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AgTech trends in 2025: the resilient farm and its future

Published on February 4, 2025

Today, we‘ll focus on resilient farming, one of the most active “megatrends” identified in our recently published report on the trends shaping the future of food. Also, if you want to know more, you can register for our upcoming webinar on the trends and the perspective for the innovation ecosystem on the 13th of February. You can register for free here (and please share this link with your colleagues!)

So, let’s start with the name: why are we talking about resilient farming and not AgTech? Indeed, we are gathering most of the innovations in the upstream part of the value chain under this umbrella. Our reasoning is quite simple: our goal is not to focus on technologies or what startups are doing but rather to identify trends which will have an impact on the future of food (and here, more specifically, on how food is being produced). Resilient farming refers to a clear set of goals by increasing the resilience of our food production to face four challenges:

  • Mitigation: being prepared to face increasingly volatile and extreme climate conditions (heatwaves, droughts, etc.).
  • Automation: facing an ageing population and a more limited availability of migrant workforce.
  • Sustainability transition: improving the sustainability of farming by decreasing the amount of chemical inputs used and reducing the impact of livestock (methane emissions).
  • Financing the three challenges above, combined with the need to finance productivity and digitisation efforts in developing countries, will also support the establishment of a new generation of farmers in rich countries.

As you can see in DigitalFoodLab’s trends curve below, we have mapped eight trends for 2025, with two additions compared to last year. Before diving into them, caution is needed as the positioning of the trends are averages in terms of geographies, technologies, and applications (each could be split into multiple sub-segments). In a word, if you want a company-focused view of the trends that will impact your future, this one is a good start. However, for any decision-making, you should definitely give us a call!

We can split the resilient farm ecosystem into two categories:

Short-term: augmented farming: making the current farm more intelligent and automated (precision farming, farm robotics, indoor farming).

🔎 Precision Farming is doing quite well, with still waves of innovations emerging from startups and legacy players to help increase how efficiently farms are managed.

🚜 Farm robotics is a recovering ecosystem doing much better than a few years ago. There have been multiple acquisitions while many players have demonstrated the reliability and value of their approach (and are now reaching significant revenue levels). It remains a mostly North American ecosystem.

🥬 Indoor farming is in the pit of despair, as most startups have failed in recent years. In most instances, the model of producing leafy greens using costly installations and a lot of energy near the place of consumption seems doomed in the short term. However, the same technologies used to produce higher-value crops, such as strawberries or vanilla, are much more relevant.

Medium to long-term: sustainable farming: creating the conditions to reduce the impact of agriculture on the environment and to resist the shocks produced by climate change through practices such as regenerative agriculture and new technologies.

🪳 Insect farming is also doing poorly. Recent news of Ynsect and Agronutris (French startups) facing insolvency are not helping. Others are doing better (InnovaFeed or Tebrio, which is starting the construction of a large-scale facility in Spain), showing that there is potential for those who have found the right combination of insect and production technology.

💰Regenerative agriculture financing: while the space of carbon credits dedicated to farming is not new, we added it to our list of “main trends” this year due to the rising number of players and the growing implication of banks and leading food companies.

🧪 BioInputs: developing alternatives to chemical inputs is one of the hottest AgriFoodTech ecosystems. Given the limited appetite for additional regulation, it is hard to imagine in the short term how substituting existing products for the solutions being developed will be financially possible at scale.

🐮 Sustainable livestock: in this new trend, we gather all the solutions to reduce the impact of animal farming, notably methane blockers (feed supplements and vaccines to limit the release of methane ruminants through their burps).

🌽 Future crops, which are being developed to increase resiliency, are still a slowly moving ecosystem, notably due to regulation.

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