Posts By: Walt Duflock
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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…