What the Ground Feels Like Right Now: A Global AgTech Perspective
Five members of the AgTech Advisory Collective met recently to reflect on the first half of 2026, representing North America, Europe, South America, and Australia. This is what we are seeing.
Agriculture is going through one of its deepest and most prolonged downturns in recent memory. What makes this cycle unusual is its breadth: commodity prices, farm income, equipment sales, and AgTech investment are all depressed simultaneously. Normally, a down year in one area is offset by strength somewhere else. Not this time.
We’ve spent the past months on the ground, visiting farms in Brazil, attending conferences across four continents, advising startups on commercial strategy, and working with corporates rethinking their portfolios. Here’s an honest read on what we’re observing.
The Funding Cycle Has Not Turned Yet
The narrative that AgTech investment is “coming back” has been repeated optimistically for two years. In our experience, it hasn’t arrived yet.
Many of the dedicated AgTech venture funds that were active in the last cycle are currently at or near the end of their deployment period. They may have one or two final investments left to make, but are not actively writing new checks. More importantly, a significant number are in the middle of raising their next fund, and finding it harder and longer than anticipated. The honest read from conversations with fund managers is that meaningful re-deployment of capital is unlikely before late 2026 at the earliest, and that’s if fundraising goes smoothly.
This has a direct knock-on effect on startups. Companies that need to raise are facing a gap: the funds that know them are out of capacity, and new entrants to the space are cautious. Bridge rounds, extended runways, and deferred milestones have become standard operating procedure.
There’s also a structural rethink underway. The pure VC model, with large cheques, aggressive growth targets, and unicorn-or-bust expectations, is being questioned openly now in ways it wasn’t before. We’re seeing genuine experimentation with alternative structures: hybrid corporate-venture vehicles, fundless-sponsor models, and private equity-style buyouts of distressed assets. Whether these alternatives prove more durable for AgTech is still being tested, but the conversation itself is healthier than the silence of the previous cycle.
The Conference Circuit Is Broken
If you’ve attended the major AgTech events over the past 18 months, you’ve probably felt it: fewer booths, more empty space, lower energy, and a growing sense that the ticket price doesn’t justify the return.
We’ve observed this across multiple geographies. Major industry conferences that were once genuine deal-making environments have increasingly become reunion circuits, places to catch up with people you already know, not to find new opportunities. Exhibition halls have visible vacancies. Corporate participation is thinner: fewer stand staff, fewer decision-makers in the room, and in some cases, companies present in name only.
The economics are becoming hard to justify, especially for smaller companies. When a single conference ticket runs from $1,500 to $6,000 depending on the event, and the measurable commercial output is low, the calculation becomes difficult.
What seems to be working better: smaller, more focused events tied to specific crops, technologies, or geographies. Field days and live demonstrations. Industry-vertical conferences where attendees share a common operational problem. These formats deliver higher signal-to-noise and stronger follow-through than the large AgTech showcases.
Brazil Is Not What You Think
For those who haven’t been on the ground in Brazil recently, it’s worth challenging some common assumptions.
The scale of Brazilian agriculture is genuinely difficult to comprehend until you see it. Driving through the grain regions of Mato Grosso, you can cover tens of kilometers with the same farm continuously visible on both sides of the road. The largest operations function less like farms and more like sophisticated logistics and processing businesses, with layered management structures, rigorous operational planning, and significant investment in precision technology.
Brazilian agriculture is unsubsidized. That forces an ROI discipline that isn’t always present in markets with strong government support. Farmers here are not early adopters for its own sake; they adopt technology when the economics are clear and proven.
Two things surprised us. First, the extent of the labor challenge. Brazil is often assumed to have abundant agricultural labor, but the reality is more nuanced: there is labor, but skilled, consistent, and reliable labor for increasingly sophisticated farm operations is harder to find. This is creating real interest in automation, autonomy, and precision application technology, not as a future concept, but as an active procurement priority.
Second, the level of environmental regulation. European observers in particular tend to carry assumptions about Brazilian land use that don’t reflect what’s on the ground. Many operations are required to maintain 20% of land as natural reserve; in some Amazonian regions, that rises to 50-80%. Riparian buffer zones along watercourses are mandated at 20 meters and above. This doesn’t erase real deforestation challenges, but the picture is more complex than it’s often portrayed.
For AgTech companies considering Brazil, the opportunity is significant, but so is the complexity. The market is fragmented by crop type, farm structure, and region. It requires local relationships, local language, and local trust. A company that enters Brazil “as well as North America” without dedicated resources will almost certainly underperform. Companies that go deep with the right local partners, however, are encountering farmers who are well-capitalized, analytically rigorous, and genuinely interested in technology that improves economics.
Europe Is Having a Difficult Season
The picture in Europe is currently one of the weakest we’ve seen across multiple cycles. Farm income is under pressure across most crop categories, with grains, horticulture, vineyards, and dairy all facing challenging economics simultaneously. Equipment orders are soft. Several events that would normally anchor the European AgTech calendar have been cancelled or scaled back significantly.
The structural issue in European AgTech is that corporate spending, which underpins a lot of conference activity, startup pilots, and market development, has retrenched. Large ag-input companies are rationalizing their portfolios and focusing investment. This has a deflationary effect on the whole startup ecosystem.
The events that continue to perform in Europe are the generational ones: Agritechnica and SIMA are still the forums where global relationships get made and deals get structured. The mid-tier events are under much greater pressure.
The Adviser’s Dilemma, and What’s Actually Working
One theme that came through strongly in our discussions was the pressure that independent advisers are facing in this environment, and the risks that come with responding to that pressure incorrectly.
Companies that are capital-constrained and under pressure from their investors often approach advisers, like this group, looking for two things: introductions and validation. Neither of these is the same as genuine strategic counsel. The pressure to open your network for companies that haven’t earned it, to provide access that substitutes for strategy, is one of the more corrosive dynamics in the current market. Advisers who yield to it consistently find that their networks become less willing to take calls, and their reputations become associated with companies that don’t deliver.
What seems to work better, and what we’re collectively shifting toward, is being very specific about what you uniquely know and whom you can genuinely help. Generic “go-to-market” and “commercial strategy” positioning is increasingly commoditized. The advisers generating consistent, well-paid work right now are those who can articulate a specific problem they solve, for a specific type of company, at a specific stage, and who approach prospective clients with that precision rather than waiting for inbound from conferences.
Direct outreach based on a clear understanding of a company’s specific challenge, paired with a credible track record of solving that type of problem, outperforms passive conference presence in this environment. The conversion rates are better, the quality of the engagement is higher, and the resulting work tends to be more substantive.
A Shared View From Across the Hemispheres
What strikes us, comparing notes across four continents, is how synchronized the current pressure is, and how similarly experienced practitioners are responding to it. Everyone is being more selective. Everyone is refining their positioning. Everyone is finding that the transactional model, quick engagements, success fees, equity-only retainers, is not a sustainable basis for serious advisory work.
The industry is working through a correction. The companies that survive it in good shape will be the ones that built real commercial foundations, understood their unit economics, and didn’t conflate fundraising with business building. The advisers who come through it well will be the ones who protected their reputations, stayed selective, and kept adding genuine value rather than just facilitating access.
The cycle will turn. Agriculture is too fundamental for it not to. When it does, the ecosystem that emerges will likely look different from the one that preceded this downturn, leaner, more commercially rigorous, and with a healthier diversity of funding models. That, at least, seems like a better foundation.
This article reflects the collective perspective of independent AgTech advisers based in North America, South America, Europe, and Australia.