Making Smallholder Agriculture Economically Attractive for the Next Generation
About the session
Smallholder farmers are being asked to navigate an extraordinary transition.
They need to produce more reliable incomes while adapting to drought, flooding, extreme heat, changing rainfall, degraded soils, volatile markets, and rising input costs.
New tools are emerging to help.
AI can turn weather and climate information into localized agricultural advice. Advances in soil health, biochar, and other approaches are creating possibilities for restoring agricultural land while potentially generating new sources of income. Agtech platforms are finding new ways to connect farmers with information, inputs, markets, and finance. Women are building businesses and leading agricultural systems despite persistent barriers to land, capital, and decision-making.
But underneath all of this sits a more fundamental question.
Who will farm next?
Across many rural communities, young people look at agriculture and see hard work, uncertain income, climate risk, and limited opportunity.
Leaving can be an entirely rational decision.
That creates a challenge that cannot be solved by introducing another agricultural technology.
If farming is going to remain the foundation of livelihoods and food systems for millions of communities, it has to offer the next generation something worth choosing.
What would make that possible?
Profitability matters. So does access to land, finance, technology, markets, knowledge, and climate information.
But education matters too.
In many places, the institutions shaping young people's futures and the institutions shaping agricultural production operate separately. Schools prepare young people for one future while farms confront a rapidly changing reality outside their doors.
What would happen if those worlds were more closely connected?
Could agricultural education become practical, entrepreneurial, technologically sophisticated, and grounded in the climate challenges farmers are actually experiencing? Could young people become the people bringing new knowledge, technology, and business models into rural economies rather than feeling they have to leave those economies behind?
And what could the next generation learn from the people already holding generations of agricultural knowledge?
This is not an argument that young people should stay on farms.
It is a question about whether farming can become a sufficiently productive, resilient, and economically attractive choice that they genuinely want to.
That requires looking beyond individual interventions.
AI advice matters only if farmers can act on it. Better soil practices matter only if farmers can absorb the transition risk. New financing matters only if viable markets exist. Agricultural education matters only if it connects to real economic opportunity.
The challenge is to connect these pieces around the reality of the farmer rather than around the categories of the organizations funding them.
Discussion Group Leaders
Nadait Gebremedhen is CEO at Hagush, advancing grassroots industrial policy and civic innovation to strengthen institutions and inclusive development across Sub-Saharan Africa.
Rikin Gandhi is CEO at Digital Green, advancing AI-powered agricultural solutions that help small-scale farmers improve livelihoods and adapt to climate change.
Trent McKnight is Founder at AgriCorps, advancing school-based agricultural education and technology adoption that strengthen opportunities and livelihoods for smallholder farmers.
What to expect
A cross-disciplinary working conversation connecting agricultural development, food systems investment, technology, soil health, rural education, women's economic leadership, and climate adaptation around one deceptively simple question: who will farm next?
Participants will move between the immediate pressures facing today's smallholders and the longer-term future of rural economies, asking what would make agriculture sufficiently profitable, resilient, innovative, and valued to remain a viable livelihood for another generation.
The aim is not to romanticize farming or discourage mobility. It is to ask what choices young people might make if agriculture offered substantially more opportunity than it does today.
Who this is for
This session is for agricultural development practitioners, food systems investors and philanthropists, agtech innovators, policymakers, rural education leaders, women's economic empowerment advocates, soil and climate practitioners, and people thinking about the future of rural livelihoods and agricultural transformation.
What you will get out of it
A sharper understanding of why the future of smallholder agriculture is also a generational challenge
Practical perspectives on what makes farming economically viable and attractive rather than simply asking young people to remain in agriculture
Ideas for connecting schools, agricultural knowledge, entrepreneurship, technology, and real economic opportunity in rural communities
A more integrated view of how AI, climate information, soil health, finance, markets, and education need to work together around farmers
A conversation about how women and young people can shape the next agricultural economy as leaders, entrepreneurs, investors, and farmers rather than simply beneficiaries