Miao to study agricultural innovations with first mid-career grant

Are all agricultural innovations created equal, and does it make a difference if the innovation is coming from a startup, a large agribusiness, or a public research institution like Auburn University?

These are questions Ruiqing Miao hopes to answer through a first-of-its kind grant awarded by the College of Agriculture’s Experiment Station. A professor in the Department of Agricultural Economics & Rural Sociology, Miao received the $10,000 award for Mid-Career Faculty Support.

As its title indicates, the grant is for mid-career faculty, specifically those who have completed a five-year research startup plan. The $10,000 award provides advancement and support for faculty transitioning beyond their initial research startup phase.

Miao has been at Auburn University for 11 years, having joined the Department of Agricultural Economics and Rural Sociology in August 2015. “Auburn has been a wonderful place to develop my research program in agricultural policy, production and innovation,” he said.

Innovation, he said, is critical to addressing the many challenges facing U.S. farmers today, and recent evidence suggests that agricultural startups have become a major force in attracting innovation-related funding.

“Public support for U.S. agricultural research has declined substantially over the past two decades, while private agricultural R&D and venture investment in agricultural startups have grown,” he said.

“In 2024, funding for agricultural startups reached a level that exceeded public agricultural R&D funding in the United States. This shift raises important questions about the changing structure of the U.S. agricultural innovation ecosystem.” 

An agricultural startup is typically a new business that uses innovative technology or business models to modernize and improve farming. These companies tackle challenges like labor shortages or pest pressures using tools like artificial intelligence, drones and biotechnology to hopefully make farming more efficient and sustainable.

The idea for the research grew from Miao’s participation in the Multistate Project NC1034 where he listened to various presentations in 2023 and 2024 on agricultural innovation, startups and venture capital.

“Those meetings helped me see that agricultural startups are an increasingly important but still under-studied part of the U.S. agricultural innovation system,” he said. “Through this project, I also developed a connection with Dr. Gregory Graff at Colorado State University, whose work on venture-financed agricultural startups provides an important foundation for this research.” 

Several forces are contributing to this shift of funding to agricultural startups, Miao said.

Venture capital investors are actively looking for new technological opportunities in agriculture, especially as advances in biotechnology, automation, data analytics, artificial intelligence, and precision agriculture create scalable business opportunities.

“At the same time, public support for agricultural research has weakened, creating more room for private and venture-financed innovation,” he added. “The recent growth of agricultural startups is therefore partly driven by new technological opportunities and partly by changes in the funding landscape for agricultural research.”

These private and venture-financed innovations cover a wide range of agricultural technologies, Miao said, including crop genetics, pest control, soil fertility, animal health and nutrition, farm machinery, automation, robotics, irrigation technologies, farm data systems, and food supply-chain technologies.

And many of these innovations combine traditional agricultural science with newer tools such as biotechnology, artificial intelligence and remote sensing. 

While startups may be more flexible and faster moving than large institutions, the question of whether their innovations are more responsive to current agricultural challenges is an empirical one, Miao said.

“Existing evidence shows that startups are active in areas such as farm automation, robotics, data systems, and biological technologies, but we still need systematic analysis to determine whether their innovations respond more strongly to emerging challenges than the innovations from large agribusinesses or public research institutions such as land-grant universities,” he said.

One major challenge facing U.S. agriculture, he said, is the persistent farm labor shortage.

“This research project uses farm labor shortage as a key case study because labor-saving and labor-augmenting technologies are increasingly important for the future of U.S. agriculture,” Maio said.

A major methodological component of the project is the use of artificial intelligence and natural language processing to analyze the text of patents generated by agricultural start-ups, large agribusinesses, and public research institutions.

“These tools will allow us to measure how similar the patents are, how novel they are relative to earlier patents, and how influential they are for later innovations,” Maio said. “The project will then use statistical methods to compare innovations from startups, large agribusinesses and public research institutions, and to examine how these innovations respond to farm labor shortages.” 

Innovations can help reduce the impact of farm labor shortages by making agricultural production less dependent on manual labor, he added. Examples include automation and robotics.

These technologies can either replace labor-intensive tasks or make existing workers more productive, Maio said. In this way, innovation can help farms maintain profitable production even when labor becomes scarce or costly.

The findings of this research can inform policy debates about public agricultural research funding, especially whether startup innovation substitutes for or complements public research, Maio said.

“The project will also provide useful information for agricultural entrepreneurs, researchers, policymakers, and industry stakeholders about where innovation is occurring and how it may help address major challenges facing agriculture,” he said. “In addition, the results will be used to develop conference or outreach presentations, refereed journal articles, and future external grant proposals.”

Miao says he is excited and grateful to receive this first Mid-Career Faculty Advancement & Support Grant.

“This grant provides me with timely support to move into an emerging area of agricultural innovation research and to build new collaborations,” he said. It is also very encouraging to know that the College and AAES are investing in mid-career faculty development, an important stage when faculty members are building onto established research programs while also seeking new directions.”

Sushil Adhikari, interim associate dean for research, College of Agriculture, and interim associate director, AAES, said the philosophy in the AAES and the College of Agriculture is that everyone needs to work together to increase research activities, and sometimes that requires offering support to mid-career and emerging researchers.

“Mid-career faculty might need to redirect their research programs to align with national and regional priorities which requires new skill sets,” Adhikari said. “Also, we want to help the emerging researchers who are still trying to establish their programs.”