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Smart Agriculture & AgriTech 2026 — John Deere / Climate FieldView / OneSoil / Trimble / Tortuga / Bowery / Plenty / See & Spray / Carbon Robotics / NEC AGRIST / Kubota / Yanmar Deep Dive

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Prologue — Soil Work Became Data Work

May 2026, an Iowa cornfield. A John Deere 9RX 830-horsepower tractor drives itself in a straight line within 0~5cm of error for 30 hours straight. The cab monitor displays soil moisture, NDVI, and weed density refreshed every second. The towed See & Spray Ultimate identifies weeds 360 times per second across 36 cameras and fires individual nozzles. Herbicide use is down 65% on the same acreage.

The same hour, a California berry farm. Tortuga AgTech autonomous robots judge strawberry ripeness with color cameras under LED lights at night, snip stems with six-axis grippers, and place fruit in clamshells. 50 kg per hour — three human pickers worth of work, in one machine.

The same hour, a giant warehouse in New Jersey. Bowery Farming's vertical farm sits empty. They filed Chapter 11 in November 2024 and were sold off in 2025. The same year, Plenty closed their Laguna Beach farm, and AeroFarms emerged from Chapter 11 but cut 60% of staff.

On one side, precision agriculture enters a golden age. On the other, vertical farming collapses. Same "AgriTech" banner, opposite fates. Why? And who owns the 2026 farm data — and how do farmers control it?

This article maps the entire 2026 AgriTech landscape — US, Europe, Korea, Japan — in one sitting. Tractors, robots, sensors, software, VC funding, policy, open source, and broken promises.


Chapter 1 · The 2026 Smart Agriculture Map — Four Big Categories

The landscape first. AgriTech is not one industry. At least four independent markets sit under one umbrella.

1.1 Precision Agriculture

Moving tractors, combines, and sprayers across existing farmland more accurately using GPS, sensors, and AI. Market size: ~$10.5B in 2026, CAGR 12%. Major players:

1.2 Vertical Farming / Controlled Environment Agriculture (CEA)

Growing crops in urban warehouses under LEDs. Big crisis in 2024-25:

1.3 Agricultural Robots

Automating harvest, weeding, and transplanting.

1.4 Satellite / Drone / Data

Looking down from above the field.

These four have different funding sources, customers, and failure patterns. Success in one category does not transfer to another. That became painfully clear in 2024-25.


Chapter 2 · John Deere — Beyond Tractors, Into FaaS (Farming-as-a-Service)

John Deere's market share in North American large tractors tops 60%. But the 2026 Deere is no longer a tractor company.

2.1 Auto-Steer / Autonomous Tractor History

2.2 Operations Center — Deere's Real Weapon

Operations Center is a SaaS platform. Every Deere machine streams telemetry to the cloud, and farmers see it on web and mobile.

2.3 See & Spray Ultimate — Targeted Herbicide

See & Spray Ultimate runs 36 cameras processing 360 images per second. Each nozzle turns on and off independently. Only weeds get herbicide, crops are skipped.

2.4 Farmer Discontent — the "Right to Repair" Movement

Deere is the emperor of precision ag — and also the enemy of many farmers. The cause: Right to Repair.

This conflict is still active in 2026. Deere is expanding "Customer Self Repair," but the software core remains locked.


Chapter 3 · Climate FieldView (Bayer) — The Standard for Farm Data

Climate FieldView is the de facto standard for agricultural SaaS. Launched by Climate Corp in 2013, acquired by Monsanto for $930M the same year, and absorbed by Bayer when Monsanto merged in 2018.

3.1 What It Does

3.2 Market Share and Conflict

Bayer's answer was adopting the "Ag Data Transparency" mark with American Farm Bureau Federation. But the value of farmer data is increasingly obvious.

3.3 Competitors


Chapter 4 · OneSoil — Satellite + AI, From Belarus to the EU

OneSoil is a satellite AI company founded in 2017 in Minsk, Belarus. After Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine and Belarus's role, they relocated to Switzerland.

4.1 What It Does

4.2 Why Free

OneSoil's farmer mobile app is free. Revenue model:

As of 2024: ~1 million farmer users, 70 countries, 100M+ hectares tracked. A satellite AI built by Belarusian engineers became one of the de facto global standards. That detail matters.

4.3 Competitors


Chapter 5 · Trimble Ag — The Original RTK GPS

Trimble was founded in 1978 as a surveying and GPS company. Agriculture became a major market in the 2020s.

5.1 Core Tech

5.2 PTx Trimble — the AGCO JV

In April 2024, AGCO and Trimble launched a joint venture called PTx Trimble. AGCO holds 85%, Trimble 15%. This entity:

Trimble focuses on surveying and construction, and AGCO took agriculture. A response to John Deere's closed ecosystem.


Chapter 6 · AGCO / Fendt / CNH Industrial — Tractor Competitors

The US market: Deere 60%, AGCO and CNH split the rest. The European market looks different.

6.1 AGCO (US)

6.2 Fendt — German Premium at Its Peak

Fendt is AGCO's premium brand. Headquarters in Marktoberdorf, Germany.

Fendt prices run 20-30% above equivalent Deere models, but European farmer loyalty is high.

6.3 CNH Industrial

CNH lagged Deere by ~10 years, but is closing the gap fast. The 2024 FieldOps launch is a direct response to Deere Operations Center's closed nature.


