Why AI in Farming Must Bow to Biology, Not the Other Way Around

Jan de Vries · 2026-08-17

As agriculture wrestles with wilder weather, tighter rules, and pickier buyers, the big question isn't whether AI belongs on the farm. It's whether the tech can play nice with nature's own rules. Munich-based AgriTech startup Greenda, founded in 2024, is tackling this head-on. They're building a data and decision layer for farmer cooperatives, turning scattered field knowledge into advice that's timely, independent, and actually useful. I sat down with Greenda's Chief Scientific Officer, Sabrina Pittroff, an environmental microbiologist, to dig into why farm data should benefit the people who create it, why agronomists and farmers can't be replaced by algorithms, and why the next wave of AgriTech should work with ecosystems instead of trying to bulldoze them. ### The Leap From Lab to Startup **What pulled you toward entrepreneurship, and what made you commit to building Greenda?** "I never quite fit the 'publish or perish' mold," Pittroff admits. "At university, I loved working on curiosity-driven projects—the kind where you can sit with a mechanism long enough to truly understand it. But the gap after that frustrated me. You can write a paper that clearly points toward a real-world application, and still, there's no guarantee anyone picks it up. That slowness, that uncertainty—that's where my impatience lived." So entrepreneurship felt like the natural next step. It meant using her research skills to build a solution, not just describe one. The tricky part, she says, is the space between research and a shippable product. "You need scientific integrity, but also the ability to develop, communicate, and sell. That's exactly where Chadi came in," she says, referring to Greenda's CEO, Chadi Nemr. "The Greenda moment for me was realizing he had the vision and experience to lead the parts of building a company I didn't—and that together, we could close that translation gap." ### Why Biology Always Wins Pittroff doesn't sugarcoat the industry. "Agriculture is a strange industry, and at times a corrupt one," she says. "But I'm drawn to it because underneath every business model, every regulation, every market dynamic, there is biology—and biology has the final say. You can build around it, but you can't override it." Here's the hopeful part: biology has already designed most of the solutions we're trying to invent. "Most of our work, honestly, is getting out of our own way and using data to support a healthy, active ecosystem," she explains. ### Who Really Owns Farm Data? **From your talks with farmers and coops, who actually controls farm data today—and who benefits from it?** "The honest answer is that most farm data isn't controlled by anyone yet, because it isn't being collected in the first place," Pittroff says. "It lives in paperwork, in messy spreadsheets, and in the heads of farmers and agronomists who are themselves remarkable data-collection machines. Walk through any field with a good agronomist, and you'll see decades of pattern recognition that no software has ever captured." But here's the catch: humans can't see patterns the way machines can—not across plots, seasons, and regions. That's the real gap. When we ask who controls farm data, we're really asking about the tiny fraction that's been digitized. And that fraction tends to flow upward in the value chain, not back to the farmer who generated it. "That imbalance is going to come into the spotlight, and it should," she says. "Farmers have historically been last in a long chain of consequences—last to capture margin, last to set terms, last to access their own information. Part of why I do this work is to flip that order." ### Putting Farmers First Greenda is built on a simple belief: farmers should benefit from the data their land produces. By bringing even basic data into one structured place, coops can start making smarter decisions without giving away their leverage. > "Biology has the final say. You can build around it, but you can't override it." For Pittroff, the path forward isn't about building smarter machines to dominate nature. It's about building tools humble enough to listen to it. That means keeping agronomists and farmers at the center of decision-making, using AI to amplify their knowledge rather than replace it. The takeaway? The next generation of AgriTech won't win by overpowering ecosystems. It'll win by supporting them—and by making sure the people who feed us get a fair share of the value their land creates.