#agtechstartup

3 Agtech startups revolutionizing our food system

...Perry calls Indigo Ag’s solution to that problem “probably the key to our early technical success, that allowed us to leapfrog everybody else.” One of the company’s most important scientific insights, he explains, “was that plants have already done this experiment for us. The ancestors of these plants have been growing in this soil for 200 million years. Every single one of them has sampled those microbes and evolved ways of incorporating the ones that are helpful and rejecting the ones that are potentially harmful. And so, we can leverage those 200 million years of experiments by just looking inside the plant….It is a super simple insight, but nobody else was thinking about it that way.” ...new technologies focused on the health and productivity of plants will lead to an agricultural system that is better for the environment, better for humans, and better for farmers. “That is what I got into this for,” he says. “If we can solve those things, the positive impact on the world would be enormous.” Agriculture already uses 70 percent of the world’s fresh water. Fertilizers have led to chemical pollution of aquatic environments and soil degradation. “Roughly a third of greenhouse-gas emissions come from agriculture or the products that are ultimately consumed by agriculture,” Perry says. Most of the people who live in poverty today are among the billion and half people who work in agriculture. “Those three goals—of improving human health, of improving environmental sustainability, and making farming a living wage—are three of the most important things I think we can do.”