2025 was meant to be the year agrifoodtech found its footing again. Instead, it turned into something messier: a year of recalibration, retrenchment, and some very public reality checks. Funding fell further than many expected, high-profile companies stumbled or collapsed, and long-standing assumptions about consumer demand, climate narratives, and venture-scale returns were put under the microscope.
In this end-of-year roundtable recorded on Dec 18, AgFunderNews managing editor Louisa Burwood-Taylor is joined by foodtech editor Elaine Watson and agtech editor Jenn Marston for a candid conversation that spans alt proteins, regenerative agriculture, biologicals, vertical farming, drones, AI, GLP-1 drugs, and the shifting role of sustainability in food and farming (spoiler alert: there’s no green premium).
From the implosion of high-profile alt-protein startups to renewed debates over glyphosate, who will pay for regen ag, and whether venture capital is the right tool for long-cycle technologies, the team unpacks where hype collided with hard economics—and where genuine progress is still being made.
Looking ahead to 2026, the picture is cautious but not bleak. Premiumization, new biomanufacturing capacity, AI-driven discovery, and pragmatic approaches to regeneration and automation could reshape the landscape in quieter, more durable ways. Watch the full conversation below for an unfiltered take on a turbulent year—and a grounded look at what may come next.
(And let us know if you’d like us to put together more videos like this next year… or go back to the drawing board 😊)
LOUISA: Hello everyone. We thought we would try something new this year. So I’ve got our team of journalists from AgFunderNews on the line and we’re going to have a little chat about what has happened over 2025 and a sneak peek at what we’re thinking is coming up for 2026 in agrifoodtech.
2025 has certainly been a bit of an odd year all round as I’m sure many people agree. We thought at the end of last year that we were looking at a bit of a bottoming out in terms of funding levels for startups in the industry. Unfortunately, looking ahead, as we start to prepare for our global report, which comes out in the new year, it looks like we are seeing some further declines in funding across the sector.
This is happening in pretty much every category and every single market globally. There’s a couple of highlight spots in Europe, but unfortunately, there’s been this decline. There’s been a bit of a flight to quality. We are seeing some really large rounds for some interesting startups, and investment is very diverse across the categories.
So if you look at the top funding deals, we’re looking at top deals in eGrocery yet again, but also agricultural marketplaces and fintech, ag biotech, bioenergy and biomaterials. So I think it’s an interesting year. It’s a bit of a transition year, I’d say, and maybe things might start to look a little bit more settled next year.
But I want to speak to the real experts… so we have Elaine Watson, our global foodtech editor, and Jenn Marston, our global agtech editor, and I’m going to turn to them and ask them to share some of their insights of the year past. Elaine, do you want to kick things off?
ELAINE: Thank you. Louisa, absolutely. I’m going to begin with alt protein, because it’s just been such a brutal year in this space.
We’ve had Believer Meats in the cultivated meat space abruptly ceasing operations. I’m still trying to get to the bottom of exactly what went wrong, but clearly this isn’t good news for the whole sector.
And then we’ve had the meltdown at Meati, another well-funded player in the alt protein space.
It’s been another torrid year for Beyond Meat, which has recently restructured its debt, but arguably, just kind of kicked the can down the road.
And then there’s Miyoko’s in the alt dairy space, which became insolvent and was auctioned off to the highest bidder.
All of these cases are different, but looking at the alt meat space specifically, many firms have focused on fixing long term structural problems in the industry, but failed to come up with a compelling argument to consumers or industry partners in the short term, especially if they’re asking people to pay a premium, which you are generally going to be until you can build any scale.
This is a particular challenge in cultivated meat. So full disclosure, I’m a huge fan of the concept. If you think it’s unnatural, I can assure you there’s nothing very natural about the industrialized animal agriculture industry. And maybe in 20,30 years, we’ll all be looking back and saying, how did we ever slaughter animals on this vast scale for our meat?
But right now, I don’t really understand the value proposition to the consumer, especially as the first wave of products are unstructured ingredients, cell biomass going into lower value processed products like meatballs and nuggets. What problem is this solving for consumers or the industry right now?
Such products are unlikely to appeal to vegans or vegetarians because they are animal cells. The message to meat eaters and flexitarians is kind of hard to articulate, and the sustainability message isn’t clear yet on products such as chicken, at least, and the ethical message is a hard sell. The health message is kind of confusing, and the economics are really challenging.
