Why Your Tractor Can't Talk to Your Drone

Table of Contents

• Fields & Frontiers

• New In Ag-Tech

• Tending Dreams

• More Fields & Frontiers

• Till You Laugh

Fields & Frontiers

Oxygen, Generated On-Site: Many fish farms aren't growing as quickly as they have the potential to. It's not about the feed, the disease, or the water temperature. What if I told you it has everything to do with oxygen? These days, a lot of aquaculture operations get their oxygen by having it trucked in from centralised facilities or using on-site generators. However, those generators can be pretty pricey and a hassle to manage, especially if you're working in remote coastal areas. It's a supply chain issue that's really just a biology issue in disguise. Irish startup Nernst Electric believes it has a solution: ceramic membranes that can separate high-purity oxygen straight from the air around us, produced on-site, at a much lower cost and with almost no maintenance required. The company has successfully raised €1.7 million in Seed funding from Hatch Blue's Blue Revolution Fund. This funding will help them test their ideas in a real farming environment, with industries like steel manufacturing, mining, and energy eager to see aquaculture as the next big thing. The technology looks good on paper. The pilot unit is currently in the process of being built. Check out the full story to see what a successful demonstration really means for getting to Series A.

Mercosur Deal Moves Brazil's Trains: Brazil makes enough soybeans, maize and sugar to feed large parts of the world. Getting it from the farmers of Mato Grosso to a port has historically been the portion nobody wants to talk about. That’s exactly what officials from Cargill, VLI Logistica and rail operator Rumo addressed when they sat together at the World Agri-Tech conference in São Paulo last month. The EU-Mercosur trade agreement is finally offering the demand certainty that makes major infrastructure investment feel less like a gamble, they said, pushing capital into Brazil's underdeveloped northern arc of ports that have lagged historically far behind Santos in the south. The rail capacity is growing: Rumo has built 162 km of additional track in Mato Grosso alone. But the more honest admission came from Cargill’s Ricardo Nascimbeni, who observed that most companies across the supply chain aren’t even managing their data effectively currently, making AI adoption a distant ambition. The infrastructure is coming as much as the digital foundations still require some improvement.

Oxford's Weed Lab’s Serious Backing: The weeds are winning. Weed species worldwide have developed resistance to 168 distinct herbicides and 21 of the 31 known mechanisms of action of herbicides. The pipeline of truly novel remedies has been thin for decades. Oxford University spinout Moa Technology is aiming to change that. This week it raised £22.2 million in Series C funding to bring its three most advanced resistance-breaking herbicide programmes closer to production. Its GALAXY platform has already discovered more than 80 new modes of action, mechanisms that work in completely different ways to anything currently registered. What’s interesting about Moa’s model is the independence. No significant agrochemical company sits on the cap table. Nufarm, Gowan, Certis Belchim and Corteva are commercial partners, not shareholders. Moa gets to work with everyone at the same time and isn’t owned by anyone. European arable farmers who are seeing blackgrass and ryegrass marching through their cereal fields year after year should look very closely at the company’s most sophisticated programme. It targets specifically those weeds in European grains.

Farm-ING's Spot Sprayer Puts Chemistry Where It Belongs: Austrian company Farm-ING has rolled out the SpotSprayING, a precision spot sprayer that comes in working widths ranging from 2.75 to 12 metres. They recently showcased it at a working contractor event in the Netherlands. Cameras spot plants in real time. With nozzles set every five centimetres, they deliver 55mm targeted spot-shitting just the weeds while keeping the crop plants safe. There are six different spraying strategies you can choose from, ranging from targeting specific weeds to applying fungicides or foliar fertilisers just for the crops. The system currently recognises sugar beetroot, onions, potatoes, brassicas, lettuce and pumpkin, and it's set to add more crops as we gather more field data. The machine has the Dutch DRT 95% drift reduction classification, which is the highest level you can get for spot sprayers available today. The prices start at €75,000 for the 2.75-metre version and go up to between €240,000 and €250,000 for the 12-metre model. Plus, there's an annual software update subscription that costs €8,400 for the largest width. The algorithms are still developing, and we don't have a tonne of practical experience yet, but the case for using precision application at this scale is already pretty compelling.

New In Ag-Tech

The Affordable AI Agronomist

Many AI crop management platforms need hardware investments that leave out most European farms. There's a German platform designed for subscription access that's now up and running in twenty countries, but there's an important detail you should definitely check out.

The Hardware Exclusion

The cost of putting in place sophisticated AI systems for agriculture was estimated by McKinsey to be between €50,000 and €100,000 per farm. For the 10.3 million agricultural holdings in the EU, the great majority small or medium operations, this is not a cost-benefit factor. This is an exception.

NetWorth Farmer’s AI in Agriculture series, release 3, highlighted this cost architecture as the first structural impediment to AI adoption in European agriculture. The release's partial solution is the subscription model: AI-as-a-service that removes the upfront hardware requirement and delivers intelligence at a per-hectare annual cost that smaller farms can afford.

Xarvio FIELD MANAGER, developed by BASF Digital Farming in Germany, is the most common European example of exactly this model.

