Innovation adoption is gated by distribution, especially in agriculture
Welcome to the June 15, 2025 edition of SFTW. Happy Fathers Day to everyone.
This week’s edition highlights how distribution is still more important to get right compared to technology, especially when it comes to agriculture. This is not new news or approach, but it needs to be mentioned time and again. These principles apply irrespective of the farming system.
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For all that AI, distribution is still king
I did a keynote (“Is AgTech relevant in 2025?”) talk at the Plug and Play Center AgTech Expo in Sunnyvale, CA on June 11th. Here are the slides from the talk.
I started the talk by showing some data on timelines on how new technology gets adopted with examples of consumer technology in the US, digital technology, and agriculture technology.
Consumer technology like the telephone took much longer to be adopted by 50% of the US population, compared to the internet.
Among digital technologies, the adoption rate of ChatGPT is not even a curve, but a straight line going up. Adoption of Netflix is a steep curve, but the rate of increase has slowed as more and more people have adopted Netflix.
We saw a similar and rapid adoption rate for physical products like Bt and HT (Herbicide Tolerant) corn, soy, and cotton. 50% of planted acres were on HT soybean just within a few years.
The obvious question then is,