Mark McCall, the vice president of business development at iSelect, says, “There are numerous areas of opportunities—these include crop genomics, seed development, biological inputs that improve sustainability, software applications and the use of ‘big data’ that assist in operating various agriculture platforms more efficiently, the development of alternative proteins to help feed a rising global population, vertical/indoor farming, alternative industrial crops, technologies that enable precision farming, robotics and more.” He sees digitization as the hook. “Agriculture is quickly evolving, leveraging data and analytics to streamline [the] supply chain, tailor production to demand, create large-scale indoor farming, and apply AI to optimize crop genetics. Digitization accelerates innovation and can turn new entrants into market leaders—and puts historical business models at risk. We are investing at the nexus of this change, in ag-related big data companies and traditional ag infrastructure that will benefit from the move to big data.”

With technology swarming toward agriculture, it seems the traditional commodities-based investment model is out of step; the big money isn’t headed to the agricultural products themselves so much as it is to the farming process.

Consider the Agro Food Park in Aarhus, Denmark, the place that wants to be the Silicon Valley of agriculture. There are 75 companies on the campus and each is focused on innovation. Many of them service the new farming approach of precision agriculture, using sensors, monitors, drones, alerts, nanotechnology, self-operating farm machinery, artificial intelligence programs and smart soil management, among other advanced technologies that help farmers wrangle the most out of their operations.

“The food industry must develop—we must find new knowledge, develop new products and enter new, innovative partnerships with an open mind,” says Karen Hækkerup, director of the Danish Agriculture & Food Council, which owns the Agro Food Park.

The park doesn’t look like it is holding the future of food in its hands. It is a relatively nondescript industrial park just off a main thoroughfare on the outskirts of Aarhus, an up-and-coming university city of 250,000 residents. The future lies with each of the companies that have offices there. By 2050, the Agro Food Park expects to grow by 3 million square feet and house hundreds of companies.

Agrointelli, whose offices are in the park, is a good example of the new wave of thinking. It develops revolutionary new products that take the guesswork out of farming by integrating automation, sensors and navigation systems. Perfectly spaced crop rows plowed to exact depth take into account soil content, nutrients, water and weather conditions. Digitally managed by dashboard, artificial intelligence capabilities can process data from different sources to inform best practices.

Ole Green, the company’s CEO, says, “We are helping to make the farm of the future.”

According to TechCrunch, an online tech news publication, that future is ripe with investment dollars. The site says, “2018 will likely see a new record in agtech dollars raised, but with larger round sizes, as strong syndication with top-quality investors on both the West and East coasts continues to differentiate true winners from the mere adequate teams in this exploding tech market.”

The consolidation of Big Ag—Monsanto with Bayer and Dow Chemical with DuPont—is driving much of the new growth according to TechCrunch, which also owns Crunchbase, a database of funding information.

PitchBook and Finistere, two other information providers, report that more than $1.5 billion was invested in the agtech sector alone last year, through more than 160 deals. That compares with just 31 deals worth $200 million a decade ago in the micro ag sector.