Ever feel like you’re struggling to keep with all the latest great ag and AgTech content available? Me too, and I’ve been trying to do something about it.

After years of trial and error, I think I’ve learned a few things and what I’ve done might be useful to others who would like to be able to keep with more of what’s going on in AgTech land, because things are changing at a rapid pace and that shows no sign of changing. In this post on Medium, I go through my three main consumption channels – podcasts, newsletters, and social media. I provide my top selections for podcasts and newsletters and pro tips on optimizing LinkedIn and Twitter. Here’s the short version:

Podcasts
Business of Agriculture – Damian Mason
Voices of the Valley – Dennis Donohue and Candace Wilson
Future of Ag – Tim Hammerich
AgTech So What – Sarah Nolet
Fresh Takes on Tech – Vonnie Estes
Podcast tips – Apple podcast app, speed it up, build a station, download for long flights and drives.

Newsletters
Upstream Ag Insights – Shane Thomas
Software Is Feeding The World – Rishi Pethe
Prime Future – Janette Barnard
Anything by Seana Day
Newsletter tip – download each weekly edition in its own window for easy reading on flights.

Social Media
LinkedIn – customize your news feeds with follows and connections, like and re-post for content creators that earn it, and LinkedIn Groups.
Twitter – follow the right folks by searches for search terms or hashtags, then add Lists when you get to critical mass.

Hopefully this helps people consume AgTech content a lot faster. I know these tips have helped me get through more content. Enjoy!

On this episode of Voices of the Valley, Hernan Hernandez, Executive Director of the California Farmworker Foundation, shares his background about growing up in a farm community to becoming a voice and force for policy change.

“What really got me more involved with the population of farmworkers who I serve today is that I always felt that farmworkers needed to improve their quality of life,” Hernandez says. “When I was in college, I had one professor who told me, ‘You’re doing the right things, but what you have to do next is look at it from a political perspective and try to engage with policymakers because at the end of the day they’re the ones who will give you the resources that you need – and they’re going to be the one that are going to be able to provide more for the population that you so care about.’”

Appointed to his position because of his background as well as how much heart he puts into his work, Hernandez is looking to provide resources to farm communities based on the pillars of personal education and personal development, workforce development, immigration services, health and community engagement.

Listen to this episode of Voices of the Valley here.

AgTech Startups, we need an open data exchange format to increase the value of complementary data sets to the end customer─the grower.

I had a great conversation today about the increased value that can be created in farming operations when data from multiple activities are combined to increase the value of each (in short – 1 + 1 = 3 … sometimes). As an example, let’s say that vendor A provides a solution for planting (something like PlantTape Inc.) and vendor B provides a solution for weeding (something like Naïo Technologies).

The efficiency of the Naio solution goes up (by a lot) when they have the actual planting location data because it’s easier to identify weeds instead of plants if you know exactly where the plants were originally planted. There are a couple of steps that have to happen: (1) PlantTape has to store the data in a cloud-based solution (ideally one the grower uses, not the AgTech provider); (2) the grower has to confirm that the data got loaded in a common data-interchange format; and (3) Naio then pulls the data from the cloud into their equipment to increase the weeding accuracy.

By this point, you can see at least a couple of requirements:

1) We need an open-source data template for storing data from multiple machines so it can easily be stored (likely via batch after the operation is completed) and retrieved by different vendors that can benefit from the other part of the data set.

2) Cloud usage by growers needs to continue increasing so that this is an option for the data storage─this puts the grower at the center of the data exchange since it’s their data that makes things easier on all sides. Startups don’t want to be responsible for the exchange─better that the growers own that.

3) The data standard needs a template and needs to be something that will be widely adopted (and existing data standards from John Deere, Trimble, or CNHi─which may apparently be 3 different solutions ─research yet to be done).

So when all is said and done, we need to develop something like an HTML data exchange standard that multiple startups can and will use to provide additional data from their data to other solution providers to the eventual benefit of the grower customer that both are working for.

There are now three crops with image libraries available in that WG Image Library that AgTech startups can use for initial R&D work and prototyping for automation robots. If you’re working with romaine, iceberg, or cabbage, there are high-resolution images tagged and annotated available on Github for you to download and begin using. Also of note, broccoli is in the final stages and will be posted later this week or early next week.

What this means for startups:

A few of the early steps for many specialty crop automation startups are to buy or build an image capture platform, then go out and capture images of the crop you’re working with, then go through the iterative process of optimizing the imaging process to capture the right images with the right light, then pick the images you want to include for R&D purposes (and remove the rest from the data set), then annotate (shorthand – physically tracing the actual products you are capturing so they can be differentiated from other items in the image) all of the selected images and adding tags (what type of crop, other data that helps build better AI).

For the crops in the WG Image Library, you can skip all of the above steps and just go right to the Github link and pull the image library that we’ve built for everyone to use for free. Startups have told us the initial creation can take several months and usually requires engineering time (and that engineering time is kind of pricey). So we built the image library to help save time and money for early stage efforts. Let us know what you think – and please share widely!

This effort is user driven, so if you have crops you want to see added, please email [email protected] and we’ll get them in the queue.

Also, if you’re at a University with an ag department and want to work on the next set of images, we are looking for partners to help. Please email and we’ll get the conversation started.

