Next week is shaping up to be a milestone moment for the AgTech community, with major events unfolding across the Central Coast and the Bay Area. From the launch of a new farming venture in Salinas to one of the industry’s most influential global summits, stakeholders across the agricultural innovation ecosystem will have a full and meaningful week of connection, collaboration, and advancement.

Grand Opening of Reservoir Farms – Monday, March 16

The week begins in Salinas with the official grand opening of Reservoir Farms, taking place Monday, March 16th from 2:00–4:00 p.m. This new venture represents an exciting addition to the region’s growing agricultural innovation landscape, and the event will bring together growers, partners, community leaders, and innovators to celebrate the launch.

Immediately following the ribbon-cutting, guests are invited to continue the celebration at a casual Gathering of Friends reception hosted at the Alvarado Street Brewery Tasting Room (1315 Dayton St, Salinas, CA 93901). The gathering will run from 5:30–7:30 p.m., offering time to connect with colleagues before many attendees make their way north for the week’s second major event.

World Agri-Tech Innovation Summit – March 17–18

On Tuesday and Wednesday, the focus shifts to San Francisco for the World Agri-Tech Innovation Summit, held March 17–18. This premier global event brings together more than 1,700 leaders and decision-makers from across the agricultural value chain—including agribusiness executives, food brands, farmers, policymakers, investors, technologists, and emerging start-ups.

Attendees will have the opportunity to:

• Hear from leaders driving the future of sustainable and climate‑smart agriculture
• Benchmark against global best practices
• Connect with innovators at the forefront of agri-tech
• Participate in strategic networking and deal-making sessions

This year’s conference also includes strong representation from Western Growers and Reservoir Farms:

• Ben Palone, Western Growers Director of Commercialization, will serve as a roundtable host.
• Walt Duflock, Western Growers SVP of Innovation, will be featured as a breakout session speaker.
• Danny Bernstein and Matthew Hoffman of Reservoir Farms will also take the stage to share insights and perspectives on the agtech startup ecosystem.

Those still interested in attending can learn more about the event and register online. A 10% discount is available using code WALTD10 at: https://worldagritechusa.com/book-tickets

WGCIT Teams Converge in Northern California – March 19–20

With many agtech start-ups and partners already in Northern California for the week’s activities, the Western Growers Center for Innovation & Technology (WGCIT) will host a series of large-scale team meetings on Thursday and Friday. These gatherings will create opportunities for companies to align on strategy, share updates, meet with growers, and collaborate in person while their full teams are in the region.

I talk to a lot of event teams, a lot of growers, and a lot of startups about events for a couple of reasons. First, I am always looking for clever new event hacks to help secure a new audience segment, new content segments that provoke audience curiosity that help get a crowd into a room, and new formats or tools that create additional engagement while at the show or before or after the live event is occurring. Second, I am always curious to hear from growers what brought them to a show and whether the show delivered on the promise and if (and this is the big one in many cases) they plan to attend next year. Third, I always try out and watch the event’s mobile apps to see how they are doing networking and community building, and to be honest, it’s a mixed bag on this one in terms of tools and tool usage.

Event hacks would include things like the day zero 8×8 format that my friends at Farm Progress rolled out at Organic Grower Summit (OGS). This is a format that puts 8 startups/innovators together with 8 growers for one day. They each get an hour with the complete set of innovators or growers, so from 8:00 – 5:00 there are 8 one-hour meeting slots in both directions. There is a breakfast time slot, lunch time slot for an hour in the middle (12:00 – 1:00), and dinner afterward to maximize the networking opportunity and let the interested parties self-select to extend the conversation further after the day is over. This brought 8 additional growers to OGS (because the participation in the 8×8 gave them an event pass for OGS). It also helped lock in 8 startups to exhibitor positions. This is high-margin revenue and a win-win because both the growers and startups get good value.

