You can't ask that! But we did: Is collaboration in agtech broken? And how do we fix it?
In agtech, where the problems are complex and the pressure is high, collaboration is critical. But does bureaucracy, politics, and duplication make true collaboration impossible?
Andrew Bate, Olympia Yarger and David Jochinke in the 'You can't ask that' panel session at evokeAG. 2025.
In this final article of our evokeAG. 2025 series, ‘You can’t ask that’, our panel of raw, refreshingly honest voices tackled the real reasons the agrifood innovation pipeline struggles to work together – and what it will take to break through.
evokeᴬᴳ⋅. 2025 ended with a bold finale – a session where agriculture’s toughest questions got an honest airing. In this four-part series, we explore what happened when the filters came off.
In this final article, a confronting concern: What’s getting in the way of collaboration in agtechs? Why don’t we work better together?
On the panel:
- Cathy McGowan (Chair, AgriFutures Australia),
- David Jochinke (President, National Farmers Federation),
- Olympia Yarger (Founder & CEO, GoTerra),
- Bren Smith (Co-Executive Director, GreenWave and Owner, Thimble Island Ocean Farmand)
- Andrew Bate (Co-Founder, SwarmFarm Robotics).
The question:
“I look around now and I see an agtech environment that’s often characterised by bureaucracy, red tape, politicisation and damaging egos, duplicate processes and projects – and all of this diminishes our impact and our ability to get results.
How do we move beyond that and encourage genuine, meaningful collaboration across government, industry, academia and the private sector to really solve the challenges we’re faced with, and actually change the world?”
Played over the loudspeaker to a darkened theatre at the Brisbane Convention and Exhibition Centre, the question landed like we’d all been thrown into the spotlight.
And for good reason. Collaboration, it turns out, is harder than it looks.
Bridging the collaboration gap
Bren Smith reflected on years of systems-level frustration as an ocean farmer in the US.
For Bren, the problem is disconnection that comes from bringing together people from vastly different political and cultural backgrounds.
“We don’t know each other’s stories,” he explained. “That’s why we can’t collaborate.”
“Half of our folks voted for Trump. The other half are queer women farming in kayaks. We just don’t know each other.”
Bren’s fix? Get out of the boardroom.
“When you go out and actually build physical things in the world, you’re side by side. You start sharing stories, respect begins, and you start to create new ways to talk about collaboration.”
Fear is the real blocker
Founder of insect protein startup Goterra, Olympia Yarger has spent the last decade building collaborations with regulators, researchers, and waste companies. Her insight on why collaboration is hard: fear of failure. Fear of reputational risk. Financial risk. Social risk.
And in Australia, she said, that fear is everywhere.
“In the microcosm of everyone that’s interacting with our innovations, every person is terrified it won’t work.”
She explained that when agtech experiments fail, we rush to comfortable explanations.
“We say, ‘The reason it failed was because there was too much red tape.’ Or on the venture side, ‘It was too early for the tech, or farmers aren’t early adopters; they’re not technology savvy.’”
Olympia argued these narratives are just excuses.
“Agtech is a first-in-the-world thing. It forces anyone who engages with it to stand at the boundary of their own confidence and take a step over it.”
When fear meets proof
Olympia’s story is proof that genuine collaboration is possible, and powerful.
She worked with government to write the regulations that introduced insect protein into Australia’s livestock feed. She’s collaborated with CSIRO, Woolworths, and waste management giants, Veolia and Cleanaway.
She’s built something new, and it works. But still, the fear sticks around.
“Everyone was afraid of me because nobody’s ever seen a maggot in a box. Can there be an actual industry for maggots in a box? Do farmers want to feed maggots to their chickens?”
Pioneering an innovation, she argued, means there’s nothing for anyone to bank on. And when growth is slower than expected, or a milestone slips, the judgment is swift.
“‘Maybe the maggot-in-a-box thing isn’t going to work.’”
In moments like that, failure isn’t a routine stage of innovation. It’s a verdict.
A cultural pivot
Compounding our fear of failure, added President of the National Farmers’ Federation, David Jochinke, is our cultural habit of hiding the hard parts.
“We like to keep a facade over who we are and what we do. Even understanding why something failed is something we’re embarrassed by,” he argued.
David offered a simple challenge: Let’s normalise failure. “What if, next to Innovation Alley showcasing our best and brightest agtechs at evokeᴬᴳ⋅, we had a Learning Alley? Somewhere for things that didn’t quite go right.”
“We should embrace the fact that people have had a fair crack at trying to solve a problem, and see what we can learn from it.”
Less silence, more cowbell
Olympia closed this powerful discussion with a call for courage.
“Anyone who was at the first evokeᴬᴳ⋅ can look at this year’s conference and see how much leaning in is happening.” But to convert that to action, we need collective buy-in.
“I’m happy to be the first penguin off the ice. To say the quiet part out loud. But that means the rest of you have to follow me, or else I’m the only one getting eaten!”
She laughed. But her point was serious. If we want genuine collaboration – across sectors, across worldviews, across generations – we’ll need more than just a process for collaboration.
We’ll need vulnerability. We’ll need to reward openness. And we’ll need to build a culture that doesn’t punish risk-takers for taking the risk.
To catch up on the full evokeAG. 2025 session, click here to watch session recording.