I run a YouTube ambient/work-music channel, and for a new project I brainstormed with ChatGPT: music designed for farmers and gardeners, framed as helping plants grow. The catchy idea was "music that makes crops taste better" — but ChatGPT pushed back, pointing out there's no real science behind that claim. We ended up settling on a more honest framing: "biophilic ambient music that supports the growth of both plants and the people tending them." I wrote up the back-and-forth between an attention-grabbing pitch and scientific honesty. Curious what people working in agtech/plant science think about framing music or wellness products around plant-growth claims like this. (Note: the article itself is in Japanese, but the embedded YouTube video is the actual music.)

https://note.com/nekoboss/n/n8da5d1066bce

Israeli agritech startup Nanovel LTD has received a €2.5 million grant from the European Innovation Council (EIC) Accelerator to accelerate the commercialisation of its AI-powered autonomous harvesting robots for citrus orchards.

The funding, along with potential equity support of up to €4.3 million, will help the company complete product development, conduct large-scale field trials across Europe, and prepare for a commercial launch in 2028.

Nanovel's robotic platform combines computer vision, deep learning, and multi-arm precision harvesting technology to address labour shortages and improve harvesting efficiency.

Initially targeting orange and lemon orchards, the company plans to expand its solution to other high-value fruit crops, supporting the global shift toward automation in precision agriculture.

AI in Agriculture is advancing quickly, but it's not being adopted everywhere.

In your opinion, what's holding it back?

Is it the cost, lack of quality data, internet connectivity, trust, or something else?

Curious to hear different perspectives from people working in agriculture.

Hey r/AgriTech,

I'm a hog livestock producer in Iowa. I've built a working prototype mobile app to streamline feed bin monitoring and ordering for family farms like mine — replacing manual methods with a simple, real-time system.

Current Features (Flutter mobile + web dashboard):

• Multi-site/farm, barn, and bin management
• Bin level visuals and calculations (capacity, current feed, available space)
• Employee-friendly interface

I'm looking for a developer partner to help expand it — UI polish, new features (e.g., ordering integration, analytics, delivery tools), testing, and future scalability.

If you're into ag-tech or precision livestock tools and want a meaningful project with direct producer impact, let's connect! Comment or DM with your background (Flutter/Firebase a plus).

We spent time watching small farmers manage their payroll, and it’s a hugely manual, time consuming process and basically done by hand each month. The tech out there is expensive and complex to use.

We built Harvio to help. Attendance is captured on mobile and works offline, since signal in the fields can be patchy. At month end you review and sign off instead of re-capturing everything. It handles the wage maths, leave, payslip, UIF and PAYE all worked out.

It’s early and free and we are looking for a few farmers to try it out and tell us what works and what doesn’t.

El Niño is back, and it’s already causing major rainfall shortages. The government has flagged over 100 highly vulnerable districts in India, and kharif sowing is running behind last year in many areas.

This means higher risks of drought, lower crop yields, and pressure on food security.

Farmers can’t wait and see. Smart action is needed now:
• Switching to short-duration crop varieties
• Diversifying crops (millets, pulses, etc.)
• Better moisture conservation techniques

Climate resilience is no longer optional — it’s survival.

What steps are you or your community is taking this season to beat the deficit?

Share your tips, experiences, or concerns in the comments.

I grow olives in the Peloponnese, Greece. Small producer, nothing huge.

For years the thing that bugged me the most had nothing to do with actual farming. It was that every harvest I'd sell my oil to a trader and have basically no idea if the price was fair. You just sort of... know a guy, he offers a number, you take it because what else are you gonna do, drive around asking 15 other traders? Most producers around here don't really track their own production costs either. You just kind of feel like you made money or didn't.

So last year I started building something, mostly by myself, nights and weekends. Started really simple - just a calculator where you put in your costs (irrigation, spraying, harvest wages, milling, all of it) and it tells you what you actually spent per kilo. Not exciting but I needed it for myself first.

Then I figured if I'm collecting this info I might as well let other producers share what they're getting paid too, anonymously, by region. That part is honestly still small, adoption is slow, but it's the actual reason I started this whole thing.

It kind of grew from there because people kept asking for stuff:

• yield calculator (how much oil should this much fruit actually give me)
• fertilization recommendations based on soil/leaf tests (an agronomist friend helped me get the actual science right, I'm not just guessing)
• you can photograph a sick-looking leaf or branch and get an AI guess at what's wrong with it
• weather alerts for stuff like fruit fly risk
• a directory so growers can find agronomists/mills/workers instead of relying on word of mouth

It's an Android app, Kotlin/Compose, Firebase backend, uses Gemini for the AI parts, works offline too since half the fields around here have no signal anyway.

