Daniela joined PickTrace with several years of experience in the Washington agriculture industry.

Editor’s note: Seana Day is a partner at Culterra Capital. Based in the US, she has 20-plus years of investment, M&A, and strategy experience in agrifoodtech. Her analyses on the sector are regularly used by participants in the space to understand the continuously evolving landscape.The views expressed in this guest article are the authors’ own and do not necessarily represent those of AFN.As the economic uncertainty of 2023 looms, I find myself reflecting on the last decade of investment in agtech and wondering what comes next?Overall, the basic farm support structure has not changed much in the past decade. People still either sell ag products (e.g., machinery, equipment, inputs) or ag services (e.g., financial, insurance, custom farming) to farmers to help them run their business and bring their goods to market.Below I’ve created a simplistic chart that is meant to illustrate the fact that there is a finite wallet to share across these products and services (which is not necessarily to scale in terms of farmer spend).On-farm products, services, and their primary providersWhere we’ve been, where we’re headedOver the last decade I’ve seen thousands of agtech companies focused on optimizing products, primarily by improving machines or crop/feed input performance. In fact, by looking at AgFunder’s annual investment reports, we can clearly see that innovation and investment has been defined by technologies focused on products, with a scant few focused on optimizing services or service delivery segments.One reason is because machinery manufacturers have been natural integrators of innovation because it improves machines by making them better, faster, cheaper. A great example is John Deere’s Blue River acquisition in 2017, which accelerated its game-changing See and Spray capability.And within the inputs segment, there are well-established relationships between manufacturers, distributors, and advisors like agronomists or veterinarians

PickTrace, the only all-in-one labor management suite for agriculture with paperless hiring, time and productivity tracking and employee payments, has been selected as the “Labor Management Solution of the Year” in the 2022 AgTech Breakthrough Awards.