True to Type

Table of Contents

• Fields & Frontiers

• New In Ag-Tech

• Digital Pasture

• More Fields & Frontiers

• A Thought for Friday

• Till You Laugh

Fields & Frontiers

A Profitable Ranch Tech Without VC: North Dakota livestock innovator 701x announced the closing of an oversubscribed Series B round of nearly $10 million, reaching profitability without institutional venture financing. All the money came from local community members and rancher-customers who actively use the platform.” 701x makes satellite-linked GPS ear tags and holistic herd management software that communicates directly over satellite. Ranchers may now get real-time phone alerts about animal health, fertility and boundary violations in remote areas. Using automated robotics, the company has broken free from the usual tech hypergrowth imperative, driving hardware assembly costs down by 75%. The self-sustaining commercial model is proof that community-funded agtech can attain global scale and steady unit economics with a fraction of traditional VC investments.

Giving Nitrogen Its Dignity Back: Nobody wants to talk about urine. That reluctance is costing European agriculture dearly. Urine contains nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium. These are the precise nutrients that synthetic fertilisers are manufactured to deliver, at enormous energy cost and increasing geopolitical risk. Most of it currently flows untreated into rivers and lakes, simultaneously wasting a resource and creating a pollution problem. Swiss startup VunaNexus has been working for fifteen years on a system that collects urine right at the source using specially designed toilets. They’ve figured out how to remove micropollutants and antibiotics through a biological treatment process, ultimately creating a certified liquid fertiliser known as Aurin. Aurin is actually the world’s first officially approved fertiliser made from urine. The system is already up and running in one of Switzerland's biggest private banks in Geneva, recycling around three million litres of urine each year. One of the co-founders thinks that if we recycled all the urine in Europe, it could meet about 30% of the continent's nitrogen needs. With nitrogen fertiliser prices still sitting 58% higher than the 2024 averages, it seems the punchline is clear: the solution to Europe's fertiliser crisis might have been right in our bathrooms all along.

The Illusion of Scaled Traction: Last Friday, we wrote about FlyBox founder Larry Kotch's warning that the insect farming sector was undergoing a painful correction. This week, the correction has a name and a face. Goterra, which is known as Australia's most-funded insect startup, has decided to enter voluntary administration. Its spokesperson was clear: "This decision was not a product failure or a market failure. We hit a bit of a snag while trying to secure the investment we needed to grow. The company based in Canberra has successfully raised over $20 million through several funding rounds. They've worked with clients like Woolworths, Melbourne Airport, and the City of Sydney, and they hold operating licences that are quite tough to duplicate. It just didn’t feel like enough when the next capital round didn’t come through. Industry leaders are highlighting a structural gap in green tech funding, often referred to as the "missing middle." This is where businesses have progressed past the early proof-of-concept stage but haven't quite reached the revenue scale that draws in growth capital. The technology actually worked! The circular model was very effective. The funding model just didn't work out. Focus on creating unit economics that can sustain themselves without needing another funding round to keep going. Goterra deserved better. So did the maggots.

Agentic AI Steps into the Livestock Sector: Agricultural tech provider Ever.Ag has kicked off the second phase of its "Everett" Ag Decision Engine rollout, bringing the specialised agentic AI platform to livestock and animal protein operations. At the World Pork Expo in Des Moines, Iowa, they announced that the engine will work seamlessly with existing proprietary management software, like the Feed Allocation System, S&OP for Animal Protein, and Feedlot IQ. The platform monitors operational data to automatically suggest workflow improvements, so users don’t have to switch between different systems. In practice, the tool takes care of a bunch of complex tasks, like figuring out feed planning gaps, sending health risk alerts, and generating daily margin reports along with confidence-scored pricing metrics. Designed to tackle biological variability and market changes, this release takes enterprise AI beyond just generic text models and dives deeper into the specific logic of the farm supply chain. After this deployment, Ever.Ag plans to roll out the engine into regular agribusiness operations later this summer.

New In Ag-Tech

Listening for Lost Bees

We celebrated World Environment Day last week and World Bees Day last month. Today, we highlight one agriculture technology innovation that is making the buzz for climate. A Yorkshire Agtech company is turning bee sound into farm data. The results from a Dole UK trial in Kent are hard to argue with.

There is a yield gap sitting quietly inside almost every fruit and vegetable operation in Europe that rarely appears on a crop report. It’s not due to any disease, lack of nutrients, or drought. It's because the bees aren't where they should be when the crops really need them.

Annually, around 44 million metric tonnes of fruit are lost globally owing to insufficient pollination. In the United Kingdom's strawberry industry, irregular pollination results in the wastage of up to 9% of fruit due to suboptimal form or size, despite the prevalent utilisation of commercial bumblebees. The bees are present. The issue is that no one has been able to ascertain, in real time, if they are visiting the crops at the appropriate density and regularity.