And just finally, on the plant-based meat side, everyone’s got a pet theory about what went wrong, right? It’s too processed, it’s too expensive, it’s too different to meat… or not different enough. But I think the simpler explanation is that we maybe just overestimated consumer demand. There is a demand there, it just isn’t going up like a hockey stick in the way people thought it might maybe three, four years ago.
And I personally don’t really buy the argument from Ethan Brown at Beyond Meat that the issue is that the meat lobby has kind of poisoned the well against alt meat. My sense is that consumers aren’t against plant-based meat—well maybe JB Vance is—but people are just not that excited about it either. It’s solving a problem most consumers, again, don’t really have. If you want to cut down on red meat, you probably switch to chicken, not a Beyond burger. Ultimately, why would you pay twice as much for something that’s half as good?
LOUISA: Really good point. And on the on the cultivated meat side of things, looking at it as an investment category, do you think that, given what you’ve just mentioned about the long term overview of potential sector, do you think there’s going to be just a few players remaining, or do you think this is an overall permanent retreat from this category?
ELAINE: I mean, that’s above my pay grade, Louisa! But if you look at the three best funded players, one of them has just arguably collapsed, and the other two have retreated and retrenched, if you like, so GOOD Meat and UPSIDE Foods. I’m not writing off the whole sector, but I think it’s just going to be extremely challenging in the short term, as before you get to scale, as in any industry, you [initially] have to charge a premium. And at the moment, the kinds of products that are on offer do not generally warrant a premium because we’re talking about cell biomass as opposed to structured products.
There are some players in the space, such as Vow in Australia, which has got 20,000 liter bioreactors that are up and running, and it’s got a more premium product, so I’m quite interested to see where they go. But again, the market for cultivated quail may be fairly niche, but maybe that is an interesting place to begin. There are also some other players like BlueNalu looking at high value products like Bluefin tuna…
Again, I’m not writing the whole sector off, but it’s extremely challenging, and it sours investor sentiment when the top funded players have spent all of this money, and at the moment, they don’t really have a great deal to show for it.
But at the same time, this is a completely new industry, right? It didn’t even exist 10 years ago. Look how long it took the mainstream meat industry to mature.
But who knows? Honestly, in 10,20 years’ time, the second wave of players that’s learned from the first, there may be a market here? Meanwhile, the ecosystem has been developing. There are developments in bioreactors, in cell culture media, in cell lines and so on. So I just think it’s not the case that we’re going to see much action in the next year or two. It’s going to be a longer-term play.
LOUISA: Yeah, and a good point to talk a bit about the ecosystem and the enabling technologies that can be developed along with this, which may seem outside of food and agriculture at this point, but may end up coming in and potentially being used for other applications?
ELAINE: Yeah, we’re seeing some players that were in that enabling ecosystem for cultivated meat that pivoted temporarily to biopharma. So maybe they were producing growth factors or something like that for cultivated meat but are targeting other more lucrative sectors at the moment. But the technology is there, so maybe if the cultivated meat sector picks up, these technologies will be available to that sector in future.
JENN: When you were talking about plant-based meat, do you think that one explanation would be that we overestimated consumer excitement and consumer desire for it? Are there lessons we can take away? We hear advocates of cultivated meat talk about we will be able to convince consumers that it’s cleaner than industrial meat production, which I totally agree with by the way. But for the majority of consumers, because a lot of folks are not going to be very familiar with this and are still going to think, oh, it’s science fiction, how much will that impact consumer excitement down the road?
ELAINE: Yeah, I think it’s a particular challenge, consumer messaging around this technology. With plant-based meat, I think you can create a compelling health message. I think that’s a little bit harder with cultivated meat. I mean, there are some companies talking about switching around the fatty acid profile of the meat, for example. But again, that’s kind of down the road.
And in the short term, if you’re combining a few cultivated chicken cells with some soy protein and making a nugget, I’m not sure that you’re making a very compelling health argument. And if you are, it’s probably coming from the plant-based side of it, rather than the cultivated side of it.
I think the antibiotic-free message may resonate along with the cleaner [production] environment [vs animal ag]. But again, that kind of messaging is available in existing meat products. You can already buy antibiotic-free or more premium meat products. So again, I’m not sure that message is going to be hugely distinctive for cultivated meat, at least in the short term for the consumer.
