Urban Farming: From Community Development to Agriculture Technology

Executive Summary

• In the US, we are seeing a growing trend of government-backed initiatives to turn unused urban land or vacant lots into community gardens and/or urban farmlands, bringing a multitude of benefits to the communities.
• The rise of urban farming has attracted millennials to the industry, and the demographics of farmers are changing as result. The number of farmers under the age of 35 is growing—only the second time this has happened in the past 100 years.
• Investment in agriculture technology, or agtech as it is known, has risen significantly in the past few years, growing almost tenfold to reach $4.6 billion in 2015 from$0.5 billion in 2012. In the first half of 2017 alone, agtech investment had already reached $4.4 billion, and was almost certain to surpass the peak in 2015.
• We are seeing agtech investment in a number of areas, and expect urban farming to become more sophisticated with the application of better farming techniques, big data analytics and farming automation through artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning. In this report, we highlight several startups helping to disrupt the agriculture industry.