Agtech Doesn’t Need More Data—It Needs More Imagination

“See the value of imagination,” said Holmes. “…We imagined what might have happened, acted upon the supposition, and find ourselves justified.” - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

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In The Adventure of Silver Blaze, Sherlock Holmes calls his audience’s attention to “the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.” When Inspector Gregory protests, “But the dog did nothing in the night-time,” Holmes replies, “That was the curious incident.”

We have, I think, trained ourselves as an industry to be very good at focusing on the things that seem most salient, while overlooking or disregarding what is easily missed.

When I listen to most smart people talk about why agtech adoption has been slow, they talk about things like return on investment, distribution channels, incentives, and unit economics.

Maybe they’ll even trot out the excuse that “agriculture is so fragmented” or complain in some backhanded way that “farmers are risk averse.” They might blame the labor and skills gap that makes implementing new technologies difficult on the farm.

If they’re really thoughtful, they dive into the trust issues around data ownership, the lack of interoperability, and the issue of unclear value propositions for new technologies.

Almost nobody, though, ever mentions the idea that a lot of agtech fails because it lacks imagination...(READ MORE)

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