Creating more pilot farms to trial new technologies may help to grow the AgTech sector and increase uptake among farmers, an industry event has heard.
Aidan Connolly, president of investment firm AgriTech Capital, said that the demand for food is projected to increase by 70% by 2050.
However, he said that agriculture is among the least digitised industries in the world.
“It is fair to say it’s not like being in a car factory, it’s not like being in pharmaceuticals. We’ve weather, we’ve got disease, we’ve insects and pests, we’ve a lot of factors out there that are very variable. But nonetheless, glass half empty, glass half full, we have an awful long way to go,” he said.
Farms
Connolly, who is the former Alltech chief innovation officer, was the keynote speaker at the recent AgriTech Ireland Industry Day at the RDI Hub in Killorglin, Co. Kerry.
He told the event that the crops sector is around 10 years’ ahead of livestock in terms of the use of digital technologies.
“These gaps in our knowledge are not only enormous but they’re massive opportunities to improve productivity, massive opportunities to improve sustainability, massive opportunities to improve welfare around animals, because today what we don’t know is enormous.”
The AgriTech Capital president believes that “the survivors in this new transformed world, in this new disrupted agriculture, are those who are going to embrace change quickly”.
“If you are not willing to embrace change quickly, you will become irrelevant,” he added.
Connolly said that there is a lot of discussion currently about the ability of the agriculture sector to reach net-zero emissions by 2050.
“I’m not that optimistic, I think it’s not easy to do. I think we’re going to have to embrace all of these ideas all at once and probably speed up the rate of adoption from the current level,” he said.
Connolly said that there is a gap between “tech development in cities and what the reality is on the farm” and bridging that gap can pose a problem.
He suggested creating pilot farms where farmers agree to work with a company to determine if a new technology will work.
James Maloney, senior development advisor with Enterprise Ireland, added that start-ups could considering collaborating with established small and medium enterprises (SMEs), that farmers already trust, to bring a technology on farm.
AgTech
Data from Enterprise Ireland shows that employment in the Irish AgTech sector grew by 13% year-on-year in 2022.
The sector is aiming to double its size in terms of employment and sales in the next decade.
Aidan Connolly said that one of the challenges in scaling up Irish companies is that some of the technology is designed for Ireland “but doesn’t think about the world”.
He said that companies must also have the appetite to want to grow.
“The reality is that we have to constantly be looking to disrupt ourselves, transform ourselves and prepare for the next level,” he said.