What are some hurdles to improving sustainability through agritech?

I am just starting to get involved in agritech, because I now own a farm.  From my own naive perspective the payback needs to be there. As I meet more farmers I am impressed with their understanding of business economics.  If new tech doesn't have clear and near immediate payback don't bother the farmer, they are busy.    For my own health though, I am interested in some of the new optical recognition systems for destroying weeds, and eventually bugs/pests.  Reducing chemicals in our food production would have benefits that I believe people will pay for (after the recession)

We work with farmers to understand how technology can support them better. From that we’ve learned that the technologies we provide need to be accessible, because not everybody's tech savvy. How do we bring technology to them so they can access it without assuming too much about their use and abilities with it? There are some interesting ideas in development around the concept of an agripreneur, which is a business model that allows entrepreneurs in agriculture to play a role. The younger generations are often more tech savvy, so we’re looking to them to work on behalf of and represent the farmer. That brings the technology a little closer to the farmer. The next question for us is the potential uses of a given technology — how can it benefit the farmer? How can it help get the farmer’s products to customers? That involves the whole supply chain, or value chain process, so increased automation and integration across the actors there is important. 

Going forward, another key consideration is revenue generation. We need to have an incentive model so that farmers are compensated for doing more people- and planet-positive production in a sustainable way. There's an interesting set of thinking around how we can use technology to bring in other income streams for the farmers, to compensate them for the good work they're doing. There is a lack of standards and integration in that space but I’m seeing increased momentum.