Agriculture
Restore productive and sustainable ecosystems
Agriculture is essential for our daily lives yet mostly hidden. In fact agriculture is both the sole source of food for us all and the biggest contributor to the disruption of our ecosystems : we simply cannot be satisfied with an impasse that does not reconcile ecology and economic robustness. We must test and deploy scalable solutions for future generations.
What are the biggest challenges in this sector for the next decade ?
Climate disruption combined with changing expectations of both consumers and stakeholders in the agricultural world pose numerous challenges for maintaining a qualitative, resilient and attractive production. We identify 5 major challenges in particular:
- Water resource management
- Adapting crops, rotations and technical itineraries
- Scarcity of agricultural labor
- Management of complex production and biodiversity ecosystems
- Correlation of food production and fossil fuels consumption
Why we believe deeptech can solve the biggest challenges ?
We need solutions very quickly, in a very specific sector where each test generally requires one agricultural season. An operator will be able on average to test 40 different methods in his/her lifetime, while ensuring the stability of his/her economic model. Cutting-edge technologies can help reduce natural cycles of learning, varietal evolution and testing in order to identify the right strategies and deploy them at scale to maximize their impact. At the same time, technical innovations make it possible to support the transition of production models by reducing the impact of current practices by admitting that they can only be abandoned once they can be replaced by new practices that are de-risked for operators.
Among the areas of research that seem most promising to us, we can count on varietal selection, robotization, the use of AI for farm management (and the acceleration of knowledge sharing) or physical protection and stimulation technologies that promote natural cycles of water, carbon and nitrogen.
What kind of project do we want to create there ?
The projects that we create and support must allow a significant scale-up in the long term, have the potential to be replicated throughout the world on top crops, and be consistent with the modes of consumption, distribution and more generally the organization of the agribusiness.