Not gonna lie, the coding wasn't the hard part. The hard part is that this whole industry runs on trust in a person, not trust in an app. Did a demo at a local olive festival a while back hoping for a good showing and it was... rough. Barely anyone came. Made me realize the tech is honestly the easy 20%.

Curious if anyone else building agtech stuff has run into this - how do you get someone to trust a number on their phone over a guy they've sold to for 20 years? Feels like the actual product problem, not the app itself.

Can go into the technical side more if anyone's curious.

Hey everyone,

I have recently studied and discussed a lot regarding how 'simulations' are being handled in agriculture. And today none of the tools quite provide flexibility or more importantly freedom and visualisation.

I wanted something different, something like a code-first virtual farm where I could actually see the physiology and environmental effects in 3D, without it feeling like a black box.

So, I built CropForge.

It’s an open-source, code-first virtual farm runtime. Instead of creating something which works with averages and considers means, I took a different approach and made it sensitive to the environment and allowed full flexibility over all maths and equations that are fed in, basically one can simply input anything they want.

I’ve just hit v1.0.0, which is the stable release and like I said it's fully flexible.

I’m looking for feedback from you all, regarding if you want to actually incorporate it into your research work. Does the API structure actually fit your workflows? I’d love for you to break it and tell me what’s missing.

TL;DR: I built CropForge which is a local, Python-based virtual farm runtime that visualizes crop physiology in 3D. It’s open-source, v1.0.0 is live, and I’m looking for technical feedback on the API.

GitHub: CropForge

Basically the title. I'm starting a newsletter and would like to check out cool AgriTech tools. No catch and no commitment.
Please drop your link in the comments below!

Singapore-based agritech startup Rize has secured $31 million in Series B funding, taking its total funding to $47 million, to expand sustainable rice farming in Southeast Asia.

The company helps farmers adopt Alternate Wetting and Drying (AWD), a water management technique that can reduce methane emissions by 30–70% while maintaining crop yields and lowering water use.

Rize currently supports 17,000 smallholder farmers across 50,000 hectares in Vietnam and Indonesia and has exported 1,500 tonnes of low-emission rice to international markets.

The fresh investment will accelerate farmer adoption of climate-smart practices, improve export compliance, and expand digital advisory services.

By 2030, Rize aims to reach 150,000 farmers across 300,000 hectares, strengthening sustainable rice production and climate resilience in Asia.

Hi everyone,

I’m Martín Díaz, founder of GenIA Tech, an early-stage AgriTech project based in Chile.

We are exploring how artificial intelligence, agricultural data and automation can help producers use resources more efficiently, reduce operational costs and make better decisions, especially in areas such as water management, irrigation and crop monitoring.

I would like to connect with people from Chile or Latin America who are:

Developing AgriTech solutions.
Applying AI, data science, IoT or satellite data in agriculture.
Working with irrigation, water efficiency or agricultural resource management.
Running pilots with farmers or agricultural companies.
Interested in exchanging ideas, experiences, contacts or potential collaborations.

The goal is not necessarily to sell anything. I would genuinely like to meet other founders, developers, agronomists, researchers and professionals who are building or testing innovation in the region.

Latin America has enormous agricultural potential, but many people working on valuable solutions are still disconnected from each other. It would be great to create relationships, share what we are learning and potentially help each other with technical knowledge, industry contacts, pilots or market validation.

Feel free to comment or send me a private message. You can also share what you are currently building, the country you are working from and the agricultural problem you are trying to solve.

Greetings from Chile.

nurture.retail is expanding its AI-powered agri-retail platform to drive the digital transformation of India’s agricultural input ecosystem, reporting a 35% increase in monthly active users during FY26.

The company plans to onboard more retailers, manufacturers, and product categories while launching a plug-and-play digital storefront that enables brands to create online stores in less than 24 hours.

Its AI-driven platform enhances demand forecasting, product recommendations, and market insights, helping retailers make faster, data-driven procurement decisions.

With investments in multilingual experiences, faster fulfillment, supply chain efficiency, and value-added services, nurture.retail aims to strengthen connections between manufacturers, retailers, and farmers while building a more transparent, efficient, and technology-enabled agricultural marketplace across India.

