Upstream Ag Professional - July 6th 2025

Welcome to the 100th Edition of Upstream Ag Professional

Index:

1. Can AI Get EQ + Judgement + Context and Displace Agronomists?

   • Tacit Knowledge and the Future of Work: A Perspective on Agriculture

2. Symbiomics Secures Strategic Investment from Corteva to Collaborate on Biologicals Innovation

3. America, the Beautiful: Ambrook Raises $26.1M Series A

4. Is AI the Secret to Next Gen Soil Sampling? with Jack Oslan and Nate Storey

5. The 2025 CropLife/Purdue Precision Adoption Survey: Making Way for New Ag Tech

6. Agrifoodtech VC funding drops to $5.1bn, but ‘these are typical bottom signals, indicating real opportunities’

7. 3BarBio Selects Fafabiotic as their Concept to Creation Microbial Delivery Challenge Recipient

8. Different Kinds of Smart

9. Other Interesting Ag Articles (9 this week)

This week’s audio edition can be found here and covers:

1. Highlight H1 2025 AgTech Funding

2. Agribusiness CVC Investments

3. Precision Ag Dealer Survey Highlights

4. Can AI Get EQ + Judgement + Context and Displace Agronomists?

Thank you for being an Upstream Ag Professional member. I hope all of you reading in the United States have enjoyed your Independence Day weekend!

1. Can AI Get EQ + Judgement + Context and Displace Agronomists? - Upstream Ag Professional

Key Takeaways

• Tacit Knowledge and Context Are Hard to Digitize — Agronomic decisions depend on field-specific context and tacit knowledge that GenAI struggles to replicate. Connecting data to LLMs and GenAi systems will remain challenging in the short term.

• Emotional Intelligence and Relationships Matter — Agronomists provide more than answers— they offer trust, empathy, and credibility, which GenAI can't match in complex, relationship-driven decisions.

Tacit Knowledge and the Future of Work: A Perspective on Agriculture - Elliott Grant

There is a constant discussion about what jobs AI will displace— including whether agronomists will be displaced.

The topic is interesting because if agronomists/agronomic advisors are displaced (or their value to farmers declines) and GenAI tools become the default spot for farmers to ask questions, it shifts value chain dynamics in multiple ways— product information dispersal approaches, sales rep focus, marketing budget allocation, trial/tour initiatives, and more. All of this has implications for input manufacturers, input retails all the way to equipment dealerships.

A useful way to consider implications is through frameworks. I referenced The Job Bundle in Mindware: 33 Mental Models for The Modern Agribusiness Leader as one consideration.

In Tacit Knowledge and the Future of Work: A Perspective on Agriculture, Elliott Grant shares an insightful framework that is useful for thinking about AI and job displacement:

I encourage you to read the full article, but here are the related quotes that stood out to me:

1. “One way to determine whether a task involves tacit knowledge is to ask the human performing it “how did you make that judgment”.

2. “AI does not learn efficiently like humans. Both of the examples — playing Go and riding a bike — were trained through millions of iterations in a simulation. The methodology for training today’s AI requires vast amounts of data and energy-intensive learning by trial-and-error to optimize model weights.² That is not how the human brain works. Humans learn quickly from very sparse data. This implies that AI will struggle to gain hidden knowledge about tasks in domains that are both hard to simulate (such as biology) and difficult to quickly run millions of real-world experiments.” (emphasis mine)

3. “There’s no reason to assume that the total area of knowledge remains fixed. More likely is that leveraging AI tools as ‘co-intelligence’ will expand the size of the pie — creating new breakthroughs and unlocking more human intuition.”

The last one, and to me the one I have been thinking on lately because of a couple conversations and articles I read (more below) this week was this one:

The last quote encapsulates what I have written in Disrupting Agronomy? Mental Models for Why the Future of Agronomy is Ai-Augmented not Automated and The Shortcomings and Opportunities of Large Language Models in Agronomy.

Which brings me to another article I read this week on AI by Dan Maycock: Harvesting ROI from AI on the Farm and a statement from venture capitalist at Voyager Capital, Erik Benson:

The reason I highlight the article from Dan Maycock is I agree with much of what he states, and I think several examples show why farmers themselves will be challenged to forego their trusted advisors.

Regarding Erik’s comment, the time cap is always useful to consider (on a long time horizon, maybe it’s true), but I’d speculate that much less than 10% of crop advisors are displaced by AI in the next 5-7 years.

My rationale is effectively four-fold, drawing upon the previous Elliott Grant article and previous Upstream writings.

For the full breakdown, check out the link in the heading.

2. Symbiomics Secures Strategic Investment from Corteva to Collaborate on Biologicals Innovation - iGrow News

Symbiomics is a Brazilian bio-based startup founded in 2021. The company raised a R$15 million seed round and has now closed an undisclosed sized Series A.

Symbiomics focuses on the discovery and development of microbial-based biologicals for agriculture, including biostimulants and biocontrol products.

What makes them unique is the integration of genome sequencing, machine learning, and gene editing to rapidly identify and engineer microbial strains sourced from Brazilian ecosystems.

Symbiomics has not yet launched a commercial product, the company is actively running field trials and co-developing with Corteva. Target products are expected to be in plant nutrition, biostimulant performance, and possibly biocontrol.

Corteva Catalyst and CVC

Corteva has been emphasizing gene editing which not only has a fit in their seed business, but as highlighted last year, also surrounding the biological segment.

What is notable is that while Corteva started investing late Corteva is the only publicly traded agribusiness CVC making consistent investments throughout 2024 and 2025 with 6 investments over the last 18 months:

Corteva was late the launch their version of a CVC relative to the rest of the industry, however they have been far and away the most active over the last 18 months:

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