Where AgTech Stories Actually Get Covered

Most agtech founders arrive with the same media list. It has TechCrunch at the top, a few farm magazines someone found on Google, and a hopeful line item that says "Forbes." Then the round closes, the release goes out, and the coverage lands in three trade sites nobody on the cap table has heard of.

The list isn't wrong. It's just missing the thing that decides outcomes, which is that agtech is covered by two almost completely separate press corps who want opposite stories from you. Founders who understand that get coverage. Founders who don't spend a year confused about why Wired won't return an email.

We've been placing agtech stories since 2016. Most of what follows comes out of years of coverage reports for Arable, a crop-intelligence company we still work with today, plus a US market entry we ran for AgriERP in 2025. The domain authority figures are current as of July 2026.

The two press corps

The first group is business and technology media. TechCrunch, Bloomberg, Wired, Fast Company, IEEE Spectrum, Forbes. They cover agtech when it stops being about agriculture. Arable's Bloomberg piece in July 2022 ran under a headline about a billionaire betting on weather stations, and the billionaire was Tom Steyer. The company was the vehicle for a climate-money story. When TechCrunch wrote about them in 2016 and again in 2017, the hook was hardware doing something clever, in the same register they'd use for a consumer gadget.

You get into this group with money, a famous name, a genuinely novel piece of engineering, or a climate story big enough to matter to someone who has never stood in a field. Product quality alone will not do it.

The second group is the ag trade press. Farm Progress, Successful Farming, AgDaily, Seed World, AgWired, CropLife, Future Farming, and about forty more. These outlets are read by people who will actually buy your product. They don't care about your valuation. They want to know what it costs, what it replaces, whether it works in rain, and which grower is already using it.

The trades are where agtech companies get their real return, and they are also where most venture-backed founders underinvest, because a Seed World placement doesn't screenshot as well in a board deck as a TechCrunch link.

Our own numbers say the trades win. Arable's best year for coverage was 2023, and the summary we wrote at the time is blunt about where it came from: the vast majority was earned in smaller, relevant, niche-specific publications covering winemaking, agriculture, and seed. That year also produced their strongest share-of-voice position against CropX, Semios, Solinftec, Sencrop, Phytech, and Tule, which are the companies an agtech buyer is actually comparing you against.

The map

Authority scores below are Ahrefs Domain Rating, pulled July 2026. Higher means the site carries more link equity, which is a decent proxy for how much a placement helps you show up in search and in AI assistants. It says nothing about whether the audience is right for you, which matters more

Business and technology, will cover agtech on the right hook

• DR 94: Forbes
• DR 93: Reuters
• DR 92: TechCrunch, Wired, Fast Company, IEEE Spectrum, Bloomberg, TIME, WSJ
• DR 91: VentureBeat, PCMag, Axios
• DR 90: Quartz, Engadget
• DR 84: The Information
• DR 83: SiliconANGLE

Sustainability, climate, robotics, IoT — the adjacent lanes

• DR 82: GreenBiz
• DR 81: Devex
• DR 78: Sustainable Brands
• DR 77: The Robot Report
• DR 73: IoT World Today, The Spoon

These are underused. Arable landed GreenBiz, Devex, Sustainable Brands, The Robot Report, and IoT World Today in years when the ag trades were quiet, and those pieces did real work with investors and partners. If your product touches water, carbon, labor, or robotics, you have four more doors than you think.

Ag trade and industry — where the buyers are

• DR 78: DTN/Progressive Farmer
• DR 77: Farm Progress
• DR 77: Modern Farmer, Civil Eats
• DR 76: Successful Farming (agriculture.com), AgWeb
• DR 76: Farmers Weekly (UK)
• DR 75: AgFunderNews
• DR 73: The Packer, Wine Industry Advisor
• DR 72: Agri-Pulse
• DR 71: AgDaily, AgUpdate, Agriland (IE)
• DR 66: Growing Produce
• DR 65: Seed World
• DR 63: Hoard’s Dairyman
• DR 62: CropLife
• DR 61: Future Farming
• DR 60: Farm Journal
• DR 59: No-Till Farmer
• DR 57: Western Farm Press
• DR 55: AgWired
• DR 55: Feed & Grain
• DR 53: Global AgInvesting
• DR 48: Precision Farming Dealer
• DR 47: Produce Grower

International

Valor Econômico in Brazil covered Arable's $40M round the same week as Bloomberg. Latifundist (DR 64) reaches Ukraine and the Black Sea grain region. Agrofy News (DR 66) covers Latin America. Farmer's Weekly South Africa sits at 66. If you sell outside North America, these outlets are easier to reach than anything in the US and they convert, because the reader is a grower.