Chapter 7 · Tortuga AgTech — Autonomous Fruit Harvest

Tortuga was founded in 2016 in Denver, Colorado. It autonomously harvests labor-intensive crops like berries and strawberries.

7.1 How It Works

7.2 Business Model

7.3 Funding

Profitability is still far off, but the longer farm labor shortages (especially around US H-2A visa friction) persist, the faster Tortuga-style models grow.


Chapter 8 · Bowery + Plenty + AeroFarms — The Vertical Farming Crisis

Vertical farming took billions in the late 2010s on the promise of sustainable urban agriculture. In 2024-25 that promise collapsed.

8.1 What Went Wrong

The unit economics of vertical farming were hard from the start.

8.2 Bowery Farming

8.3 Plenty

8.4 AeroFarms

8.5 Survivors — Crop + Region Match

The lesson: vertical farm economics depend entirely on "what crop, in what region." The blanket "urban food security" vision collapsed under unit cost.


Chapter 9 · Indigo Ag + Granular (Corteva) — Seeds + Data

9.1 Indigo Ag

Founded in 2014 in Boston. Started with microbial seed coatings.

9.2 Granular (owned by Corteva)

Granular was founded in 2014 and acquired by DowDuPont (now Corteva) for $300M in 2017.

It's a Bayer-FieldView vs. Corteva-Granular rivalry. The model of selling seeds, chemicals, and data as a bundle is hardening.


Chapter 10 · Carbon Robotics — Burning Weeds With Lasers

Carbon Robotics was founded in 2018 in Seattle. The flagship product is LaserWeeder G2.

10.1 How It Works

10.2 Why It Beats Herbicide

10.3 Where It's Used

2024 Series D: 70M,cumulative70M, cumulative 160M. Farmers replacing herbicide with photons is symbolically big.


Chapter 11 · NVIDIA Jetson + Edge AI on Tractors

Autonomous tractors and farm robots became possible because GPUs got small. NVIDIA Jetson is at the center.

11.1 The Jetson Lineup

11.2 How It Gets Used in Farming

Edge AI matters on farms because of rural connectivity. 5G and LTE coverage is patchy in many places, and cloud round-trips don't match a tractor's 30 FPS demand. Jetson finishes inference locally and sends only results to the cloud.

11.3 Agriculture-Specific AI Models

Agriculture has become one of AI's biggest application domains. Not by replacing a million farmers, but by letting one farmer manage 1,000 hectares.


Chapter 12 · Open Source — FarmOS / OpenAg / Open Source Ecology

Counter to closed agricultural data, there are open source projects.

12.1 FarmOS

12.2 OpenAg (MIT) — a Vision That Ended

The MIT Media Lab's OpenAg project pushed a "Food Computer" vision in the late 2010s. The dream that anyone in a city could build a mini vertical farm.

12.3 Open Source Ecology (OSE)

Open source agriculture is less about commercial success and more about data sovereignty and applicability to developing countries. Farmers can build their own tools when they don't like the available ones.


Chapter 13 · Sensors — SoilOptix / Arable / Pessl Instruments

There's no precision ag without data. Sensor companies make that data.

13.1 SoilOptix (Canada)

13.2 Arable (US)

13.3 Pessl Instruments (Austria)

Beyond these, there are dozens — CropX (Israel, soil sensors), Sentera (drones + multispectral), Teralytic (60cm soil profilers), and more. The weakness is integration — farmers end up checking five vendor apps.


Chapter 14 · Korea — RDA + Smart Farm Generation 4

Korean smart farming is government-led. The Rural Development Administration (RDA), Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs (MAFRA), and KOFAS (Smart Farm Innovation Valley) share policy, funding, and R&D.

14.1 Smart Farm Generations

14.2 Government Support

14.3 Key Companies

14.4 Korean Strengths and Weaknesses

Smart farming is a prescription for Korean rural population and labor problems. The real bottleneck is the speed at which farmers adopt IT tools.


Chapter 15 · Japan — NEC AGRIST / OPTiM / Rakuten / Kubota / Yanmar

Japan's core agricultural problem is average farmer age 68. This demographic crisis drives every Japanese AgriTech effort.

15.1 NEC AGRIST — Bell Pepper Harvest Robot

15.2 OPTiM Geo Scan — Drone + AI Orthophoto

15.3 Rakuten e-Nogaku

15.4 Kubota — Autonomous Tractors and Rice Transplanters

15.5 Yanmar Smart Pilot

Japan hit the same demographic problem Korea is now facing — 30 years earlier — so it leads in farm automation. There's a lot for Korea to learn from the Japanese model.


Chapter 16 · Who Should Learn AgriTech

This field has no single profession. Agronomy, robotics, software, policy, and finance all meet here.

16.1 Agronomy / Crop Science

16.2 Agricultural Robotics / Mechatronics

16.3 Agricultural AI / Vision

16.4 Agricultural Policy / Economics

16.5 Agricultural VC / Finance


Chapter 17 · References


Agriculture is humanity's oldest industry and so is also the slowest to change. In 2026, 60% of tractors are still driven by humans. Vertical farms collapsed. FieldView collects data but farmers started asking whose data it is. Yet one thing is clear — soil work is becoming data work. John Deere's RTK GPS, Carbon Robotics' lasers, NEC AGRIST's pepper robot, RDA's Smart Farm Generation 4 — all point in the same direction. One person managing a larger area with fewer resources. That's the core promise of 2026 AgriTech.

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