Agtech, the Last Frontier, with Sonia Lo, Roger Royse and Jim Connor

Game Changers Silicon Valley

According to a United Nations study by the year 2050, the world’s population will reach 9.1 billion which is 34 percent higher than today. In order to feed this larger, more urban, and richer population, food production must increase by 70 percent. So the question is given the limits of available farmland and water resources, how are we going to meet this increase in food demand?

Agtech Sector Perspective from Roger Royse, Founder Royse Law Firm:

Agtech is not just a movement it’s a revolution. We’ve had an industrial revolution we had an information revolution learn an agricultural revolution right now and as agriculture becomes a tech-enabled business and we’re seeing that come up in a lot of different areas robotics artificial intelligent controlled environment soil health as we were talking about earlier. So the thing that’s been driving all that. Are a couple of things in my world here in Silicon Valley. It’s really been the fact that the venture community woke up to this like I say about six or seven or maybe eight years ago and started investing heavily in this.

On Vertical Farming, Sonia Lo, CEO of Crop One Holdings

Vertical farming is as the name implies a stacked shelving system generally within an enclosed space with artificial lighting but probably the simpler way to think about vertical farming is that it is the transfer of electrons to calories or the storage of electrons to calories because energy is the single largest input and what that really implies is that for the first time ever really agriculture can be segregated from climate and geography. And so anywhere you can generate an electron you can grow food.

This type of vertical farming, that’s very dense, that can be liberated from climate and geography is something that’s a relatively recent phenomenon in the last six to seven years. And that’s been enabled by the advent of cheap LCD lighting and cheap sensors. The unit economics of indoor growing of food has really been enabled by the cost decline and those two input technologies.