As for sustainability, we’ve seen that doesn’t seem to really sell in many markets, right? So again, I’m not sure that’s going to help sell cultivated meat at least in the short term. So then you get to the ethical arguments. Again, we’ve seen in the plant-based sector that this messaging isn’t compelling for a large number of consumers. And let’s face it, cultivated meat initially, is going after the mainstream consumer or the flexitarian consumer, and not the vegan or vegetarian consumer, well maybe some ethical vegans [who avoid meat for ethical reasons, so may consider ‘real’ meat if animals are not harmed].
So I honestly don’t really know what the proposition is for the consumer right now, and I think the industry is still trying to work out what that is.
At scale, cultivated meat makes obvious sense, right? If you can produce real meat, why wouldn’t you switch [to a version that doesn’t involve mass slaughter] if you can make it without animals? But how do you get there [from scratch to scale] and make money?
LOUISA: Yeah, I think there’s definitely a case to be made that the assumptions about consumer demand were way off and added to the hype around this category, the whole alt meat category.
OK, Jenn, what are some of your key takeaways from 2025?
JENN: Yeah, I guess we can start with… on a high level, it’s been a pretty up and down a tumultuous year for climate. I think we’ve seen a lot of folks, just from a political, regulatory perspective, a lot of people backing out of climate smart initiatives.
Elaine, you just mentioned that sustainability is not a selling point for consumers. In most cases, we see brands really backing away from that, choosing alternative messaging to relate to consumers, because they’re just not gaining any attention. With the sustainability argument, we could go in a lot of directions as far as climate and sustainability goes, but I’m going to zero in here on regenerative agriculture and what has happened this year, because we got arguably the biggest development, at least from a regulatory perspective, just last week, which was the US Department of Agriculture announced a regenerative agriculture pilot.
It’s worth about $700 million and its purpose is to help farmers in the US adopt regenerative practices, cover cropping, no till, low till, grazing, rotational, crop rotation, etc. So that obviously caused a huge stir.
I thought a great way to just recap the spectrum of thoughts about that… we’ve covered it extensively on AFN, and heard a lot of people talk about it. Folks are excited. Some folks say that this is going to advance and accelerate pathways to regenerative agriculture for farmers, it’s going to give them access to the capital they need to transition, which is, as you know, anyone following the space knows has been a massive barrier.
It’s still the number one barrier for most folks wanting to transition to regenerative farming. There are also some concerns about … so the Natural Resources Conservation Service is the one administering this pilot program. Well, they were part of the massive cuts to staffing and funding that happened not so long ago. And so we have heard some folks say, if you really want to make this regenerative pilot program a reality, you need to restore the cut staff, you need to restore the funding. They won’t be able to do it working with the sort of bare bones operation that they have now.
And I think there’s also concern about where the money will go. We saw with the Climate Smart Commodities program that a lot of that money went towards big companies such as JBS and Tyson, really just reinforcing the consolidation that’s happening right now, and not really going towards the smaller operations who arguably need that funding the most. So there is that question of who’s going to benefit the most from this?
There have also been questions raised about, where does chemical crop protection, glyphosate [fit in}? Don’t worry, we’ll get to glyphosate later. But where does that fit in? It doesn’t really fit into a truly regenerative food system. But we saw addressing chemicals really got deprioritized with the MAHA report earlier this year.
There have also been some other moves by the government that really back up companies who are pushing those chemical products. So that’s obviously another question around all this as well. I think though, to look at this development—and it is the biggest development in region this whole year, I believe—to really look at it in context, I think we have to remember that it’s brand new.
It’s a small-scale pilot, and we just don’t know at this point how it’s going to impact farmers and who it’s really going to benefit. I think the consensus that I’m hearing is we will be able to measure how successful a program like this is once we’ve got measurable outcomes. How much biodiversity did it restore? How much carbon did it capture? Did it, in fact, increase yields and therefore money going back to the farmers?
So, I think it’s, it’s a case of, it was a big announcement and everyone has a lot to say about it, including myself, but it’s like anything else having to do with regenerative agriculture, it’s a long game, and we just are not going to know if this is successful for, I would say, at least a few years.
