Farmers resistance, especially among smallholders, is often cited as the major barrier to technology adoption.
In reality, farmers have their own set of concerns when it comes to implementing new tech.
“There’s notion that farmers don’t like technology, and I tend to disagree. Farmers welcome technology to different degrees. But they don’t have the luxury of investing in technology with no evidence of the outcome… The worst situation is when you deliver some benefits but it’s very difficult to trace the benefit back to the technology,” said Isabelle Decitre, founder of ID Captial, a venture capital investment company based in Singapore.
She said farmers cannot afford to wait for technology to prove its value over a long period of time.
“A crop cycle of six months is too long for a farmer. They want to see evidence of the benefits in a shorter term and time horizon. Sometimes we’re talking about weeks… They need to see the trend to build the confidence that any extra effort, any extra cash investment is really worth it.”
Decitre emphasised that without immediate, tangible returns, even the most promising innovations will struggle to gain acceptance on the ground.
“What I’ve discovered over the last few years in agritech is that there’s not really a hurdle to tech adoption. But the cash-to-cash cycle is just very much not in the favour of any innovation that takes too long to prove and requires a leap of faith. That just doesn’t work in agriculture, especially when it comes to the smaller farmers.”
When it comes to the complex question of who should bear the cost of agtech, especially in the context of smallholder farming, Decitre believes the long-term goal is for farmers to foot the bill.
However, this needs to happen in phases, she added.
“Eventually, the people getting the benefit should pay for it but it’s a journey. It’s not unheard of that there are multiple phases. In phase one, the people who get the benefit are subsidised. In phase two, they pay half of it, and in phase three, eventually they pay the full price.”
During this period, the biggest challenge in scaling is is bridging the gap between technical functionality and commercial viability.
She added: “The difficulty with all these intermediate phases is that people tend to get a bit too optimistic when something works technically… When someone says it works, it also needs to work from a business perspective. That means having a real client, a clear price tag that makes sense for them—and that’s not trivial. It can take multiple phases to get there. But eventually, for me, it’s simple: the people who get the benefit should be the ones who pay for it.”
How to engage the ‘bottom of the pyramid’
Another challenge that agtech developers face is reaching and engaging smallholder farmers.
Decitre advised against treating smallholder farmers as a single group, especially in Asia where the landscape is anything but homogeneous.
Instead, agtech developers must seek out a targeted group of first movers among the farmers.
“The reality is for any tech developer is that you need to find the early adopters. You need to find the progressive farmers and those ones would be the tip of the pyramid, whatever the pyramid looks like,” said Decitre.
On the other hand, while organisations may have the tools, they often lack the local insight needed to engage farms and scale up across Asia’s fragmented farming landscape.
“If you really want to reach the numbers, the large numbers of the bottom of the pyramid farmers, you need grassroots organisations, which are very often the NGOs,” said Decitre.
These local partnerships are essential to bridge the gap between innovation and everyday farming realties.
“I don’t know of any single organisation that can deal without them. Banks, conglomerates, SMEs all need to eventually work with these people who have the proximity, the chemistry, the intimate knowledge of the daily life of a farmer, their families, their kids, their mothers – everything.”
