The agriculture industry is gearing up for another challenging year, as persistent issues — a struggling farm economy, trade turmoil, and lack of adoption and funding for innovative technologies — are leaving a mark on the sector. However, with challenges come opportunities, as the ag sector takes an active role in combatting numerous health crises and global food waste.
These issues lay the foundation for what’s to come in the year ahead. Below, AgTechNavigator editors reflect back on 2025 and share their thoughts and predictions for 2026.
The agtech funding ice age continues ... unless a new buzzword emerges
By: Ryan Daily, Americas editor
Industries live and die by buzzwords. Industries also live and die on how these buzzwords evolve and how they can capture a market.
Throughout the timeline of the Covid pandemic, in-person working led to remote working, which led to the new normal of hybrid working – the work-from-anywhere movement. Video meeting platform Zoom leaned into the changing times, becoming a market leader, and the default for millions of workers around the globe.
Agtech has not had the same evolution, as agtech does not inherently convey a solution to a problem but rather a catch-all for anything — and everything — that can be considered a tech solution for the ag industry.
Consider the agtech venture capital funding slump. 2025 was another bad year for funding, and 2026 is expected to be more of the same. When many investors hear the words “agtech” or “foodtech” now, they meet it with skepticism at best or fear they will never receive a return on their investment at worst.
However, agtech companies that embraced a shift in marketing and terminology – i.e., embracing AI – are faring better, as PitchBook reported.
AI is undergoing its own buzzword evolution, as the term “physical AI” appears in more press releases and corporate earnings calls, demonstrating a shift from the conceptual to the practical real-world application of the technology. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang made physical AI a main theme of his Consumer Electronics Show presentation.
Buzzwords are not just important for the corporate equivalent of “keeping up with the Joneses.” These words serve as industry grounding rods, capturing important market trends, and providing companies with ways to compare their products and services against their competitors.
This is not to dismiss the work agtech companies are doing and the real problems that they are addressing across the world – whether it is robots in California or biologicals in Brazil. However, these companies will need capital to solve even more problems, and investor appetite for agtech appears to be withering in a field somewhere.
So, agtech might need to go, but what will replace the term is unclear. The future of agriculture will have more automation, AI, biologicals, and everything that agtech represents. However, these products and services’ best path forward might be sticking out – embracing bold and unique messages and terms – as opposed to being more like their neighbours.
Food waste takes centre stage in 2026
By: Gary Scattergood, editor-in-chief
2026 needs to be the year food waste takes centre stage, and agrifood innovation looks beyond productivity to deliver more targeted nutritional and public health outcomes.
Asia-Pacific (APAC) accounts for 50% of the 1.3bn tonnes of food wasted annually. In South Asia alone, where one-in-four are born with a low birth weight and one-in-three children under five are stunted, a staggering 40% of all food perishes.
It is, literally, a colossal waste. And it doesn’t get the attention, or investment, that it clearly needs.
We hear far more about innovations in increasing yields, reducing inputs, maximising data, and driving technological integration at the pre-harvest level, than post-harvest.
There are multiple reasons for this, but there are signs that the needle could start to shift in 2026.
First, the challenges: Preventing food waste often requires significant upfront costs and high levels of digital literacy. Improvements to cold chains are often highly energy intensive, and the region’s fragmented food network, powered by smallholder farmers, is notoriously difficult to unite.
When it comes to waste valorisation, be it through upcycling, bioconversion, or biochemical process, there are significant hurdles around scalability, poor, and varied waste segregation policies and adherence, limited consumer buy-in and a lack of technical know-how.
While many of the industry and policy innovations to date have been in the West, there are now reasons for optimism in Asia, with countries beginning to pool resources and expertise across the public and private spheres.
Last year, the regional platform South Asian Policy Leadership for Improved Nutrition and Growth (SAPLING), brought together leaders from public, private, and civil society to spotlight how circular economy solutions are beginning to take shape. They highlighted how Bhutan, Maldives, India and Sri Lanka are now taking steps at the highest levels of government to address food waste, while showcasing private enterprises such as S4Technologies, SenZAgro Solutions and GreenPod Labs as regional success stories.
Meanwhile, new financing models are helping scale what works, with the World Bank recently commending India’s National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development (NABARD) for offering open-ended loans, and it $25–30 million Carbon Fund, which supports innovations that traditional banks often overlook.
Of course, there is a long way to go. And the problem is not confined to the south of the region. In South East Asia, there isn’t a single, coherent food waste approach across ASEAN, while the situation in China was so dire that the country has enacted a strict ‘Anti-Food Waste Law’ and will be expecting to see results over the next 12 months.
For much of Asia, some agtech developments risk appearing to exist in a bubble, floating above not only what is happening at the farm level, but also in wider society.
But in a region that still accounts for 40% of the world’s hungry, tackling food waste to improve nutritional and health outcomes isn’t just an innovation, business and policy imperative, it’s a moral one.