LOUISA: Yeah. I think what’s really interesting about the timing of that is we’ve seen some other fairly large funding deals for regenerative ag-related technology companies.
Obviously, there was Halter out of New Zealand which raised $100 million. Nofence raised a really sizable Series B. And I think there was another… [raise]. I mean, these are all actually fenceless grazing technologies, essentially. So I think it’s interesting. You’ve had these ginormous deals. And as you say, this [USDA regen ag program] is actually a pilot program. I mean, if you put it in the context of all USDA spending, it is microscopic, well not microscopic… I think I saw a chart the other day saying that spending on chemical agriculture was like $15 billion or something.
This is just $700 million. I’m sure there’s errors with that comparison, but we are also seeing large corporations increasing their commitments in regen ag, and when you speak with various people, they’ll say, okay, these guys are legit with that. Some of them, is still kind of a greenwashing thing.
With what you were saying around this retreat from climate, we have a bit of a recalibration at some of these corporations… some of them have somewhat admitted, behind the scenes, that some of this was a bit of a marketing exercise to say they’re doing these regen ag initiatives. But oftentimes, they’ve actually hired in some really great people who are true believers in the regen ag transition, which has actually made some meaningful change. And if you look more broadly outside of the tech space, as well, funding to regen ag initiatives, whether that’s real assets or farmland transition plays and so on, does seem to be continuing to increase.
JENN: Yeah, absolutely. And I think we’ve also seen some interesting models for getting investment in these farmers emerging with Mad Capital, which is a subsidiary of Mad Agriculture… I believe they raised this year as well. I think it was $78 million to help farmers access capital and access what they need to transition.
There’s another group in the Illinois area called Iroquois Valley that specializes in long term leases for farmers with the idea being [that with] short term farm leases, a year, two years tops, you can’t prepare for regen ag. You can’t restore the soil on a short term farm lease. So Iroquois Valley has created this system where they get investments.
That investment then goes into providing these long term leases, enabling farmers in the US to really hone in on true regeneration. So I think going forward we will continue to see a lot of focus on lease length, on investing in sort of a natural capital, which is a part of regen ag. Three years ago, I went around at an event in London and asked people to define natural capital, and no one could. And this year, people are actually fixing really clear ideas to it, of what that is.
LOUISA: Yeah, one of the things that we’ve been doing a bit internally, and we’re still hoping to produce a report related to this, is funding levels into regen agtech, which is obviously difficult when there’s no one solid definition around it.
We don’t want to get into that debate, but it is interesting to see how that does feed down into the technology space as well.
One area that maybe we could get on to is the ag biologicals market, because that is oftentimes related to regen ag. What have we seen in that market this year? Sticking with you, Jenn… you’ve written a few pieces [on this]. We’ve done some investment related pieces based on the market mapping that the folks at Mixing Bowl have done for us. Any core takeaways from that space before we move on to looking at 2026?
JENN: Yeah, absolutely. So the bio stimulants category, DunhamTrimmer, who is pretty much the number one market research firm in terms of tracking… they’ve been tracking the biological space for years, they released a report recently, and biostimulants in particular are still growing as a category, and still strong.
Latin America is leading that category, and leading pretty much all the categories in biologicals, biostimulants, biofertilizer, biopesticides. Brazil in particular has a regulatory setup that really enables companies to bring products to market and get them out in the field. We have some of that in the US. And then Europe, of course, has a lot of hurdles and a very long regulatory period.
So I think the growth of biologicals is inherently tied to what the regulations in different regions are and how long it takes companies to get through the pipeline. I think one question everybody’s asking as we go into 2026 is there’s a ton of companies. I mean, if you look at the Mixing Bowl’s wonderful market maps. I mean, the biostimulants category got, I think around 100 more companies between 2024 and 2025 when they unveiled the latest. But people are still asking, Is this an investable category? Is this something that it could actually generate, sort of, especially when you look at VC, can these products, which can take years and years and years to develop and test and actually get to market, bring the kind of returns that VCs are looking for?
And I think we have yet to get a solid answer on that. I have definitely spoken to investors who are wary of the category, a bit dubious about whether or not it’s something that folks should be putting their money into.
