Food security is becoming especially relevant, and its stability is directly influenced by climate change and geopolitical uncertainties. Agribusiness is a big market share for Eurapco Partners, and for that reason, the Eurapco Lab Core Innovation Team is currently exploring the intelligent farming and agritech topic.
All Eurapco Partners have a strategic interest in agriculture. In addition, in the past 10 years, 33.22 Billion Euros have been invested in the agritech market, more than half of them in the last three years. For these reasons, the Eurapco Lab Core Innovation Team is currently exploring the intelligent farming and agritech field with the aim of developing innovative solutions that will benefit our Partners and its customers.
Which are the main areas of exploration?
Our members have been exploring different areas within the farming sector carrying out the following activities:
- Analyzing Agri claims data of our Partners to identify the critical risks.
- Interviewing agricultural and horticultural companies to understand what the current needs, priorities, and concerns of farmers are, as well as their biggest challenges in the future.
- Exploring the Agritech market to understand the recent technology trends, as well as the major segments in the markets and the companies’ distribution.
What are the first insights obtained?
Through the exploration process, several initial insights were derived.
In this regard, two common patterns are relevant and noticeable to our Partners: on the one hand, the extreme weather events and, on the other hand, the fire. Furthermore, the research concluded that the production costs, the profitability, and the weather extreme events are the most prominent worries of farmers nowadays. And one of the biggest challenges for the industry in the future, in addition to the viability and profitability of the production, is, not surprisingly, climate change.
The Agritech market research revealed the following findings:
- Geographic trends & distribution: There is only a small difference in terms of the number of companies in the Americas and Europe, but the European companies (most of them based in France, Germany, and the Netherlands) are trailing behind their North American counterparts. Smaller investment amounts are partly linked to the strong role of the public sector within the EU. In Asia, India stands out as an active hub for Agritech companies followed by China.
- Trending technologies: The technology segments that are growing faster in the last 4 years are Food & Tech, AI & ML, and e-Commerce.
- Major segments in the market: Currently the main segments in the market are data capturing (7.5B€ and 938 companies), farm management software (6.4B€ and 452 companies), sustainable farming (6B€ and 510 companies), automated farming (5.5B€ and 693 companies) and ecosystem solutions (5B€ and 471 companies).
Eurapco Lab Core Innovation Team has also researched the most prominent user needs in the agriculture technology some of them are the following:
Which are the project’s next steps?
Currently, the “Exploration” phase is almost completed and in the next steps, the team will further research key sub-domains, deep-dive into sub-domains and start-ups that are invested in and identify potential new concepts for Agri-insurance.
