Never trust an ag startup that's not near UC Davis, Salinas, Waginenigen NL, UIUC, Cornell, or Iowa State. I grew up on a farm, my parents still farm, and if anyone wants to be an ag-tech VC feel free to hire me but I'll give you one piece of advice gratis: never invest in an ag-tech company with HQ in a big city. Any farm boy could tell you this nonsense would never pencil out.
Half of this ag-tech shit is so stupid I wonder if it's not just straight-up money laundering.
I would like to second this. There are a large amount of comments on this site, just as one example, when anything ag is talked about that are just insanely uninformed. The assumption seems to be that farming is just good old boys doing what they've always done, instead of the massively data informed, extremely sophisticated business it is, even for family operations.
I was a full-time farmer until after graduate school. The guy who rents the family farm now farms to the square foot and sometimes even at precision even tighter than that (applying chemicals sometimes is based on the 1/2 square foot)! And that is over the entire 7-10k acres he rents/owns in total.
The amount and variety of data he uses is startling.
I shared this with my spouse, who worked for an ag startup in Boston (still exists, different leadership, who knows what they're up to now). They had this to say on the matter:
One big competitive advantage of [company] was that we were able to hire smart, young ag scientists, especially LBGTQ+ ones, who wanted to live in a big, queer-friendly city. We had a lot of great people who were really excited that they didn't have to live in Davis or Ithaca, as well as people whose partners' careers tied them to a big city in some way (doctors, lawyers, finance).
(They would also add UMich, University of Minnesota, and the Research Triangle in NC to your list.)
Half of this ag-tech shit is so stupid I wonder if it's not just straight-up money laundering.