How it Works

xarvio doesn't need you to buy any hardware. It works through a browser or mobile app, linking up existing farm management data to a decision support engine that's been trained on over five million hectares of European field data, which includes wheat, barley, oilseed rape, maize and other key arable crops.

The platform offers tailored recommendations for fungicide timing, windows for applying plant growth regulators, and optimising harvest dates. All of this is adjusted based on the specific variety, growth stage, local weather forecast, and regional disease pressure for a particular field on any given day. It doesn't give out generic advice. It provides a recommendation at the field level that updates every day based on changing conditions.

xarvio is available in over 20 European countries, like Germany, France, Poland, Romania, Ukraine, the UK, and the Baltic states. It stands out as one of the few AI crop advisory platforms in Europe that’s specifically trained on local crop varieties and climate conditions, rather than just using models from North America.

Subscription pricing ranges from €10 to €25 per hectare per year, depending on the service tier and the country. No extra hardware is needed beyond the smartphone or computer that the farm already has.

The Caveat NetWorth Farmer Raises

xarvio is part of BASF, which is one of the biggest names in the agrochemical industry. BASF also offers the fungicides that xarvio's timing recommendations aim to enhance. The platform's recommendations aim to be commercially neutral, guiding farmers to use less product at the right time instead of more product at the wrong time. Independent studies indicate that xarvio users have seen documented reductions of 10 to 20% in their fungicide applications.

But the governance question Release 3 brings up is directly relevant here. Who holds the recommendation when the platform is run by a supplier of inputs? NetWorth Farmer won't answer that question for you. We bring this up because your agronomy advisor should be able to let you know if xarvio's timing recommendations have been validated without any influence from BASF's commercial interests, and what the evidence for that validation looks like.

It's also important to mention that xarvio relies on the cloud. It needs to be connected to work. This means it partially answers the cost architecture barrier, but it doesn’t tackle the connectivity infrastructure barrier that Release 3 points out as the second structural issue. For farms in well-connected areas of Western and Central Europe, this isn't really a limitation. In lower-connectivity areas of Romania, Bulgaria, or rural Poland, the platform's usefulness really depends on the signal quality that those farms can get.

NetWorth Farmer Verdict

Who This is For: Arable farm operators across Western and Central Europe on cereal, oilseed rape, and maize operations in the 50 to 500-hectare range who want AI-driven crop protection timing without a hardware investment. Particularly relevant for farms already enrolled in or considering CAP eco-scheme actions where input reduction documentation is required.

Who it is not for yet: Farms in low-connectivity regions where the platform's cloud dependency creates operational risk. Operations where the BASF ownership structure creates an unacceptable governance concern for the farmer or their supply chain auditor. And farms growing crop types not yet covered by xarvio's European model library.

Questions to ask Before Engaging: Has the fungicide timing recommendation been validated independently of BASF, and where can you access that validation data? What is the privacy and data ownership position for field records uploaded to the platform? And which CAP eco-scheme actions, if any, recognise xarvio-documented input reductions as eligible evidence in your member state?

What This Makes Possible: A farm operator reducing fungicide applications by 15% through better timing is not simply saving on product cost. They are building a verifiable precision input record that meets the documentation requirements of EU sustainability audits, retailer supply chain standards, and CAP eco-scheme reporting. That documentation trail has increasing financial value beyond the input saving, which compounds across multiple seasons of consistent use.

Next Steps by Persona: Farm operators can visit xarvio.com to assess coverage for your specific crop types and country. Request a demonstration of the recommendation output for a field you already know well before committing to a subscription. Investors: xarvio's adoption across 20-plus countries on a subscription model demonstrates that the cost architecture barrier is solvable without hardware. The strategic question is whether BASF will maintain xarvio as a neutral advisory platform or gradually align recommendations with its own product portfolio. Founders: the data asset xarvio is building from five million-plus hectares of European field observations is the genuine value in this platform. Any founder building European crop advisory AI without comparable training data is building from a structural disadvantage. Agribusiness advisors: the governance question NetWorth Farmer raises above is the question your clients will eventually ask. Being able to answer it clearly, with reference to independent validation evidence, is the advisory value you can add before they ask it.

NetWorth Farmer is Watching: Independent validation studies on xarvio's fungicide timing accuracy relative to agronomist recommendations, whether BASF's ownership of the platform creates regulatory scrutiny under the EU AI Act's high-risk classification for agricultural decision systems, and whether the per-hectare subscription model evolves to include cooperative collective licensing that changes the economics for smaller farm groupings.

Digital Pasture

Tending Dreams

The Fifty-App Problem

A Farmer, a Coffee, and Fifty Different Apps

A Farmer, a Coffee, and Fifty Different Apps

Imagine a Dutch arable farmer named Harmen. He wakes up at 6am, and before he even gets out of bed, his phone is buzzing with updates: while he was sleeping, his autonomous tractors took care of weeding two fields and snapped photos of every plant they came across. He just wants to know one thing, is it going to rain today?, but to be real, his current setup just isn't able to have that conversation. Not just yet.

Why Doesn't This Feel More Like it Does in the Movies?

