Why AgTech Thrives in St. Louis

Writing for EQ, I have previously argued that increasing economic complexity is an effective means by which to build a region’s affluence.

Put another way, ideating and innovating products that are not produced in many other regions and that require both extensive information and knowhow, in which smart people and firms must work with each other in a creation ecosystem, builds a more prosperous future for everyone. Such innovation and firm creation will be much more likely to be effective if it builds upon resources that are already present in the area.

St. Louis Solves the AgTech Puzzle

An example sometimes given to illustrate the benefits of economic complexity is that of a jigsaw puzzle. It is much easier to complete a puzzle if many of the pieces are already assembled and ready.

Dating back to the mid-nineteenth century with the founding of Shaw’s Garden (now Missouri Botanical Garden) in 1859, the St. Louis region has very deep pockets of knowhow in agricultural and plant science. Moreover, the area has an extremely large corporate presence in this market space, such as Bayer AG (which acquired Monsanto), Bunge North America, Benson Hill, and many others.

Strong Bioscience Labor Force

The fertile and high-quality bioscience labor force, which supplies both high-end R&D talent as well as technical and production workers, is noted in the St. Louis BioScience Labor Market Analysis.

Important factors favoring this bioscience labor market include excellent and focused research universities (Washington University in St. Louis, Saint Louis University, and the University of Missouri in St. Louis) as well as vocational and technical training resources, such as the St. Louis Community College System. These also provide a source of intellectual capital for the area’s innovation districts.

Finally, one of these innovation districts, called the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center, is focused on agtech and agriculture science (39 North), with much participation in this market space by two others (CORTEX and BioSTL).

New Puzzle Pieces In Play

There is also a temporal dimension to all the above. Much of modern agtech is enabled by a converging of bioscience, information technology, complexity science, and even artificial intelligence/machine learning.

This has all come together in just the last few decades. Applying AI/ML to plant genomics would not have been possible without both a deeper understanding of genomics and the development of advanced algorithms, among other developments. These puzzle pieces were not in place twenty years ago.

The St. Louis region thus appears to be the right place at the right time. This all bodes well for agtech entrepreneurs relocating their startups in St. Louis.

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