Coming fresh from a recent funding round, Agronomeye is laser focussed on helping farmers better understand their land, so they can boost productivity, and reduce degradation.
We spoke to Stu Adam, the company’s CEO, about how ag-tech can drive positive impact.
What does your business do, and who are your customers?
Agronomeye develops digital twin technology to help farmers make the best use of their property.
Our Digital Foundation and AgTwin™ platform offers access to detailed maps and models of farms in very precise detail, helping land owners and managers understand what’s going on across their property, in real time, so they can make better decisions.
Focusing on clearly identifying risks and opportunities across the landscape ensures our customers focus their attention on long term meaningful value – both production and environmental value.
What’s your mission?
To unlock ‘nature positive’ agriculture through productive, profitable and efficient farm businesses.
What does it mean to you, to be a ‘social enterprise’?
To be a business that is working to improve the outlook of society
Can you scale a mission? Are there challenges around growing your business, while also staying committed to your impact thesis?
It’s not easy, but the things worth doing rarely are. Agriculture is a sector with long sales cycles, deeply ingrained incumbent practices and unpredictable threats to productivity like weather and climate. There are many challenges facing agriculture and most of them are day to day challenges.
For the ag sector to be a cornerstone in the globe’s rapid transition to net zero there must be economic signals while balancing a need to feed the world. Sri Lanka has an almost perfect ESG score but their economy is in turmoil and a lot of that is related to their organic farming mandate.
This balance, paired with the urgent need to act in order to mitigate climate change should not be understated.
How have you seen investor sentiment change over the past 5 years, when it comes to recognising the value (or cost) of being mission-led?
I doubt there has ever been a more dramatic shift in investor sentiment than over the past five years. Mission-led is THE place to be and not only because we need to do ‘good’ but the economy is now demanding we do ‘good’. Impact is not a nice to have for an investment portfolio in 2022 it’s a must have.
Was there a business (either local or globally) that influenced the development of your organisation?
Children standing on the shoulders of giants still see further than the giants. There is a rich history of earth observation and agtech companies who have paved the way for Agronomeye to be building our technology. To list one would be unfair.
What’s in store for your business in 2022?
We’ve just closed a funding round (good timing), released v1 of our AgTwin platform, hiring experts in geospatial and ESG and delivering product to more than 2m ha of ag land in Australia.
The rest of 2022 is about building powerful use cases that prove we can increase agricultural productivity hand in hand with sustainability… and show that farms can get paid to save the world.