Agtech solutions shouldn't just solve the problems of today, companies should be predicting what the problems of tomorrow might be and trying to solve those.
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That's what venture capitalist firm Tenacious Ventures is looking for when it weighs up what agtech and agrifood companies to invest in.
Tenacious Ventures co-founder and managing partner Matthew Pryor said his firm was interested in delivering environmental impact alongside agricultural productivity and profitability.
Mr Pryor said they were also interested in participating in the larger knowledge economy that was going to be required to feed billions of people in the years ahead.
He said innovations had to make up a part of this as surely as farm-gate production would.
"If you were going to pick a discipline to be world-class at, surely it has to be agricultural innovation," Mr Pryor said.
"It would be like going to the Olympics and not fielding a swimming team.
"There are certain things we just happen to be really good at and we believe this is absolutely one of them."
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In his address at the 400M Agrifood Innovation Forum in Toowoomba last week, Mr Pryor said it was important to have an understanding of what future problems might be and plan toward those.
Some of the guesswork has been taken out of this equation thanks to the Future Forces: A ten-year horizon for Australian agriculture report.
"The reason why the future is important to us is because when we invest in companies, they often don't have a lot of customers, they often don't have a lot of revenue, the often may not even have a product that works fully yet or don't know who really is going to benefit most from their product," he said.
"So it's really helpful to us to have ideas about what the future might look like."
