Seeding New Farm Futures: Silicon Valley Investors and Agrifood Valuation Practices

• In Event: Feeding the Anthropocene: The Promises of Agro-Food Tech and the Difference Of Food - III

Abstract

As food and agriculture attract a new generation of entrepreneurial startups intent on reinventing how and what we eat, they operate in a complex relationship with the network of funders who attempt to parse profitable innovation from over-hyped money pit. Presaging a new era for food production enabled through digital technologies—characterized by precision, automation, personalization, efficiency, and adaptability—investors are approaching the newly agglomerated “Agrifood” industries keen to profit from transforming what they see as one of the least digitized sectors in the economy. In order to support rapid growth in this sector, Silicon Valley has become host to a thriving ecosystem of startup pitch competitions, incubators, accelerators, and investment funds dedicated to cultivating new business opportunities from lab-grown synthetic meats to crop-picking robots and big data analytics platforms.

In this paper, I will examine how Silicon Valley’s investor class imagines the future of food and agriculture through prevailing frames of disruption, profitability, and socio-environmental value. Drawing on interviews with actors in the Silicon Valley funding world as well as analysis of industry publications and promotional material, I focus on the construction of value that shapes where and how much investors fund in this sector. Connecting STS explorations of socio-technical imaginaries with critical finance studies, this analysis demonstrates how Silicon Valley investors approach the largely unfamiliar terrain of food and farming, and import tech-centric metrics for assessing good bets from bad. In the process, food and agriculture become socially and materially enmeshed in the broader culture of digital disruption.

Author

• Zenia Kish, The University of Tulsa