Growers are increasingly finding two- and three-day events difficult to attend. They cost a lot of money, but that is the least of the challenges. A few nights in a hotel and at an event while away from the office makes the real cost the opportunity cost of what the grower is unable to do while at the event. The other thing I am consistently hearing is that growers are not seeing enough incremental progress in AgTech solutions from year to year. When I ask why they stopped attending certain shows (in some cases shows they had attended for multiple years – sometimes in the same location, sometimes in different locations), a recurring theme was that the new products and features in a segment like automation were not very large and it was therefore harder to justify the cost and time off the farm and away from operations each year. The combination of grower fatigue on trade shows and the lack of huge breakthroughs (even though much of the progress is slow and steady) combine to make growers less frequent show attendees. We heard this from people who attended past FIRA USA events and did not attend this year. Turns out that four years in a row were too many when the progress was not that large from year one in Fresno to year two in Salinas to years three and four at Yolo County Fairgrounds.

I think the mobile app space has come a long way in a few years and is helping drive value for attendees on all sides. If you are able to schedule meetings with folks based on their show profile or having talked to them previously or seeing them on stage, it adds value (often for both sides of the match who can connect live). That said, it does seem like there is more that apps can do to drive engagement and value.

All of this is to say, for many years events were one of the best ways to market to growers. You had large horizontal shows like Tulare World Ag Expo, Commodity Classic, and Farm Progress (well, okay, FP is primarily Midwest crops, but products from many solution segments for those crops show up every year). There were also segment-specific shows like Organic Grower Summit (organic segment AgTech), FIRA USA (automation segment), and Salinas Biological Summit (yep you’re right – it’s in the name) that focused on a specific set of solutions and delivered content and an audience tailor-made to that segment. There were also crop specific shows such as the California Almond Conference and Strawberry Industry Expo.

Out of these three sets of options, AgTech startups had to decide which ones to attend based on a complete economic analysis (i.e. travel costs, exhibitor costs, and likely sales funnel results such as leads generated) and some tough budget decisions in terms of which events justified funding and which ones did not make the cut. It was and is often really tough to know how an event will perform each year. Last year’s performance is always somewhat helpful in setting baseline performance standards and targets but it’s not always accurate. So startup marketing teams can look at potential spends, compare them to last year’s results, make what seems like an intelligent decision on which ones to use and still be wrong because for reasons nobody can quite explain fewer growers showed up this year than last year so lead funnels leaving the show are much emptier than hoped for for startups.

All of this means that knowing where to put your marketing budget for 2026 for AgTech startups is really tough. Which events work will change from year to year. In addition, some events that worked for multiple years may not be around anymore and from what I see there are still too many shows so expect some more to struggle to get back to break-even. The fact that growers are attending fewer shows and there is not much to bring them back will make it harder for AgTech startups to find growers to engage with at shows. This will cause some shows to deliver poor economics for startups, which will make it even harder to maintain an event budget at the same size for next year. If shows are unable to consistently deliver results each year, startups will need to find some creative new marketing channels to replace trade show leads with leads from other channels.

But that is a topic for another day. For now, I just wanted to note that however hard the marketing job was two years ago, it’s even harder now because the margin of error for marketing budgets to under-deliver results is smaller than ever because of increasing margin pressure on growers, which makes AgTech spending harder to justify. I’ll be back in a future post to talk about some marketing thoughts from my time running marketing at a couple of startups (back in the day as the kids like to say – so grain of salt that my marketing lessons learned were primarily from the 90s, 2000s, and 2010s). The short version is I think content marketing and social media marketing are both valuable channels to be considering. How and how much remain large open questions.

