Chris Knight, founder of Agribot, has built a career around reading systems, from code to climate to crops. As a founder, foster carer, and environmentalist, he explores the subtle feedback loops among technology, survival, and the future of our planet. In this changing world, Knight has sought to develop technology that predicts, and in his life, he writes about its unpredictability in his upcoming debut novel, Unfinished Memory.
Agribot: The Science of Anticipation
Knight completed a Bachelor of Science in AI and Robotics, and followed it up with a PhD in Applied Climatology. Agribot was born of his thesis work on atmospheric regimes and is currently funded by the UK government through programs such as UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), a significant milestone for any business.
Agribot is an AI-enabled index of fields for agriculturalists, described by Knight as "Google Earth for Agriculture." Agribot "crawls" across the globe using satellite imagery and climate data to track fields in real time, noting growth, moisture, stress, and risk.
Currently, Agribot is focusing on grassland monitoring and forecasting technology, providing agriculturists with a minimum two-week growth forecast to support grazing planning.
Unlike Google, it does not exclusively visualise, but "ranks, explains, and answers the questions that move money and yield, months earlier than conventional signals." This means Knight has created a system that alerts farmers early to changes in their grasslands, enabling them to plan herd movements accordingly. The firm Knight has built not only saves money but also reduces the carbon footprint of dairy herds.
The Challenge of Innovation
Knight and his team discovered that traditional satellite imaging and near-infrared sensors perform poorly under cloud cover, so, in a strategic business move, they have switched to SAR technology. SAR (synthetic aperture radar) is a remote sensing technique that operates through cloud cover.
The Emotional Architecture of Systems
Knight's strength lies in mapping unseen forces: emotional in his novel, environmental in his company. He treats both human and climate systems as living, reactive, and shaped by stress and silence.
That inability to express and the struggle with it is what Knight writes about in his novel, Unfinished Memory, which follows Nathan, a traumatised foster child who experiences the death of his sister and begins a troubled journey through the hidden memories of his past.
Between Invention and Introspection
Knight defies easy categorization. He is a founder who quotes Ishiguro, and a scientist who writes fiction. He is a technologist who has spent his life focused not on optimisation but on repairing trust, memory, and systems.
His professional and creative work intersect through a shared belief: what's fractured can be made whole, but not without first being understood. With Agribot, Knight brings an understanding of the conditions farmers face, enabling them to make the best decisions for their livelihoods and for the world, as we are all interconnected on this big blue planet.
That same understanding runs through his fiction, and perhaps with that knowledge, he will achieve his dream of ending hunger worldwide.
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