Posts By: Walt Duflock
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AgTech Partnerships Matter More Than Ever
I wanted to share Ben Palone’s LinkedIn post from a couple of weeks ago and provide additional context. While I was on a CDFA delegation in Australia with CDFA Secretary Karen Ross and a bunch of growers, researchers, and industry delegates, Ben was headed to Sacramento to attend the signing of a landmark five year agreement between the State of California and Queensland, Australia, focused on…
Farm to Fame Podcast Talks Changing Specialty Crop Landscape
Big thanks to Ali Cox for having me on her Farm to Fame Podcast last week. Thoroughly enjoyed the conversation, and as you can imagine, we covered a lot of ground in 28 minutes! Give it a listen if you've got time. Otherwise, here are a couple of the highlights: 1) We walked through the Peru origin story - the combination of watching a lot of Imperial Valley acreage wander east to Yuma and…
The Next Wave of AgTech Is Taking Shape
Thanks to Andrew Jason and the Grand Farm team for being great hosts in Fargo for Autonomous Nation and several related activities. They really made a full couple days out of the event – as you should if you’ve got a bunch of folks in town! Always great to see friends and make some new ones. Lots of great stuff going on in Fargo the four days I was there, highlighted by Autonomous Nation…
California Agriculture – A Cautionary Tale for Other Specialty Crop States
Great article from Cassidy Walter in Successful Farming comparing Midwest farming with California farming. They are the same in terms of margin pressure and increasingly global competition. They are different because California farmers deal with these issues while operating in the most regulated state in the country. Cassidy does a great job of getting the growers perspective on increasing…
Welcome Matt Hoffman – Senior Director of Innovation
We are excited to share that Matt Hoffman is joining the WG Innovation team as Senior Director of Innovation. We welcome Matt to the team, and I wanted to share some of his background and why we think he is the perfect fit for this role. The role sits at the intersection of agriculture chemistry inputs and innovations to help growers use less chemistry while still getting comparable results in…
Startup Sessions: Henry Cremers Talks AgTech With Verdant Robotics
Big congrats to our WG Innovation intern Henry Cremers for putting together some great AgTech videos this summer. Here’s the first one! It was a really great summer for our WG Innovation intern Henry Cremers. He’s a Cal Poly rising senior and a Salinas guy who knows his way around ag, AgTech, videos, and social media. Naturally given that background, we put him to work talking to as many…
White Pickup Trucks, Real Farm Problems and a Good Day for AgTech
Last Thursday in San Juan Bautista, there was a great set of field demos for specialty crop automation hosted by Jennifer Clarke and the Leafy Greens Research Board along with support from Mark Mason from Nature's Reward and Tony and Daniel Alameda from Top Flavor Farms. This was a really good demo day for several reasons. Attendance was 1.5 – 2x last year’s event. Attendance is important…
The Path to $5 Billion in Automation Revenue
The most important number in specialty crop agtech is $5 billion in automation revenue in a single year. I’ve written before about the importance of automation becoming a category with more than $1 billion in annual sales. That metric is significant from a segment perspective because, across many technology categories, there is precedent for that level of revenue generating meaningful…
New H-2A Numbers Highlight the Need for Agricultural Automation
Two Farm Bureau analysts put together some good summary points and trend analysis of H-2A data over the past year. I’ll include links to both analysis summaries at the end of this article. Cameron Castillo from Farm Bureau put together a really solid analysis of the latest set of H-2A data, along with some key trends and some emerging regional differences worth watching. This analysis follows…
The $5 Billion AgTech Strategy
Last week, we took a look at the overall $5B strategy for specialty crop AgTech automation. This week we are going to dive into some of the specific re-allocation requests and rationale. First, let’s look at the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) Climate-Smart Ag Funding, which represents $19.5B and is being used to increase existing conservation programs through NRCS through payments for…
Why Ruggedize Matters
Because Salinas Valley can benefit from the progress Silicon Valley is making on AI and this event will help both sides recognize that. There have been a lot of (and many are ongoing) discussions about the interplay between Silicon Valley and Salinas Valley. Lately, Silicon Valley is heavily focused on AI – how it’s getting used, how many vibe coders it is enabling, how many jobs it’s…
The Most Important Number to Watch in Specialty Crop AgTech
The most important number in specialty crop AgTech is annual automation revenue, and the big target we are taking on is how we can get that number up to $5B in one year. I’ve written before on the importance of getting automation to become a category with over $1B in annual sales. That metric is a big one from a segment perspective because in many tech categories there is precedent for that…
Agriculture v AI Data Centers
Water is once again right in the middle of a hot California dispute! Kudos to Erik Benson for a great article on the market dynamics that are impacting both agriculture and AI data centers around water rights, land values, and the relative impacts on state economies that are or are considering the impact if both are increased or decreased. This is not a hypothetical exercise. Data centers are…
We Need to Re-Think How We Do Bio-Controls Testing
It was a great week at the Salinas Biological Summit last week at the Salinas Rodeo Grounds. A full day of workshops and a VIP gathering on Monday, a full day of bio-controls content on Tuesday, and a full day of bio-stimulants on Wednesday. From a content perspective, I believe it was the best Summit yet. One of the topics that continually came up in content and conversations was the need for…
Some Thoughts on AI’s Impact on Tech Segments and AgTech
AI is changing how we (and for this article I mean we to specifically be AgTech startups) should think about engineering talent. I have been listening to and reading a lot of content about AI and its impact on businesses. One of the under-recognized aspects is the multiple impacts it is likely going to have on organization-wide engineering for startups. Based on what I’m hearing and reading, I…
What the Drone Ban Means for Growers
As many of you know, drones are seeing increased use cases for grower operations, including spray drones, scouting drones, aerial surveillance drones, and high-tech aerial scarecrows with dog fighting included! Well, some changes made in December are having an impact on drones in ag. These changes resulted in Western Growers hosting an online webinar that we recorded and are making available…
The AgTech Cost of Overpromising
Caroline Petrow-Cohen put a great piece out in the LA Times on Monarch Tractor and it tells the whole tale of how a company and a sector can get over-hyped and lead to bad results for all concerned. I had a chance to talk to Caroline last week, and she was focused on the right stuff: what happened with Monarch, why were they so hyped up initially, and what went wrong? She was really asking if…
Four Reasons Hort Connections Stands Out as a Great Event
I want to share a few thoughts about Hort Connections and what made it so special: 1) The energy was really high. People got up early for 7:00 am breakfasts every day and stayed late for happy hours and dinners every night. It was up early and up late all week, from the time things got going in earnest on Monday through the field demos just outside Adelaide on Friday. From my perspective, it…
WG Innovation Team has an Open Position: Senior Director of Innovation
I am very excited to share that we have an open position on the WG Innovation team. This is a Senior Director of Innovation role, and it will be a replacement for Dennis Donohue's role. So yes, whoever gets this job has big shoes to fill! Here is what you need to know about the position. 1) The primary focus will be on managing the "less chemistry" portfolio that includes: (1) precision…
The Future of Ag Drones: Navigating Chinese Supplier Drone Ban Webinar
Join industry experts who are addressing critical regulatory and supply chain developments related to the Chinese drone ban as it relates to AgTech. If you're working with drones or interested in how drones are impacting ag, Ben Palone and I will be talking ag drones with Briana Layfield and Kevin McDonald next Thursday. Drones are emerging as a space with multiple possible use cases, and…