At the same time, there’s a bigger push from consumers, from certain regulatory bodies, from the regen ag sector, all this pushing for cleaner crop protection solutions. I’m sure we’ll get into the whole Bayer glyphosate thing a bit later. But there is opportunity. It’s a matter of… can startups get these products to work with the same level of efficacy as some of the chemical counterparts, and can they do that at a price point that makes sense for the farmers? I think those are the two biggest things.
LOUISA: Yeah, absolutely. I mean that question around is venture capital the right type of capital for many different categories in agrifood tech is something that a lot of our peers are often asking, and there are lots of other great podcasts where you can listen to that debate being rolled out. Sarah Nolet, for example, Shane Thomas… I know they’ve been talking a lot about this as a theme, and I think that is almost something that could be relevant for the cultivated meat space as well, when you think about those timelines. Is that suitable for venture capital?
So let’s move on to what we’re looking at for 2026 and Elaine, I know you’ve got a fairly healthy list of what you’re gonna be packing next year…
ELAINE: Yeah, obviously, GLP-1 drugs, I think this is going to be fascinating area to watch. It’s hard to know whether this is a foodtech or an investable opportunity, or just something that’s going to affect the food industry more broadly, though, and a lot of it really depends on things beyond the food industry’s control such as access to the drugs, insurance and things like that.
But clearly if 20 or 30% of the population ends up on these drugs, that is going to have a massive effect on the food industry and the products people buy. But I think the food industry, at the moment, is still trying to navigate how to respond to this trend. So some companies are looking at companion products for people that are on these drugs, or trying to wean themselves off and maybe deal with the nausea, the GI issues [associated with them] and right now their response is to add protein to absolutely everything, which most Americans are not short of.
And then there’s separately, a tech angle, if you like, where you’ve got companies that are looking to see if they can mimic the effects of these drugs. I think the jury is still out on those companies. Do you try and find things that naturally stimulate these [appetite-suppressing] hormones, in which case it’s not likely to be anything like as effective as drugs. Or do you do something that kind of mimics these drugs, and engages the same receptors? So I’m watching that space quite closely.
Another area that I’ve been following quite closely is the so called animal-free dairy space, which is where companies are using microbes to produce ‘real’ dairy proteins in fermentation tanks. So we’re just seeing Perfect Day, the biggest player in this space, which has raised $825 million to get this technology off the ground and they’ve got a plant that’s going to be up and running late next year in India. So I’m excited to see that.
But I think what’s really fascinating about this space is how many players are now shifting and pivoting to a more premium offering. So we’re seeing companies that are functionalizing proteins. We’re seeing them switch from commodity proteins like whey and casein to lactoferrin. And we’re seeing people moving to other high value proteins that are in breast milk [such as osteopontin].
And I’m seeing this [pivot to premium] right across the food tech sector as well. So I am seeing also this in indoor farming, for example. Again, it’s a very challenging space that maybe players that are in [very high-value products such as] saffron or vanilla are going to make more money than players who are trying to grow lettuce.
Other things I’m watching are in the political sphere. Where’s the whole debate about ultra processed foods going? It looks like we’re going to get a federal definition at some point. And if we get a definition, how is that going to influence policy? Will we have a warning labels on processed foods going forward at the federal level?
I’m also obviously following the MAHA movement. Where is that going? In the immediate term, it’s really just meant people continuing the clean label trend, if you like, which does present opportunities for companies looking for more natural preservatives, colors, flavors and so on, some of which you can produce through precision fermentation quite effectively. So that’s an interesting space to watch.
I’m obviously looking at AI. This is going to impact every single segment in agrifoodtech… in protein discovery, new product development, consumer sentiment, even assessing meat quality in real time. There’s a big funding around in that space this week.
I’m also quite interested in plant cell culture, using plant cells rather than microbial cells, to produce ingredients that you can’t produce in a yeast cell, for example. And I think there’s a particular opportunity there in high value botanicals, for which there’s already an established market, and plant cell culture companies are just offering a more consistent production method and supply.
Also Rubisco… Is 2026 the year that Rubisco, which is this protein found in the leaves of plants, going to finally take off?
Finally I’m also looking at biomanufacturing. One of the challenges over the last few years has been access to capacity in this space. If you’re trying to scale up in the biomanufacturing space, no VC is going to come offer the capex for you to build a $100 million, $200 million plant anymore. So how do you get from A to B?
