Assets and opportunities to advance North Carolina’s agtech innovation corridor

Abstract

Agriculture and innovation are core pillars of the NC economy; agtech sits at the intersection of these core pillars and presents substantial economic opportunity in terms of amplifying the state’s infrastructure for innovation-based jobs and companies, while also accelerating productivity, market connectivity, and profitability of agricultural production. The variability and viability of these successes must endure annual and cumulative changes in variable and extreme weather, as well as market dynamics.
There are barriers that exist across the agricultural and agtech industries that ecosystem partners need to address to realize sustainable economic possibilities. The diversity of NC farms contributes to both opportunities and challenges. Most NC farms are family-owned and more than half are less than 50 acres,1 presenting scalability challenges for both technology adoption and market access. Intentional efforts to bridge gaps and maximize resources—from large scale to smaller scale farms—are necessary to strengthen NC’s position as a global agtech development and adoption leader, especially in ways that ensure the state’s 34,600+ small acreage farmers and communities beyond the Research Triangle Region (RTR) benefit from agtech’s full potential.
CROPS is an NSF-funded coalition of NC-based universities, industry associations, and nonprofits that envisions a vibrant agtech innovation corridor spanning from Greensboro to Greenville and beyond, ultimately broadening who participates in and benefits from agtech innovation activities. Following a stepwise place-based economic development approach, this landscape report seeks to highlight the many, often disconnected, agtech-related assets and initiatives that are currently active within NC. These assets have the potential to contribute to a robust, regional agtech innovation corridor, given intentional connections, incentives, and support. This analysis also presents opportunities and recommendations to accelerate NC's agtech innovation corridor, building on the many complementary efforts within the innovation and agricultural communities that are aimed at growing high-value innovation jobs and building agriculture-fueled prosperity across the state.