The UK’s newly released 10-year Industrial Strategy places agritech squarely in the spotlight as a frontier sector of Advanced Manufacturing. It recognises agritech as central to future food security, climate resilience, and export competitiveness, all while noting a 40-fold rise in UK agritech startups over the past decade. New Zealand has experienced strong agritech growth of its own, though our current trajectory lacks the concentrated policy focus now visible in the UK.

This latest UK 10-year Industrial Strategy builds on the foundation laid by its 2017 predecessor, both of which identified agritech as a priority sector for innovation, productivity, and sustainability. This continuity underscores the power of long-term, cross-government commitment to sector development, a lesson New Zealand could draw from as we consider our next phase.

New Zealand’s Agritech Industry Transformation Plan (ITP), launched in 2020 and stopped in 2023, helped make progress in building visibility, framing challenges, and seeding collaboration. It sparked conversations, positioned agritech as a national priority, created active pathways through international missions, and supported projects like Farm2050 and the Trust Alliance. However, it also revealed the system’s limitations: patchy delivery, siloed funding, and a lack of a sustained investment architecture. We moved into action before anchoring ourselves in a shared understanding of the system’s root challenges.

Crucially, it taught us that strong intent must be backed by persistent infrastructure and capital.

Today, with the closure of Callaghan Innovation and no visible strategy to re-energise the early-stage pipeline, we are risking stagnation just as international competitors are scaling up. The UK, by contrast, is actively doubling down.

Through its new Advanced Manufacturing Sector Plan, the UK Government commits over £4 billion to innovation and automation, including targeted investment in Agri-Tech through the Farming Innovation Programme, the Agri-Tech Export Accelerator, and precision farming adoption schemes. The strategy seeks not just to protect food production but to reinvent it, creating new companies, capabilities, and value chains through frontier science and data-led tools.

That’s a critical distinction. In New Zealand, we have seen excellent public-private collaboration in the AgriZeroNZ initiative, a bold and well-supported partnership to develop tools that will help our farmers reduce biological emissions. This kind of coordinated investment is precisely what is needed to protect our existing food production systems. It is vital. However, we must now match that same level of commitment and coordination in creating new value: new companies, technologies, and markets, not just in defending what we already have.

The early-stage innovation gap is real. Aside from MBIE grants, there is no coherent and collective plan to support new agritech ventures in their formative stages. Organisations like Sprout Agritech and Icehouse Ventures continue to carry the load. Cross-border partnerships such as Agnition Ventures’ collaboration with Farmers2Founders in Australia are emerging to fill critical gaps. Meanwhile, international actors like Innovate UK and the UK Agri-Tech Centre are engaging more systematically and strategically with our ecosystem than many of our own domestic institutions.

Despite the policy vacuum, New Zealand’s agritech sector continues to progress, both individually and collectively. The momentum is being kept alive by committed founders, ecosystem builders, and international partners. But without a clear, coordinated national strategy, we risk falling behind.

Where do we go from here?

Let’s not reboot the last plan. Let’s redesign the model using what we’ve learned:

• Create a cross-sector agritech futures forum to align the ecosystem around a shared diagnosis and collective direction.
• Move from short-term pilots to persistent platforms, including data infrastructure, nationally accessible trial farms, and long-horizon capital.
• Establish Innovate New Zealand to replace Callaghan Innovation and fill the front-end gap in start-up support, a specific form of support not addressed in other science system changes.
• Position agritech within our trade and diplomacy strategy as a tool of soft power and climate cooperation.
• Strengthen alignment with global partners through formal collaborations and the collective missions that create and nurture them.

Our role now is to persist. To keep building relationships, shaping pathways, and driving outcomes – even without perfect policy scaffolding. We’ve shown what’s possible with AgriZeroNZ. Now we need to apply that same ambition to the next horizon: value creation.

Because protecting what we have is vital. But creating what we don’t yet have is how we lead.