It was historically challenging accessing CMOs and there were really long lead times and so on. But there is more suitable capacity becoming available now, both in the US, India and some other markets. So I think that is going to help players in the sector scale up.
The other things I’m looking at are actually in Jenn’s area [agtech], which are livestock methane reduction and [spray] drones.
LOUISA: Yeah, great. I mean, you’ve done some fantastic coverage of drones, just picking up on that last point and everything that’s been going on around DJI being I mean… it’s close to being banned?
ELAINE: There’s been multiple efforts made by lawmakers to try and restrict their activities in the US market. It looks like they are going to be effectively shut out of the US market for new models, unless there’s some kind of 11th hour deal, and potentially we’re going to see the revocation of existing licenses as well.
So it’s going to be interesting to see what that means for the domestic ag drone sector. There are many more players coming up, although many of them do actually buy parts from China. And again, these parts could be subject to the same kind of restrictions [that are impacting DJI]. And then on top of that, you’ve got tariffs as well. So it’s going to be really interesting to see what happens in that space in 2026.
LOUISA: Right, exactly. And then on GLP-1, I’m very interested about that. I mean, overall, just the reframing of the food industry that comes with it. But I’m also wondering… I see things cropping up, and I don’t know if many of them are actually founded yet, about the long term side effects of using some of these drugs… I mean, someone sent me something the other day about them causing blindness or something. And I’m sure a lot of these are very rare cases, but I do think that there’s still some long term impacts that might be coming out.
ELAINE: I’m not sure. I mean, the drugs actually have been available for the diabetic consumer for many years before we all came across them for weight loss, so they have actually been in the market a while; you have people that have been on them for many years.
With the GI [side] effects [experienced by many users], it seems like the next generation of these drugs, which hit multiple receptors, not just GLP-1, they could potentially be better tolerated as well, which, again, will presumably mean that people are more likely to stay on these drugs. But one of the issues I’m interested in is the longer term effects of cycling on and off these drugs on your metabolism.
JENN: Directly tied to that conversation as well about ultraprocessed foods and health and building programs for folks that can support them while they’re on these drugs, and to create better habits, to understand more about the food they’re putting in their bodies, why it might be increasing weight gain and so on and so forth. I don’t know, Elaine, do you get a sense that there’s an effort to pair that more addressing lifestyle and choices with these drugs?
ELAINE: Yeah, so I did a recent online event like this one all about GLP-1, and Dr Ryan Kane at Tufts University is looking at this specific issue about wrap-around support for people on these drugs, which, as you say, is absolutely critical. Because anecdotally, I know people that are taking these drugs and are subsisting on coffee and one bagel a day. They’re quite happy as they’re losing all the weight, but this doesn’t seem to be very healthy or sustainable.
LOUISA: Okay Jenn, to finish up, tell us about what you’re looking at in 2026…
JENN: Absolutely. Well, I too, am very interested in the whole ultraprocessed foods and GLP-1 trends, and how that evolves within agtech. We saw a lot of funding rounds go towards ag robotics and automation this year, and we will see more of that, I suspect, all over the world, not just in the US and across specialty crops and broad acre row crops.
Louisa, you mentioned virtual fencing, which I think we’re going to see lots and lots of next year. It very interesting in the sense that it does tie into the regenerative ag conversation, because it makes rotational grazing a little bit easier. But it’s also a herd management tool, being able to monitor movement of your herd, see if there’s a problem without having to actually be in the field. That varies from company to company, but that’s definitely one of the major pluses of that. So it’s up there the virtual fencing, and on a basic level, it’s, in a lot of cases, cheaper than building miles and miles and miles of fence line, which has become frightfully expensive in this day and age. So we will see more of that.
And then I think, along the lines of biologicals, I think AI is a huge component there, when we’re thinking about how companies are using AI to speed up the process of discovery in ag biologicals.
Another sector that, like alternative proteins, has had a very tumultuous year, is vertical farming. Close to the beginning of the year, we saw Plenty… it raised over $400 million from really high profile people. They closed their doors, and then just literally this week, Aerofarms, which is another [key player in vertical farming] that raised tons of money, [had] unicorn status, after all that they, after a very, very long process, have finally announced that they… will be closing their last plant and terminating all of the staff, including the C suite folks. So AeroFarms is really the last of those giant vertical farming players that won over these generalist investors back during from about 2020 on up to 2022, 23.