In an industry where tradition often meets innovation, HeavyConnect is showing what’s possible when technology is built inside agriculture rather than imposed from the outside. Leading this charge is Roberto De Leon, Head of Growth, who brings more than two decades of experience in customer focused technology—and a firsthand understanding of the challenges growers face.
“When I moved into agriculture seven years ago, I immediately saw how much opportunity there was to improve efficiency,” De Leon says. With labor shortages tightening and compliance requirements expanding, farms are under more pressure than ever. HeavyConnect emerged from that reality with a simple mission: reduce paperwork and streamline compliance.
At the center of the platform are two tools: a mobile app for field data entry and a dashboard for interpreting and acting on that information. The emphasis on usability is intentional. “If data isn’t collected properly in the field, it isn’t useful,” De Leon explains. “We design for the people who actually use it—farmworkers and supervisors.”
What truly sets HeavyConnect apart is how it grew. Instead of being created in a boardroom, it was built on the farm, shaped by real users and real workflows. And despite its growth, the company still doesn’t have a traditional sales team. Word of mouth drives adoption. “Our users become our salespeople,” De Leon says.
Looking forward, the company is already exploring touchless interactions and AI driven data processing to stay ahead of industry needs. As De Leon puts it, “The industry is evolving, and we want to evolve with it.”
By removing paperwork and simplifying compliance, HeavyConnect isn’t just helping farms operate—it’s helping them thrive. “Our growth hasn’t come from selling harder, but from solving better,” De Leon emphasizes. “Our customers create the momentum, and for that, we’re truly grateful.”
Read more about HeavyConnect in the current edition of the Western Grower & Shipper magazine.

The race to develop reliable, scalable automated harvesting solutions is no longer a regional priority; it has become a global imperative. Around the world, growers are grappling with shrinking labor pools, rising production costs, and mounting pressure to maintain a stable food supply. This week marked an important step toward addressing these challenges collaboratively, as Western Growers signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with the Queensland Department of Primary Industries (QDPI) to accelerate automated harvesting innovation in both the United States and Australia.

This partnership reflects a shared recognition: no single country can solve the labor crisis alone. Australia, in particular, faces labor shortages that are even more acute than those in the U.S. Growers in Australia contend with higher labor costs, fewer available workers, and increasing competition for skilled talent. Yet, despite these challenges, Australia also brings a unique advantage to the table. Many of its growing configurations—crop layouts, field designs, and production systems—are inherently more conducive to automation. These structural differences offer valuable insights that can help speed the development and deployment of automated harvesting technologies worldwide.

This week, I had the opportunity to meet with Australian growers and Ian Layden from QDPI, where we toured three key areas of  the U.S. to observe the latest automated harvesting efforts underway in our vegetable industries. We visited Matt Heart at Betteravia Farms in Santa Maria, along with growers from Salinas, that included Amaral Farms, Taylor Farms, and D’Arrigo Bros. From Salinas we will travel to Yuma, Ariz. to see S.A.M.I. AgTech with their selective automated harvesting platform.  Across fields, Reservoir Farms, and many leaders in the agricultural community, we explored the technologies that Western Growers members are testing and refining—from robotic harvesters to machine‑vision systems to self-propelled platforms designed to reduce the physical burden on workers.

What stood out most was the shared sense of urgency. Both U.S. and Australian growers are confronting the same demographic reality: an aging workforce and a shrinking pipeline of new entrants. But rather than viewing automation as a replacement for people, our discussions focused on how technology can elevate the workforce. Automated harvesting opens the door to upskilling—creating better, safer, and higher‑paying positions that attract new talent and retain experienced employees. The goal is not to remove people from agriculture but to empower them with tools that make the work more sustainable and rewarding.

Together with Western Growers members and board members, we spent time unpacking the nuances that make automated harvesting such a complex challenge. Every crop, region, and operation presents its own set of variables—plant architecture, harvest timing, field conditions, and market demands. Yet the conversations made one thing clear: collaboration across borders is not just beneficial, it is essential. By pooling knowledge, aligning research priorities, and sharing real‑world data, we can accelerate progress far faster than any one region working alone.

The new MOU with Queensland formalizes this spirit of partnership. It establishes a framework for joint research, technology exchange, and coordinated innovation efforts. More importantly, it signals a commitment to tackling the global labor crisis with a global mindset.

Automated harvesting is not a distant vision. It is a necessity—and one that requires cooperation, creativity, and a willingness to rethink how we grow, harvest, and sustain our food systems. This week’s conversations reaffirmed that we are not alone in this effort. With partners like QDPI and the growers of Australia, we are building a pathway toward a more resilient and technologically empowered future for agriculture.