As governments race to secure leadership in strategic technologies such as AI, semiconductors and advanced manufacturing, agriculture risks being overlooked despite its critical importance to economic and national resilience.
For Christine Gould, founder and CEO of scaling and investment platform Giga Futures, that must change.
“Food security is integral to national security,” she said during an interview with AgNavigator at World Agri-Tech London.
According to Gould, food and agriculture should no longer be viewed solely through the lens of farm policy or subsidy programmes. Instead, countries need to recognise agriculture as a strategic capability that underpins economic strength, social stability and geopolitical resilience.
“It is fundamental to feeding people and should be treated with the same priority as we’re treating AI and chips and semiconductors.”
The shift is already happening in some regions, she noted. Countries including Canada, Brazil and several nations in the Middle East are deploying billions of dollars to strengthen domestic food production, biomanufacturing capabilities and agricultural innovation ecosystems.
The result is a growing global competition to determine who will lead the next wave of food and agriculture innovation.
“Countries are starting to step up and say: what do we want to lead in when it comes to food and agriculture?”
Escaping agriculture’s scaling trap
Alongside funding shortages, Gould believes one of the sector’s biggest challenges remains helping start-ups move beyond pilot projects and early commercial trials.
The issue, often referred to as “pilot purgatory” or the “valley of death”, continues to prevent many promising innovations from reaching meaningful scale.
While access to investment remains important, Gould said founders often focus too heavily on fundraising and not enough on building sustainable commercial traction.
“We need to get off this hamster wheel thinking that the only way to survive is more investment, more investment.”
Instead, start-ups should prioritise deploying technologies into real-world farming systems, securing customers and generating revenue.
“A start-up should be there to get their solution into the hands of farmers and into the value chain so it can transform food systems.”
The four Cs of scaling
Giga Futures has developed a framework known as the “four Cs” to help companies overcome scaling barriers.
The model focuses on: capital – ensuring businesses have access to appropriate funding sources; customer demand – creating market pull and commercial pathways that place technology into farmers’ hands; capabilities – helping founders develop the partnerships, skills and strategic positioning required for growth, cultural pull – building policy support, market acceptance and consumer demand that actively pulls technologies through the system rather than forcing them in.
According to Gould, scaling succeeds when all four elements work together.
“It’s not just about capital. We need customer demand, founder capabilities and cultural pull.”
She also believes food security programmes may unlock entirely new funding pools outside traditional venture capital, creating fresh opportunities for start-ups working on strategically important technologies.
What does ‘anti-fragile’ actually mean?
A recurring theme in Gould’s work is the concept of “anti-fragility” – a term borrowed from systems theory that goes beyond resilience.
While resilient systems recover from shocks, anti-fragile systems become stronger because of disruption.
“The opposite of fragile isn’t resilient,” Gould explained. “Resilience is just bouncing back. Anti-fragility is getting stronger because of chaos, volatility and disruption.”
For agriculture, that means building innovation systems capable of adapting to climate shocks, geopolitical tensions and market volatility rather than simply surviving them.
Examples include diversifying innovation pipelines, developing broader technology portfolios and avoiding overreliance on a single breakthrough solution.
“The era of investing in one blockbuster and hoping it wins is over. We need portfolios of different alternatives so that whatever challenge comes our way, we’re ready.”
Gould believes companies should begin treating anti-fragility as a strategic discipline in its own right, much as many organisations developed dedicated sustainability teams during the emergence of carbon markets.
“The people who decide to lead now will capture the opportunity.”
Gene editing, robotics and food system diversification
Looking ahead, Gould sees significant opportunities emerging from technologies that can improve food system resilience and diversification.
She highlighted gene editing, particularly when applied to crops beyond a handful of major commodities, as an area with substantial potential.
As countries rethink food security strategies, she expects increasing interest in technologies that enable more diverse and nutritious crop production.
She is also optimistic about the role of robotics, particularly solutions designed for smaller farms and underserved agricultural regions.
For Gould, the most exciting opportunity lies not in any single technology but in the convergence of multiple innovations that are now reaching commercial maturity.
“All of this technology that we’ve been building over the past decade is going to have its moment.”
World Agri-Tech London Webinar: Event Intel Unwrapped
This interview was conducted at the recent World Agri-Tech Innovation Summit in London. The full on-camera interview with Christine Gould, alongside discussions with other industry experts, will be featured in AgNavigator’s World Agri-Tech Unwrapped webinar on 4 November. The webinar will also be available on demand. Register for free here
