Welcome back to AgTech Digest. This week the deal desk did the heavy lifting — three acquisitions changed hands, two companies leaned on debt rather than equity, and one of vertical farming's biggest names called it quits. Here's the agriculture signal, scored and sorted.

Our latest premium edition, Seed Capital, unpacks July's real story: agriculture's inputs layer. It breaks down the month's seed, genetics, biologicals and fertilizer surge with a full year-over-year and month-over-month read on 6 M&A deals, 23 funding rounds, 33 partnerships and 17 product launches.

Consolidation reshaped the map. Farmmi (Nasdaq: FAMI) signed a framework agreement to acquire 100% of Four Seasons Holding Group in [Chapecó, Santa Catarina, Brazil], paying in Class A shares at a price to be set by independent valuation — plugging directly into soybean, sugar and protein trade flows. Agro Care, Europe's largest tomato producer [Maasdijk, Netherlands], took full ownership of Moroccan grower Omagreen, extending greenhouse capacity into Morocco's lower-cost export base. And Parish Tractor acquired Kubota dealer Crain Tractor in [Columbia, Mississippi], its ninth location across the US Southeast, as ag-equipment retail keeps rolling up.

Two names exited. Hydrofarm (Nasdaq: HYFM) completed a $16M sale of Aurora Peat Products and launched "Project Agility," trimming its controlled-environment portfolio to cut Term Loan debt. More starkly, 80 Acres Farms [Hamilton, Ohio] — which raised $390M across six rounds, including a $160M Series B — began winding down after it could not secure the capital to continue, underscoring how thin vertical-farming margins remain against high energy and infrastructure costs.

Debt did the financing this week. Vital Farms (Nasdaq: VITL) secured a $125M senior secured term loan led by Silver Point Capital, part of a $185M package that includes a $60M J.P. Morgan revolver. Plantible Foods landed a $25M USDA OneRD guaranteed loan through X-Caliber Rural Capital, plus $10M equity from RA Capital, to quintuple Rubi Protein capacity in [Eldorado, Texas].

Venture stayed selective but active. Ambrook [Denver, Colorado] raised a $30M Series B led by Lachy Groom (total capital $59M), scaling from 2,500 to more than 8,000 farm and trade customers. Mitti Labs closed a $9.5M Series A led by Aramco Ventures to expand its rice water-resilience platform across India, the Philippines and Indonesia. And Proxy Foods AI [Washington, D.C.] raised a $6M seed led by Ted Leonsis for its agentic food-formulation platform, whose customers include Barilla.

Agtecnic advanced its SenseSpray green-on-brown precision system [Tingalpa, Australia], using boom-mounted RGB cameras to spray only detected weeds and cut chemical use by up to 90%, now gaining compatibility with CapstanAG and Ag Leader pulse-width-modulation hardware. Latham Hi-Tech Seeds [Alexander, Iowa] unveiled its K-Class soybean lineup for 2027 — 16 products, five carrying the Ironclad designation targeting iron deficiency chlorosis, sudden death syndrome and cyst nematode. AgroLiquid [St. Johns, Michigan] expanded its crop-nutrition portfolio with six humic, fulvic and sugar-based products gained through its acquisition of Monty's Plant Food Company.

Capacity and IP led the strategic plays. ADM will add roughly 700,000 metric tons of annual oilseed crush across four plants in [Frankfort, Indiana], [Deerfield, Missouri], [Lincoln, Nebraska] and [Spiritwood, North Dakota], opening more than 25M bushels of new farmer demand tied to US biofuel policy. Kemin Industries broke ground on a $35M Kuriosity Centre at its Asia-Pacific headquarters in [Singapore]. On licensing, Origin Agritech (Nasdaq: SEED) secured exclusive China rights to the machine-harvest corn hybrid Zhongdan 6202 from the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, projecting about RMB 65M in cumulative cash flow through FY2028; and Limagrain signed a worldwide genome-editing license with Beijing's Qi Biodesign for field and vegetable crops, aligned to the EU's updated New Genomic Techniques framework.

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