So in some ways it isn’t surprising at all the Aerofarms news, and it’s sort of just the punctuation mark on all of this long, drawn out death sentence for vertical farming. But I don’t think it actually is a death sentence. Elaine, to your point, there’s some very interesting things happening with growing much, much higher value crops, vanilla, saffron seedlings, even nursery seedlings, and not even food… your nursery plants and things like that, potato seedlings have been successfully grown there.
So I think we’re going to continue to hear about vertical farming into next year. But it’s not going to be this huge, wow, these are going to change agriculture and save the planet. None of them are, and they all know that. But this is a use of technology that has its place in farming. And I think now that the hype is well and truly dead, we can now begin to see the real possibilities.
I’ll end with another piece that’s been in the news a lot this year and is definitely going to be front and center next year, [which] is Bayer and glyphosate/Roundup. We had quite a few things happen this year with regards to the situation around glyphosate. The biggest one… we saw a paper that was published 25 years ago get retracted, and this is a paper that has over the last quarter of a century been cited by regulators as being evidence of the safety of glyphosate.
Well, the journal that originally published that paper back in 2000 retracted the paper. In a nutshell, it’s been revealed that Monsanto, which Bayer acquired, and Monsanto is the original maker of Roundup, had basically ghostwritten the paper.
But what’s interesting is the timing of this paper happened just as Bayer urged the United States Supreme Court to review its 67,000 I think, is the number lawsuits It is currently facing from people claiming that Roundup caused their cancer. So Bayer asked the Supreme Court to renew and curtail a lot of this legislation.
We don’t need to go into the nitty gritty legal jargon of all that, but suffice to say, this is going to be a big deal going into next year. We’ve seen the Trump administration back Bayer on this. And it’s really how the Supreme Court decides this could say a lot in terms of the future of glyphosate. I think it’s also worth noting that the EPA’s 15 year renewal of glyphosate, so this happens every 15 years, is under final review. It was supposed to happen already, but now with the cuts and the upheaval, it’s been delayed. And so that that decision on keeping the product registered is supposed to happen in 2026.
So there are a lot of questions around, what’s the future of this, this particular product that could be incredibly harmful, whilst others say it’s not harmful at all. I think we’ll see debate on that just pick up even more.
LOUISA: Great, OK, so well, to finish up, I’ll just share a little bit about what I’m interested in, based off of what you guys have been talking about.
I think you mentioned Jenn the role of AI in discovery and R&D, and that is something that I find particularly interesting. And flying the AgFunder flag for a minute, we have a company called Atinary Technologies, who has got some really exciting developments coming up next year, with a self-driving robotic lab, and they can accelerate R&D about 100x and they are working with various foods from agriculture companies. So that is definitely a space to watch. We think they’re one of the leading, if not the leading, players in that space. How is that going to change the landscape for some of these very research intensive categories of agtech and foodtech and can that make them more investable? So I think that’s really exciting.
And then I have been tracking a bit the rollout of AI in some of the large corporations. I think there’s a debate around the culture of AI and the data readiness that corporations have to adopt some of these tools at scale. We’ve definitely had a sort of hype moment around AI. And if you look at overall venture capital dollars, AI is eating all the venture capital dollars in the US. It’s north of 60, 70% of all venture capital.
We’ve actually seen that pull capital away from agrifoodtech, as many of the more generalist VCs have closed down some of their sector specific departments just to go all in on AI. So I think something that’s going to be key and interesting for the agrifood industry is to see how we can still make use of some of that innovation. It doesn’t necessarily have to be built for agrifoodtech. It can be built for other industries and be brought into agrifood and I think that’d be something key for the industry to be considering.
Anyway we’ve gone far longer than we thought we were going to go. There’s a lot to talk about. There’s plenty that we haven’t said, but we want to thank our readers for reading AgFunderNews this year. Let us know what you think. Let us know what you want us to write about and report on next year.
Our research report, our global report, is coming out [soon], so let us know what you want to see in that!
Wishing you all a very happy holidays and all the best for 2026!
The post Agrifoodtech in 2025: What broke, what bent—and what might still work appeared first on AgFunderNews.
- Source: https://agfundernews.com/agrifoodtech-in-2025-what-broke-what-bent-and-what-might-still-work
