Agricultural technology

Days later, the largest rice methane offtake on record landed too, with Google as the buyer.

This is AgTech Digest, the briefing on the week in agri-food technology, covering September 5 to September 11, 2026.

A quick orientation before the detail.

This was a quieter week for big-ticket ag-tech capital.

Midi Labs will deliver Google up to 1 million rice methane credits by 2030 across three Indian states.

3.

InVenture opens Food and AgTech Fund 2.

It is a new fund targeting the global agri-food system with AI, biotech, and automation, anchored by partners across Latin America.

Hello and welcome to the Agritech E podcast.

This is where we're going to be talking all things Agritech.

So whether you're a farmer who's been working the land for the last 60 years or someone who's only just come across the term, this is the place to find out about agriculture innovation.

So without any further ado, let's get on to today's topic.

So I'm here at Cambridge Consultants, which is part of Capgemini here in Cambridge, and I'm with Neil Mottram, who is the VP of Energy and Agritech.

So Neil, lovely to see you.

Thanks for your time.

Neil, great to talk to you.

A brief intro, and then you have a rule, I think, of investing in companies, which, I mean, like any rule, sometimes get broken, but mostly...

the farmer shouldn't pay for the interventions that the companies provided you invest in, which I think has been not a mistake in AgTech until now.

Like agriculture technologies investments have gone wrong mostly.

I think there's a pretty bad track record of investing in technologies for farmers.

If you know HealthTech, you'll invest in HealthTech.

If you know Agritech, you'll invest in Agritech, right? If you take all of those factors into consideration before you then diagnose what the issue is, is that you've got individuals that have raised money that are looking to invest in businesses that they think will have a big outcome.

And more times than not, it's things that they have some sort of background in and so if you don't have you you have so many entrepreneurs coming through uh looking for this early stage funding and the individuals that are looking to back them are themselves going i don't believe i'll get a big enough outcome even though we believe in your solution and so these aren't and entrepreneurs aren't getting funding so in order to address that gap you need diverse fund managers that are potentially niche that looking to invest in different space you need potential government dfis to support some of these fund managers with mandates to support under underrepresented your health tech ed tech type of solutions And that leads me to how we've decided to play a role there.

So I think it's two years ago, we backed the SASME funds, high impact seed fund funds structure, where they went to DFIs like TIA and the Department of Science and Innovation.

Welcome to your weekly Agritech update with Belinda Clark, where farming meets the future.

We're diving into the latest innovations, trends and policy in this week's episode.

it is lashing with rain outside and blowing a hoolie so I am vlogging this week from my hay shed.