Session titles like “You Can’t Ask That” and “The Great Fallacy: the future is female” say a fair bit about the kind of conference AgriFutures EvokeAg is, and Ruminati CEO Bobby Miller and Lily Rodgers spent two days at the 2025 edition coming away with a lot to think about. The sessions ranged from the fuel powering the planes people flew in on, and the opportunity biofuel presents for the agricultural sector, to the downstream effects of GLP-1 weight loss drugs on global food demand.
With around 10% of the US population now taking those drugs, it is a conversation the food and agriculture industry cannot afford to ignore for much longer, and the breakout sessions kept the discussion collaborative and challenging. Startup Alley and the Scale Up station were well worth the time too, as useful signals of where investment and innovation are concentrating in agtech right now.
A couple of lines from the floor stuck with Bobby and Lily. “Can we afford NOT to invest in agtech?” is a question more of the industry should be asking itself, and “VC is chasing unicorns, agtech is building workhorses”, from Rob Hulme, captures the mismatch between how agtech gets funded and what it needs to deliver on the ground. For producers that means the tools built to be used day to day matter more than the ones built to impress investors.
SwarmFarm Robotics founder Andrew Bate then put the question that should sit behind every product decision: “Are you building something producers want, and are they prepared to pay for it?” That is the question Ruminati takes most seriously, because a tool only earns a place on a farm if the producer sees the point of it and thinks it worth paying for, and the answer has to be yes to both.
