sustainable-agriculture
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Mike Zelkind Tried to Take the Weather Out of Farming
He built a farm like a factory, betting that software, sensors and stubborn operational discipline could shorten the distance between a seed and a salad. The experiment scaled across America - and ended by exposing the brutal economics beneath agriculture's most controlled environment.
Eitan Marder-Eppstein Put Warehouse Robots on Salad Duty
The roboticist who once taught machines to navigate offices is now giving them watering cans - and asking whether a greenhouse can compete with a field on price.
John Dyke Bet His Life Savings on Ugly Tomatoes
Before Nashville had a local-food boom, a former medical salesman opened a neighborhood grocery and learned the business one farmer, one customer and one costly mistake at a time. Twenty-five years later, he still stocks the produce aisle.
Perry Vieth Left the Bond Desk for Gold With a Coupon
A securities lawyer became a bond trader, then traded the screen for soil. Nearly two decades later, his farmland thesis has become a $2 billion platform inside WisdomTree - while another revealing investment sits in the classrooms he helped redesign.
Brandon Contino Taught a Robot to Pick the Produce Aisle
He started with neural prosthetics, followed a water problem into agriculture, and discovered that the hardest part of a tomato is persuading a machine to pick it quickly, gently and all day long.
Pierre-Antoine Mariage
Pierre-Antoine Mariage is the founder and CEO of Botalys, a Belgian agtech company that grows rare medicinal plants like Korean ginseng and Fjord Rhodiola indoors using a proprietary hydroponic technology, supplying ultra-pure botanical ingredients to the nutraceutical, cosmetic and pharmaceutical industries.
Satish Vemuri
Satish Vemuri is the CEO of ëko Incorporated, a New York-based venture that stitches urban farms into the real estate that hosts them - matching developers, architects, biologists, and agriculture specialists to grow food for the restaurants and shops downstairs. He studied Finance and Economics at NYU Stern with a math minor, and he tends to reach for spreadsheets and mathematical models before making a call on how the company should move.
Harrison Yoon
Harrison Yoon is the CEO of Kula Bio, a Massachusetts agbiotech company turning supercharged nitrogen-fixing microbes into a low-emission alternative to synthetic fertilizer. A chemical engineer by training with a Cornell postdoc and more than 25 years across cell culture, microbial fermentation and bioprocess engineering, he joined Kula Bio in 2020 as President and COO and stepped up to CEO in November 2025 as the company closed its Series A-1 round and launched shelf-stable products into farmers' fields.
Kathryn Cook
Kathryn Cook is the CEO and co-founder of NuCicer, a Davis, California agtech and food-tech company breeding chickpeas with up to 75% more protein than ordinary varieties. A former Boeing materials engineer and Facebook technical program manager, she left big tech to commercialize 35 years of her father's chickpea genetics research at UC Davis, applying machine learning and data analytics to plant breeding. NuCicer has raised roughly $23 million in total funding, planted across multiple US states, and aims to cut the cost of plant protein in half.
Ricardo Alba
Ricardo Garcia de Alba is the President and CEO of Meiogenix, an agriculture biotech company whose chromosome-editing platform speeds up the way crops naturally reshuffle their own DNA. A chemical engineer from Mexico City turned global ag executive, he spent 15 years at Corteva Agriscience helping build and launch the Enlist weed-control system before taking the helm at Meiogenix in 2024. He pairs hard science and commercial scale with a long habit of community and STEM service - and keeps bees on the side.
Nicolas Pinkowski
Nicolas Pinkowski is the Co-Founder and CEO of Nitricity, a Fremont, California-based clean energy company reinventing how nitrogen fertilizer is made. Armed with a Stanford PhD in Energy Systems, Pinkowski and his co-founders turned a backyard experiment on a lemon tree into a $95M-funded company producing organic nitrogen fertilizer from air, water, renewable electricity, and recycled almond shells. Their flagship product, Ash Tea, delivers 92% lower emissions than conventional fertilizers, has achieved OMRI certification, and has already generated over $150M in binding offtake agreements. Pinkowski was named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 list in 2021 and is an Unreasonable Food Fellow (2024), leading Nitricity's expansion from California into global markets.