Digital agriculture platforms took their present shape between 2013 and 2015, when Monsanto acquired The Climate Corporation, CLAAS founded 365FarmNet and Granular was established — input and machinery manufacturers converting agronomic models and machine data into a direct relationship with the grower. A decade on, the record is neither uniform success nor uniform failure: some platforms have reached hundreds of millions of acres, others have been closed, sold or absorbed.
AgroPages has tracked 37 companies and organisations across crop protection, plant nutrition, biologicals, machinery, irrigation and drone application, covering 46 platforms — among them several that have since been shut down or sold, and one major producer that never built one at all. Three characteristics emerge from that record.
The first is that this is not one market. It comprises at least six functional layers with different customers, different technical requirements and different revenue logic, and platforms in different layers do not compete with one another.
The second is that seven distinct monetisation models are running simultaneously, with several companies operating more than one. Subscription has produced both the clearest documented failure in the sector and continued growth, depending on the company.
The third is that scale figures published by different companies cannot be compared. Each uses its own metric with its own definition, and most of those definitions have never been published. One company publishes a definition of its principal metric. One submits its figure to third-party assurance. They are not the same company.
