Roger's testimony before the House Agriculture Subcommittee on General Farm Commodities and Risk Management. He discusses technological innovations, opportunities, and challenges for producers in the agriculture industry.

1. The Future of Farming:
Technological Innovations,
Opportunities, and Challenges for
Producers
Roger Royse
Royse Law Firm, PC
Royse AgTech Innovation Network

2. Dynamics
• Food Security
• The Rise of Consumerism
• The Declining Labor Market
• The Changing Agricultural Markets
• Increased Rural Internet Connectivity
• Cannabis
• The Introduction of Venture Capital
• The Rise of Big Data

3. Food Security
• Factors: climate change, growing global
population, rising food prices & environmental
pressures
• Impact people’s physical, social & economic
access to sufficient, safe & nutritious food

4. The Rise of Consumerism
• Grow Local Movement
• Growing middle class’ desire for convenience & year-
round food
• Tech development: urban & vertical farming, waste,
transport & packaging
• Transparency in supply chain
• GMO & gene editing practices
• Environmental sustainability

5. The Declining Labor Market
• Farm labor shortages resulted in increased
labor costs
• Technologies (e.g. Farmbot & Blue River
Technology) replace manual labor part of
farming process

6. The Changing Agricultural Markets
• Harvested cropland & agricultural labor work
force declined over time
• Agricultural production increased
• Productivity increase
• Agricultural methods have changed

7. Increased Rural Internet Connectivity
• Adoption & application of AgTech rests on
availability of the Internet
• AgTech is new rural driver for Internet
utilization
• 70% of U.S. farms had Internet connectivity
(2012)

8. Cannabis
• High margin & high cost
• Most high value (legal) crop in the world
• Easier to develop or implement tech
compared to other crops
• Lighting (e.g. LED tech), water conservation,
hydroponics, aeronautics & robots

9. The Introduction of Venture Capital
• AgTech startups raised more than $320 million
(2017)
• Increase in Series B financings
• Diverse range of investment themes
• Willing & active venture investors

10. The Rise of Big Data
• Farm data: site-specific data (e.g. info about
seeding rates, soil nutrients, fertilizer,
pesticides, water, yield data)
• Meta data (e.g. info about number of acres,
inputs applied, crops)
• Big data (e.g. aggregation of farm data from
numerous operations)