Adoption continues to be agtech’s Achilles’ heel
By: Amanda Lim, APAC editor
As the new year unfolds, agtech needs a shift in mindset where success is no longer defined by innovation alone, but by how effectively existing technologies are deployed on farms.
Agricultural innovation has often been framed as a technology development challenge, with effort and capital focused on developing new tools, machinery, and techniques to increase efficiency, yield, or sustainability.
The resources have not gone to waste, with today’s toolbox spanning everything from AI-powered robotics to biologicals to gene-editing.
However, the sector faces a different and arguably more urgent problem: deployment.
The leap from lab to field remains agriculture’s Achilles’ heel – not because technology is lacking, but because too little of it reaches farmers and their fields.
“I’m not sure we need a lot more R&D. The big challenge is translating R&D into impact. R&D is just a good idea if it doesn’t translate to impact. How do we take that technology and science and create meaningful impact?” said Marisa Soares, senior vice president at Yara International, at the the Asia-Pacific Agri-Food Innovation Summit last November.
Today, adoption remains uneven and, in many cases, stubbornly low for a range of reasons. One is that incentives remain skewed towards novelty rather than utilisation.
Rebecca Sharpe, Director of Better Earth Ventures, told this publication last July that while early IP creation and late-stage scaling are well supported, startups often struggle in the interim, where resources are needed to validate and commercialise their technology.
The farmer is central to the success of any endeavour. It’s easy to say farmers are reluctant to adopt new technologies, but they are not being stubborn for the sake of it. Every experiment puts their economic security on the line and what they really need is a safety net to manage the risks each trial poses to their livelihoods. This is particularly acute in Asia, where most farmers are smallholders.
“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.
And these issues are just the tip of the iceberg. The gap between what’s technical possibility and practical implementation on farms continues to widen, and it is becoming critical that we close it.
The reality is that we are facing climate volatility, regulatory pressure and food security concerns. This demands immediate impact, not a perpetual cycle of pilots. If agriculture continues to chase innovation while underutilising what is already available, it becomes counterproductive.
Tisha Livingstone, president of 80 Acres Farms said it best at the World Agri-Tech Innovation Summit Dubai last month: “You can’t eat technology.”
2026: The year agtech gets accountable to human health?
By: Oliver Morrison, Europe editor
This year the idea that agriculture shapes human health is taking root and about to become loud and investable. The scientific and commercial infrastructure is catching up with what researchers have long argued: that the way we farm influences the nutrients in our food, the resilience of our ecosystems, and ultimately the health of our populations. In 2026, expect this connection to shift from rhetoric to measurable biology and watch investment flow accordingly.
Investors like The First Thirty argue that technologies once trapped in academic labs are now making it possible to track how soil function affects crop quality and, eventually, markers of human health.
And evidence is what the market has been waiting for. A significant share of global deaths is tied to poor diet, yet the vast majority of healthcare spending still flows into treatment rather than prevention. Governments are trying to reverse that logic. Health strategies across Europe now emphasise prevention, early diagnosis, and the preservation of health, opening new funding streams for solutions that connect upstream determinants like soil, agronomy and food quality to downstream health outcomes.
Expect more visibility for emerging companies that can turn the complexity of soil biology into actionable insights. Ones to watch include Elaniti: its DNA-based soil analytics, paired with machine learning, are helping farmers and agribusinesses understand soil health and crop performance at a level of granularity that could underpin future claims about nutrient density. Muju Earth, tackling soil degradation with a biodegradable capsule, represents the growing appetite for simple biological tools that restore soil function. Soil Acoustics has unveiled a handheld tool that uses sound to assess soil biodiversity – offering farmers a faster, more scientific alternative to traditional tests.
Soil health innovation more broadly will accelerate, particularly as Europe and the UK show increased openness toward gene editing in plants. Regulators appear more willing to consider gene‑edited traits that improve root systems, nutrient uptake and soil conservation. Meanwhile, regulatory optimism around biopesticides is building. With resistance rising and chemical pesticides restricted, growers are hungry for a wider biological toolbox that meets strict health standards.
Another emerging frontier is microplastic remediation in soils. While still early, investor attention is growing around companies like BluumBio and AgroSpheres in the US, which are deploying bioremediation and soil decontamination approaches. Europe remains thinly populated with soil‑specific microplastic clean‑up startups, but the urgency is rising and the opportunity widening.
Finally, expect water storage to become a chief investment theme in European agribusiness. Climate volatility – drier summers, wetter winters – is making reliable water access both more difficult and more essential. Policy signals across Europe point in the same direction: more funding for on‑farm storage, irrigation upgrades and integrated water‑resilience strategies.
This will be the year agriculture, food and health stop being treated as separate systems. The companies that can measure, verify and monetise the links between them are about to define the next wave of agtech.