What Polly Does

AgriSound, located in York, has created Polly, a solar-powered bioacoustic sensor that sits in the field and listens for pollinator activity. It can spot areas where pollinator numbers are low and sends that data through 2G in almost real time to a dashboard that growers can use to take action. Each sensor has its own special AI algorithms that help it pick out bee flight patterns from background noise. It then turns that sound data into useful information about where pollination is taking place and where it isn’t.

The idea is simple: if you spot an issue in the crop before it affects the yield, you can step in and take action. Change the location of the hive. Change the timing. Add some attractants. The sensor takes a biological process that you can't see and turns it into something you can easily work with.

The Conversation-Changing Number
From April to October 2025, at Dole's Future of Food research centre in Langley, Kent, a joint trial between AgriSound and Dole UK produced fruit with up to 28% more yields at peak harvest and much better quality. I don't see a lab result in it. It is a result of employing Polly sensors that are placed continually throughout the growing season, and it is done on a commercial basis by a top provider of fresh produce.

"Pollination underpins yield, fruit quality, and consistency, yet we rarely measure it directly," said Robin Wilson, an AgriSound specialist dedicated to pollination. By demonstrating how pollination may be made visible, this initiative helps farmers understand the true state of their crops.

Where It Is Active in Europe

AgriSound is now being used in the UK for strawberry, berry, and protected crop systems, and it's set to kick off European trials in 2026. There's an exciting partnership happening with the international food group Importaco during the 2026 bloom season in almond orchards across Spain and Portugal. They've installed more than 120 field sensors to connect pollinator activity directly with nut set, yield, and kernel quality. A separate trial with Westfalia Fruit is set to run through 2025 and 2026, focusing on optimising pollination in avocado production. The results are anticipated to influence a long-term strategy for Westfalia's global grower network.

The technology isn't available for sale in mainland European markets just yet, aside from these trials. Pricing isn't available for everyone to see. AgriSound works on a project-based partnership model instead of providing a one-size-fits-all retail product. If you want to get involved, you'll need to connect directly with their team.

The NetWorth Farmer Verdict

Who is this for?: UK soft fruit, protected crops, top fruit and tree nut growers, and trial sites in Spain and Portugal where irregular pollination is a known restraint on productivity. Agribusiness advisers working with clients on biodiversity net gain, ESG compliance or CAP eco-scheme eligibility will find the data layer AgriSound creates directly relevant to compliance reporting. This will be seen as legitimate evidence infrastructure for biodiversity pledges by corporate sustainability managers within food manufacturers and retailers, several of whom are already partners, including M&S, Tesco, Innocent Drinks and Dyson Farming.

Who it’s not for yet: Arable growers who do not rely on pollinators directly or growers in European markets where AgriSound is not currently deployed or distributed.

Questions to consider before engaging: What is the cost for sensor installations and platform access per site or per hectare? How does the data combine with your current farm management software? If you are trying to get paid for biodiversity through a CAP eco-scheme or a private nature market scheme, does the data output by AgriSound match the verification standards that you need?

Next steps by individual 

• Farm operators with strawberry, berry or orchard enterprises could contact AgriSound directly at agrisound.io to determine if your crop type and growing system qualifies for a trial or commercial deployment in 2026.

• Investors may find it interesting to know that AgriSound is supported by UKRI, an increasing number of commercial partners including well known brands, and a 28% yield improvement from a commercial scale study. The business model question to go into is how the sensor data layer scales from project-based to subscription, and when.

• If you are a founder, the bioacoustic sensing technique to precision pollination is underexplored. AgriSound is stress-testing to find out, does pollination intelligence become a common farm input decision together with soil moisture and weather data.

• For agribusiness advisors, there is a strong pitch for customers who must balance commercial pressure with sustainability commitments, using a single sensor that integrates biodiversity monitoring, yield optimisation, and ESG reporting.

Digital Pasture

More Fields & Frontiers

Giving Doctors Their Evenings Back: Before a doctor sees a patient, they spend two to three hours preparing. After the consultation, there is documentation. Then referrals. Then patient communications. By evening, many are still working, at home, on their own time. OurMind, based in Amsterdam, has secured €2.1 million to address that very challenge. It all began with Notes, an AI platform that turns consultation chats into medical documentation. Since then, it’s grown to include consultation prep, admin support, and patient communications. Now, it’s being used by more than 300 general practices and 14 hospitals throughout the Netherlands. The numbers really stand out: one in seven workers in the Netherlands is currently in the healthcare field. By 2040, the Scientific Council for Government Policy estimates that one in four will be needed. OurMind's founder, who used to be an orthopaedic surgeon, puts it simply: "This isn't about AI. It's all about how we keep providing great care with the same team size. A burnout prevented is a doctor saved.