What changed recently

Agriculture Dive is gone. Informa TechTarget shut it down on February 1, 2025, less than two years after launching it in June 2023, with 30,000 engaged subscribers on the list. The domain still ranks and still shows up in media databases, which means a lot of media lists still have it. Editor Sarah Zimmerman moved to Food Dive and reporter Nathan Owens moved to Manufacturing Dive. The archive folded into Food Dive. The outlet died; the reporters didn't. That distinction is worth more than the list entry ever was.

Farmers' Almanac is ending after 208 years, with the 2026 edition as its last. The Farm Press regional titles have been consolidating, with Southwest and Delta folding into sister publications.

The pattern is fewer staffed outlets and fewer full-time ag reporters, spread thinner. Practically, this means a smaller number of people decide what gets covered in agriculture, and they are easier to know personally than the tech press ever was. It also means a media list bought or scraped today is stale in a way that isn't obvious until your emails bounce.

What actually earns coverage

Announcements still work, and their yield varies more than most people expect. Arable's five biggest 2023 moments produced wildly different returns: an IDEA award drove 204 articles, commercial availability drove 145, a Shell partnership drove 75, an AgTech Breakthrough win drove 64, and a presence at Agrishow drove 40. Awards outperformed the partnership with a global energy major. That result surprised us too, and it's held up since. Agriculture has an unusually dense awards circuit, the judging is real, and trade editors treat the wins as news.

Between announcements is where programs die. Arable had years with fourteen to twenty-six pieces of coverage, which is roughly one every three weeks. Filling those gaps is a different job than announcing, and it needs three things we found we were missing when we audited the 2023 program:

Customers who will talk to a reporter. Not a logo on a slide. A named grower, on the phone, describing what changed. This is the single hardest thing to get and the single most valuable. Nearly every agtech story that ran without a funding hook ran because a customer was willing to be quoted.

More than one spokesperson. A single founder becomes a bottleneck within about six months. Podcasts, inbound commentary requests, and trade interviews all arrive at once and the calendar can't absorb them.

First-party data. Agriculture reporters will cover a dataset from a company that has sensors in fields. Yield numbers, water savings, regional weather patterns, planting timing shifts. You are sitting on stories that don't require you to have news.

The case with no news at all

AgriERP came to us in 2025 with a strong reputation in India and none in the United States. No funding round. No product launch. No executive hire. Nothing that fits the definition of news. They wanted American farmers to recognize the name inside ninety days.

We got a mention in a Forbes contributor article, and it ran on what the company had built rather than on anything it announced. That's the version of this most founders don't believe is available to them, and it's available to most of them.

What to do with this

Pick the trades first and treat the tech press as upside. Build the customer-reference pipeline before you need it, because it takes months and it gates everything. Enter the awards, since in agriculture they behave like news rather than like vanity. Check whether the outlets on your list still employ humans. And find the six or seven reporters who genuinely cover your corner of this, because in agriculture that number really is six or seven, and knowing them is most of the job.

Common questions

How many outlets seriously cover agtech in the US? Roughly forty publish agriculture technology coverage with any regularity. Perhaps a dozen matter for any single company, depending on crop, geography, and whether you sell to growers, processors, or input suppliers.

Will TechCrunch cover an agtech company? Sometimes. It covered Arable twice, in 2016 and 2017, both times around hardware and funding. Treat general tech press as reachable on a money or engineering hook and unreachable on product merit alone

What's the highest-authority outlet that regularly covers agriculture technology? Among dedicated ag publications, DTN/Progressive Farmer, Farm Progress, and Successful Farming sit highest, in the 76 to 78 range. AgFunderNews at 75 is the one investors read.

Do agriculture awards actually generate coverage? Yes, more reliably than in most sectors. One award win in 2023 produced 204 articles for a single client, outperforming that year's partnership announcement with Shell

Can a company get coverage without funding or a product launch? Yes. AgriERP earned a mention in Forbes in under ninety days in 2025 with no funding, no launch, and no executive news.

‍Salient PR has been placing agriculture technology stories since 2016. Figures in this piece come from our own client coverage reports and from Ahrefs data pulled in July 2026.