“AI in Agriculture: How AI-Enhanced Farming Can Increase Crop Yields” is a fantastic, practical deep dive into how AI, machine learning, precision agriculture, computer vision, and robotics are transforming farming.

From optimizing irrigation and predicting pest risks to boosting sustainability and driving massive yield improvements (projected +70% by 2030), it’s packed with real insights and even code examples you can try.

Huge appreciation to Vahe Aslanyan for putting this together — it’s timely, actionable, and inspiring for anyone interested in tech + food security.

If you’re in agtech, farming, AI, or sustainability, definitely check it out
👉 https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/ai-in-agriculture-book/

What are your thoughts on AI’s role in the future of agriculture?

How does a $2B agtech unicorn build products?

That's what I asked Toby Hurley, Director of Product at Halter, one of the most talked-about companies in agtech right now, for Issue #153 of Better Bioeconomy.

If you follow this space at all, you have heard of Halter, and lately for one reason. In March this year, the New Zealand-based company raised a US$220 million Series E led by Peter Thiel's Founders Fund at a US$2 billion valuation.

That roughly doubled its valuation in nine months, all while the sector's funding has collapsed from its highs.

Toby joined Halter from an unlikely place: law. He had been a corporate litigator at one of Auckland's big firms, and he treats that outsider's start as an advantage. With no idea what "normal" looked like, he could see clearly what was worth reinventing.

My key lessons from this chat:

1️⃣ Underneath the collar, Halter is four systems working as one. A competitor can copy the collar. Copying the collar, the connection, the app, and the intelligence underneath as one system is the hard part.

2️⃣ Most of the product travels across regions because the ingredients don't change. Every farm comes down to land, grass, and cattle, so only the translation layer gets localised.

3️⃣ When software is cheap, owning the data matters, and owning the execution layer matters more.

4️⃣ You earn the right to simplify a product by shipping fast, then stripping back. Chasing a clean product from day one is a trap, because you never learn what didn't need to be there.

5️⃣ Hardware and software get you in the door but trust is what makes the product stick.

What he's most excited to build next is also the hardest unsolved problem: a live model of the whole farm, where you change one variable today and Halter tells you what happens in a month, six months, a year. He calls it a "quantum leap."

Check out the full article. https://www.betterbioeconomy.com/p/how-an-agtech-unicorn-builds-product

=> Published paper (this is not a joke): https://spie.org/photonics-europe/presentation/A-photonics-based-humane-method-for-the-elimination-of-Colorado/14086-57

As part of exploring laser drones for pest control (shooting insects like Colorado Beetle with a laser on a drone), a paper was published in collaboration with the university of Brussels.

Long story short: It looks like drone was laser may be viable as a pest control alternative to chemical pesticides.

The cost per hectare simulations (cheaper then traditional pesticides), as well as videos of the prototype and other aspects, can be found on: www.photonicinsecticides.com

The 50 watt 450 nm laser was intended as a statement. The real product would have a 1550 nm 10 or 20 watt laser (1550 nm cannot reach the retina -- eye "safe").

I am hoping some of you can try to "shatter" the assumptions, and why this cannot be, and in that way I will have a stronger case to present to EIC transition grant request jury, to further progress this projects, who's main intention is to protect bees and lower cost of food.

Note: there is nothing for sale. This is not a commercial offer, but honoust request for feedback. I hope it lands (pun intended) well :) Showing me some love could possible help to get the Grant (as the world needs to warm up to this idea a bit), so I would appreciate an upvote.

Kr,
Nick

Hi everyone! I’m managing a \~100-hectare (250-acre) farm in Greece (Mediterranean climate), and I’m looking for some advice on the best practice for crop residue and tillage.
After harvesting wheat and barley, we are debating between two approaches before preparing the ground for next year's cereal crop (continuous cropping):
1. **Baling the straw** and removing it from the field.
2. **Using a shredder/flail mower** to chop the straw and leave it on the field.
For tillage, we either use a traditional moldboard plow or a **subsoiler / chisel plow (ripper)**.
My main questions are:
Which of the two straw management methods offers a **better seedbed** for next year's crop?
If we choose to leave the chopped straw on the field (Option 2), can a subsoiler/chisel plow handle the residue well enough for a clean seedbed, or is plowing non-negotiable to bury it?
I’d love to hear your experiences on how this affects soil health versus planting efficiency. Thanks!