Western Growers University presents the train-the-trainer Harassment, Discrimination, and Abusive Conduct (HDA) workshop designed to equip you with the knowledge you need to train managers and non-supervisory staff in federal and state anti-harassment practices. Learn how to identify concerning behaviors, properly respond to complaints and build a healthier environment. Gain a deeper understanding of how to create a workplace free of sexual harassment where employees can feel safe to speak, grow and thrive. Understand how to:

• Describe and give examples of harassment, discrimination and abusive conduct in the workplace
• Stop harassment based on gender identity, gender expression, sexual orientation and other protected classes
• Protect those who report good faith complaints from retaliation
• List the costly consequence of not addressing complaints
• Conduct a complete and thorough investigations
• Apply best practices that support a more inclusive culture.

Workshop details:

• Virtual Course
• Date: Tuesday, June 13, 2023
• Time: 8:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m.

What to Expect:

• Participants will receive access to four customizable HDA decks
  • Manager version, in English
  • Manager version, in Spanish
  • Employee version in English
  • Employee version in Spanish
• Access to posters, brochures and fact sheets, both in English and Spanish
• Guidance on how to access the EEOC and state news feed
• Review state and federal case studies
• Receive a certificate of completion, worth 4 CEU
• Network with other industry professionals

Who should attend?

• Human resource professionals or harassment prevention consultants, with a minimum of two years of practical experience in one or more of the following areas:
  • Designing or conducting discrimination, retaliation and harassment prevention training
  • Responding to harassment complaints or other discrimination complaints
  • Conducting investigations of harassment complaints
  • Advising employers or employees regarding discrimination, retaliation, and harassment prevention.
• Attorneys admitted two years to the state bar and whose practice includes employment law under FEHA and Title VII
  • Law school professors or instructors who have either 20 instruction hours or two years plus teaching employment law under the FEHA or of the federal Civil Rights Act of 1964
• Register

Register:

• 15% Early Bird Discount; Expires May 26, 2023
  • Member: $561
  • Non-Member: $731
• Regular Cost
  • Member: $660
  • Non-Member: $860

For additional questions, please contact Anna Bilderbach at [email protected]

The surplus of rain and snow from the beginning of 2023 has been enough that the Bureau of Reclamation is increasing Central Valley Project 2023 water supply allocations to 100 percent for contractors both north and south of the Delta. Future water allocation updates will be determined as the year progresses.

The revision to the allocation that occurred on April 20, 2023 is a responsive update to the allocations initially announced in February 22, 2023 and a second revision announced on March 28, 2023.

Visit the Bureau of Reclamation’s website for more information about the updated allocations for contractors in different regions of California.

Additionally, the California Department of Water Resources announced that public water agencies will also receive 100 percent of contracted water supplies from the State Water Project.

CONTACT is asking produce growers to fill out a 10-minute anonymous survey to help collect data for the Department of Agriculture and Natural Resources at Rutgers University to help understand ag water use in the United States. The resulting research will help researchers learn about operation and how production water is used on the farm.

To participate, visit CONTACT Ag Water Survey.

On June 5, 2023, Agri-Pulse will be hosting the Food & Ag Issues Summit at the at the Sheraton Grand in Sacramento. Industry experts will address issues from everything from groundwater recharge to biologicals as well as economic outlooks within the farming industry.  The theme of this event will be Navigating Uncharted Waters.

Speakers include Senator Anna Caballero; Karla Nemeth, Director, California Dept. of Water Resources; Karen Ross, secretary, California Dept. of Food and Agriculture; Dave Puglia, President and CEO, Western Growers; Ian LeMay, president, California Fresh Fruit Association and more.

The summit offers both in-person and virtual attendance options. Register here.

Desert growers are invited to share thoughts, perspectives and ideas through a six-question survey to address a drying climate.

In support of the University of Arizona’s Presidential Advisory Commission on the Future of Agriculture and Good Production in a Drying Climate, the Water Resources Research Center has invited those working in desert agriculture to share industry insight to help develop actions to include in a report to President Robert C. Robbins.

The commission welcomes answers to any or all of the following six questions:

1. What are the threats of a changing climate to Arizona’s agricultural production systems?
2. Given these threats, how do you expect agriculture and food producers will respond?
3. What big-picture ideas would have the most impact on agriculture and food producers in the short and/or long term?
4. What expertise and resources (i.e., specific research, innovations, technologies, infrastructure, practices) can UArizona provide to help agriculture and food producers be as productive as possible in the face of these challenges?
5. What actions by UArizona can bring these resources to bear on the threats to agriculture and food production systems?
6. What funding and partnering opportunities are there to support these actions?

Click here to participate.

“The University of Arizona is uniquely positioned to address this critical problem for Arizona’s agricultural production system, and by extension, for other arid regions around the world,” Robbins said. “With this in mind, I have formed a Presidential Advisory Commission on the Future of Agriculture and Food Production in a Drying Climate to provide recommendations on concrete steps the University can take to make our state a global leader in creating and applying transformational technologies and climate-resilient sustainable agricultural and food production practices, in partnership with the desert agriculture industry.”

Read more about Robbins’s initiative here.