How Ag-Tech Ripened Into a Growing Market As the market grows for better farm data, VC firms are seeding new developments.

This article is part of our Trends 2016 coverage.

With the rise of data-crunching agricultural software, farmers these days are digging as much in data as in dirt.

"It is as frothy as I have ever seen it," Adrian Fortino says of the ag-tech software market. In 2012, as an investor with First Step Fund, Fortino invested in a seed round for FarmLogs, an Ann Arbor, Mich.-based developer of software to help farmers map and predict crop yields, rainfall and other essential data. "But in the course of the last three years, we've seen a dramatic explosion," says Fortino, who now leads the Ann Arbor office of venture capital firm Mercury Fund.