SPIN-Farming together with NewSeed Advisors is co-hosting Agriculture 2.0, The Conference for Innovators and Investors, on September 17 at the Marriott Financial Center in New York City, to introduce a select group of alternative agriculture entrepreneurs to the investment community.

Roxanne Christensen, co-author of the SPIN-Farming online learning series, says SPIN-Farming has inspired a wave of innovators, many of whom offer profitable models for sustainable alternatives to industrial agriculture. The Agriculture 2.0 conference will introduce them to potential investors face-to-face.

In general, sustainable agriculture has shunned technology and treated profitability as an afterthought, and this has limited its appeal to commercial investors, she says.

"To infuse the sustainable agriculture industry with much-needed capital and clout, we need to demonstrate that it can be profitable."

Entrepreneurs are producing breakthrough technologies that can help create a post-industrial food system that is less resource intensive, more locally-based, and easier to monitor and control, Christensen says. "This conference will introduce these entrepreneurs to investors and open the doors to collaboration, capital and long-term success."

Areas represented will include sustainable growing systems, controlled climate growing systems, building integrated agriculture, urban agriculture, closed loop irrigation and waste processing systems, mobile food processing, aquaculture and appropriately-scaled marketing and distribution systems.

According to Janine Yorio of NewSeed Advisors, the conference will take a sector which has been viewed as marginal and dispel that notion, and expose its potential to the mainstream financial community. "We want to shine the light on the sustainable agriculture sector and demonstrate to investors that there are real economics and commercial prospects here," Yorio says.