America Has a Screwworm Problem. And a Budget One: The New World screwworm, a parasitic fly with larvae that feed on living flesh, is back in the United States after being gone for decades. There are seven confirmed cases. Texas is currently being closely monitored. A $1.3 billion response is currently in progress. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins has confirmed that some of that funding was shifted from the Biden administration's Local Food Purchase Assistance program and the Local Food for Schools program, both of which the USDA ended last year, resulting in the cancellation of $1 billion in commitments to food banks and school districts. Rollins pointed out that the Commodity Credit Corporation, which is the USDA's main emergency funding tool, is feeling the pressure. Its annual cap of $30 billion hasn’t changed since 1987, and if you adjust for inflation, that would be about $90 billion today. European agricultural policymakers and investors tuning in from across the Atlantic should definitely take note of this structural lesson. Emergency biosecurity responses tend to come out of nowhere. Long before a crisis hits, we make choices that shape how we fund things. A limit set back in 1987 isn’t really going to cut it for biosecurity in 2026.

AI Just Got a Printing Press: Most AI language models operate like a typewriter, producing one word at a time from left to right and pausing between each keystroke. It's dependable. It's pretty slow, too. Google has rolled out DiffusionGemma, an experimental open model that completely ditches the idea of generating tokens one after another. Rather than predicting words one at a time, it puts together a whole 256-token paragraph all at once. This means it can generate text up to four times faster on dedicated GPUs, hitting over 1,000 tokens per second on a single NVIDIA H100. The model also adds attention that goes both ways, so each token can talk to any other token in the block. This is very helpful for jobs that don't follow a straight line, like filling in missing code, making mathematical connections, and creating amino acid sequences. Latency has always been a problem that agtech owners and developers had to deal with when they were working on real-time AI apps like field advisory tools, autonomous machinery interfaces, and agronomic decision engines. What we can make at the edge changes a lot when we think in paragraphs instead of just words.

Farming Spain's Driest Future: Spain isn't just sitting around waiting for climate policy to catch up with its agricultural lands. It's already experiencing the consequences, and this week, it's sharing what it has learned. On June 16-17, the Spanish CAP Network is gathering farmers, researchers, advisers, and public administrators in La Rioja for a two-day event all about real farm-level experiences with soil health, sustainable water management, and climate resilience. The program features field visits to active farms in Sojuela and Nalda, where these practices are currently in action. The urgency is really felt. Spain is dealing with some serious issues when it comes to soil degradation, desertification, and water scarcity. A lot of its agricultural soils have low organic matter, which really limits their ability to hold onto water, stay fertile, or act as carbon sinks. For European farmers, agronomists, and policymakers who are keeping an eye on climate adaptation in real agricultural settings instead of just talking about it in conference rooms, this event brings something that's becoming harder to find: real evidence from the field rather than just promises. The event will be held in Spanish. Go ahead and register at the EU CAP Network.

A Thought for Friday

Identity in the Mirror

We like to think identity is something we craft on our own. The farmer, self-made. The only inventor. The rugged individualist who "needs nobody. But let’s be honest, so much of who we are is only exposed when mirrored back by others.

Think of a mirror. You know you have a face, but without a reflection you can’t see it clearly. The human mind is like that. If somebody listens and says, “I know exactly what you mean,” they are your mirror. That recognition says: I am genuine, I make sense, I matter.

We want to assume identity is something we invent. The farmer, self-made. The only inventor. The rugged individualist who "needs nobody. But let’s be honest, so much of who we are is only exposed when mirrored back by others.

Consider a mirror. You have a face but there is no reflection you can see it plainly. The human mind is like that. If somebody listens and says, “I know exactly what you mean,” they are your mirror. That recognition says: I am genuine, I make sense, I matter.

Now picture the opposite. Working hard, trying hard, speaking your truth, only to be ignored or discarded. It doesn’t make you go away, but it can feel like you’re invisible. That’s why validation is important. Not the surface applause, but the deep applause – the kind when someone really recognises the struggle behind your attempt or the heart behind your concept.

This is why self-sufficiency has limits. You may till the ground, you may sow the seed, you may live in silence, but your personality will hunger for recognition. You don’t need people to complete you, but you do need them to mirror you back to you.

Here’s the great twist: when you are fully seen by another, you actually become more grounded, more able to stand on your own. Recognition does not undermine self-sufficiency, it facilitates it. Because when kindness reflects your value, you don’t have to work so hard to prove yourself anymore.

So sure, be independent. Never confuse solitude with completeness. You don’t find yourself when alone in the field. You find yourself in the glance, the words, the warmth of others. That is identification in the looking glass.

Till You Laugh

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