Because agricultural robots, however capable, don't speak the same language. Sow, weed, spray, mow: every task now has a machine for it, but each machine comes from a different manufacturer, with its own app, its own screen, its own logic. Wageningen researcher Paul van Zoggel puts the core problem plainly: managing all that technology, not the technology itself, is what trips farmers up.

Is This an Equipment Problem, or a Data Problem?

Data is the main issue here. Creating an assistant that can really chat about things like the nitrogen rule or a harvest forecast in a way that feels natural for farmers involves giving it a tonne of reliable agronomic information right from the start. Skip that step, and researcher Ard Nieuwenhuizen warns that the system begins to guess, politely, confidently, but incorrectly.

Do We Still Have to Wait Five Years?

Both, in a way. Your fleet will not be able to have whole Jarvis-style discussions for another five years. Botato, a chatbot trained on potato-growth models, can answer genuine questions, such as what a week's delay in harvest will do to yield, therefore there is a functional preview now available.

The National Precision Agriculture Living Lab is already putting fifty Dutch farmers through their paces, one field, one robot, and one season at a time, proving that the fragmented-app problem isn't insurmountable. The same methodical, farmer-to-farmer testing that brought weeding and disease-scouting robots from concept to reliable fieldhand is all that's needed here.

More Fields & Frontiers

Three Enemies and One Cherry Orchard: It has never been easy to grow cherries in the Netherlands, but 2026 has made it a lot harder. Annemiek Scholten, a cherry grower from De Versekers in Wehl, Gelderland, faces the same three problems that fruit growers all over Northern Europe do: the Suzuki fruit fly, an invasive pest that eats soft fruit without mercy; extreme summer heat that makes fruit ripen faster than harvest teams can move; and stricter crop protection rules that keep taking away the tools that growers have used in the past. Scholten's response is planned instead of reactive: orchard management all year, careful attention to timing, and a focus on what makes Dutch cherries unique enough in the market to make the cost and difficulty of making them worth it. In an honest interview with GFActueel filmed at the orchard, she talked about how she makes a hard crop profitable when everything around her is changing all the time. Read the whole thing.

Your Body Gets The Implant: Most medical implants are long-lasting alien bodies that the body gets used to. Xeltis is making something very different: implants that the body slowly replaces with its own living tissue and then absorbs completely. Xeltis, a Dutch-American MedTech company, raised €20.5 million in a new round led by Horizon 3 Healthcare. The European Innovation Council, Invest-NL, EQT Life Sciences, and DaVita also took part, bringing the total amount of money raised to over €85 million. The money will be used to finish the US pivotal study for aXessTM, an implantable blood vessel for haemodialysis access that has already been approved by the CE Mark and treated its first commercial patient in Germany. The technology is based on Xeltis's own Restorex® platform and uses a high-tech polymer structure that lets the body grow new blood vessels around it. Eventually, the body absorbs the scaffold, leaving nothing artificial behind. This is not a small step forward for the millions of people in Europe who need haemodialysis and are currently reliant on patches that fail and get infections all the time. It's a completely different kind of answer.

France's Farm Law Is Already In Court: This is only about France, but the problems it shows are ones that affect farming all over Europe. France passed an agricultural emergency law earlier this month that will speed up projects to store water, make it easier to get approval for pesticides, and give farmers more operational flexibility during this summer's severe drought. Before the ink was dry, on July 24, three opposition groups, La France Insoumise, the Écologistes, and the Socialist Party, sent the law to France's Constitutional Council, saying it goes against the precautionary principle, the right to a healthy environment, and the duty to prevent damage to the environment. Acetamiprid, a neonicotinoid insecticide that opponents say is bad for pollinators and people's health, and plans to double agricultural water storage by 2035 without enough public input are the main issues in the fight. They have thirty days to make a decision. France is going to court before the harvest is even over to try to find a balance between farmers' needs and their duty to protect the environment.

Pack Light. Stream Heavy: The newsletter isn't going anywhere, so take your time! It’ll be right here, patiently waiting like a dog at the door, tail wagging and all! But before you dive headfirst into summer hibernation, we’ve unearthed ten films and series that are absolutely begging to be added to your watchlist for those long evenings, train rides, and lazy Sunday mornings when your biggest decision is whether to snack on popcorn or chips! These are definitely not the cinematic masterpieces about crops and cows you might be expecting! They're films about wheeling and dealing, sticking to your guns, flopping spectacularly, chasing dreams, and the wonderfully chaotic art of creating something out of thin air. Air shows you what a pitch looks like when it’s had one too many cups of coffee and decided to wear its bravest outfit! Dumb Money shows that when a bunch of people band together, they can shake things up in the market like a toddler with a rattle! Mountainhead dives into the awkward territory of what happens to folks who collect power like it's Pokémon cards. Spoiler alert: it’s not all fun and games! Super Pumped will have you cringing at the spectacular train wreck that is hypergrowth gone awry. Bank of Dave will give you a gentle nudge to remember that a purpose-driven business is like the cherry on top of a sundae. Go on, don’t be shy! Have a blast this summer! Don't forget to apply sunscreen and avoid turning into a lobster!

Till You Laugh

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