌補：機器人和自動化技術可以在勞動力稀缺或季節性的地區處理種植、除草和收割。
獲利能力和風險管理：即時數據和市場可以改善農民和買家的投入時機、定價和營運資金週期。
食品安全與可追溯性：物聯網+財務技術，實現從農地到餐桌的全程追踪，加快召回速度，減少欺詐，並滿足監管部門和零售商的要求。
減少浪費加強供應鏈：冷鏈技術、分級/視覺系統和需求預測可減少約三分之一的食品損失或浪費。
包容性成長：行動金融/諮詢工具透過信貸、農業指導和有保障的採購，將小農戶引入市場。
就一個operator的角度來看，農業科技是確保從農地到餐桌整體價值鏈的可靠（塑）性、成本控制和速度。它將一個波動性大、由生物驅動的過程轉變為可規劃、可衡量且持續改進的過程。
應用與資本的現狀
農業科技的採用情況參差不齊，由歐洲及北美獨步，約有61%的農民正在使用或計劃在兩年內採用工具，而反觀亞洲則約9%而已。早期（種子輪/A輪）投資者的資金主要集中在五個主題：替代蛋白質、永續材料、環境控制農業、數位化和精準農業以及永續投入。但現狀就是規模差距是真實存在的：很少有IPO或後期融資，這通常是因為新創公司未能達到足夠的客戶採用率和市場深度。
根據 AgF 2024 年度報告，由於交易數量減少且規模縮小，去年融資金額全年減少 50% 。交易活動的下降幅度不如美元投資的同比 26% 下降（我們預計未來幾個月將有更多交易出現）。而平均交易規模較去年同期下降近 30%，較 2021 年下降約 50%。
雖然有些交易是低價輪次，導致新創公司估值、交易平均值和中位數大幅縮水，但在早期融資階段，許多交易也本身也容易陷入停滯。另外部分原因是一些創辦人拒絕降低公司估值預期，但在某些情況下，調整幅度過大，例如：陷入困境的植物基公司 Beyond Meat 在納斯達克證券交易所的估值僅為其收入的 1 倍；這遠低於收購或上市快消品公司通常看到的3到5倍估值，更不用說科技公司通常看到的8到10倍估值了。鑑於創投家在為早期融資輪次定價時，通常會使用上市公司的收入和收益倍數來模擬「一切順利」的情景，「現在，即使是表現良好的種子輪/A輪初創公司1500萬美元的估值，看起來也很高了，」我們的創始合夥人Rob Leclerc最近在給投資者的信中寫道。
最後，農業科技的未來會在哪裡？
農業科技產業有著截然不同的成長軌跡；利潤率普遍較低，研發和銷售週期較長。這並非一個快速致富的行業！更糟糕的是，與能源和交通等產業相比，政府的支持力道並不大。在這些行業，某些補貼和稅收制度實際上創造了一個全新的競爭環境。 —— Jaap Strengers 未來食品基金
自2018年人工智慧真正開始突破以來，我見證了信貸、航運、零售等傳統產業的即時重建。但這也讓我提出了一個更大的問題：是什麼推動了農業從古代到現代的演變？我們如何將這些驅動因素與各產業連結起來，從而激發下一波創新浪潮？
我的論點是：農業的真正進步在於平衡生物多樣性與生態系統工程，在設計規模化和精準化的同時，確保系統具有韌性是關鍵的要素。對我來說這是一個困難而又令人興奮的問題，它值得領導者不僅為短期回報而投資，也為長期的平衡和管理而投資。
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