Labor remains a top challenge for specialty crops, and it’s getting harder to find. U.S. farmworkers decreased by 70 percent in 70 years, regulatory costs increased 795 percent in 12 years, and U.S. H-2A labor increased from 48,000 in 2005 to 300,000 in 2021—which add transportation and housing costs. Innovation remains the best solution to ...
Civil Eats put out an interesting Op-Ed on January 23 entitled “Want an Agtech Revolution? Center Farm Workers’ Expertise. It’s primary narratives are: (1) Agtech robots are coming to take all the farmworker jobs; (2) Agtech startups are targeting farmworkers for replacement and will eliminate tens of thousands of jobs across rural America; and (3) ...
(Before I start, I have to once again invite everyone to see one of the coolest event promo videos ever — thank you to my WG colleague Cory Lunde for his great editing work in putting this video together! If you are looking for something to get you fired up about AgTech automation — and ...
The subject matter experts (SMEs) of the Western Growers Global Harvest Automation Initiative (GHAI) gathered for a two-day conference on Tuesday and Wednesday this week to build Tech Stack 1.0. The conference, which was held in Mountain View, Calif., was comprised of two tracks: tech track and platform/grower-producer track. The tech track focused on key ...
On December 1-2, the “Organic Grower Summit 2021” will bring together organic growers, producers and processors for a wide array of education and networking opportunities. The in-person event will be held at the Hyatt Regency Monterey Resort in Monterey, California, and registration is now open at https://www.organicgrowersummit.com/registration/. Produced in partnership with Western Growers…
Join Western Growers for the Organic Grower Summit 2021 on December 1-2 for a series of educational sessions and workshops aimed at improving the bottom line for organic farmers. OGS 2021 recently announced details on three featured workshops: “Organic Grower Perspectives on the Challenges of Scaling” – this session will explore how organic growing operations ...
Growers are facing a multitude of threats, including chronic labor shortages and mounting regulatory and marketplace demands. Western Growers believes that harvest automation will be essential to helping growers adapt to these unprecedented challenges. The Global Harvest Automation Initiative aims to automate 50 percent of the fresh produce harvest within 10 years through a series ...
Western Growers will have a booth in the Corteva building at the World Ag Expo on February 8-10, 2022, and will be sharing some big news: Launch of Harvest Automation Report: WG will officially reveal the Harvest Automation report – the industry’s first in-depth look at how harvest automation is performing in fields, with detailed ...
Western Growers (WG) has launched HarvestWiki to help specialty crop growers share information about growing operations, allowing agtech startups to have as much crop-specific information as possible when they design and develop agtech solutions for growers. HarvestWiki—which is focused on fruits, vegetables and nuts—can be found at https://harvest.wginnovation.com/. Like Wikipedia,…
In 2021, Western Growers received nearly $750,000 in grant funding from the California Department of Food and Agriculture. Over the next three and a half years, these funds will be used to educate the next generation of agriculture employee. WG will be working with California Community College ag faculty throughout the state to develop educational ...
Are you looking for upcoming agriculture field demos (or wondering how to get more people to come to your field demos)? Check out how to find them or build awareness around yours... 1) For all AgTech startups doing field demos, please use the hashtag #agtechfielddemos in your social media posts and include the date, time and location (preferably with a map pin) of the demo (and a best…
By Walt Duflock, Vice President, Innovation On February 11, 2021, Western Growers announced the launch of the Global Harvest Automation Initiative (GHAI). This initiative will provide several benefits for entrepreneurs and startups. First, Western Grower is clearly indicating an intent to help solve the food security problems caused by decreasing labor availability and increasing labor ...
By Walt Duflock, Vice President, Innovation Getting all the food planted by growers harvested remains a challenge, particularly in California as labor gets harder to find and more expensive due to increased regulation around minimum wage, overtime, break rules, and payment for non-productive time. Western Growers launched the Global Harvest Automation Initiative to help harvest ...
By Walt Duflock, Vice President, Innovation Agtech innovation has enabled agricultural production to grow over 300% in the last 70 years, while losing almost 70% of the ag workforce (both family members and hired farmworkers). Despite all the progress in ag productivity, every year acreage gets planted and does not get harvested, often because of ...
By Walt Duflock, Vice President, Innovation Recent events in agtech and agtech acquisition activity have brought to light a new focus area for Western Growers: the need to increase capital sources for harvest automation. Let’s take a deeper dive into three recent events: 1. CNH Industrial’s acquisition of Raven Industries In June 2021, CNH Industrial ...
By Walt Duflock, Vice President of Innovation The Western Growers Innovation team is making good progress on the Global Harvest Automation Initiative as we continue to target sustainable food security by getting all the crop acres that are planted harvested. Our target is to automate 50 percent of fresh specialty crop harvest in 10 years. ...
By Walt Duflock, Vice President of Innovation One of the ongoing questions in agtech is why agtech startups so often struggle to raise venture capital. Through multiple blog posts, podcasts and social media posts, Sarah Nolet, Matthew Pryor and I have produced content that provides two different answers for these struggles. Two of the most ...
By Walt Duflock, WG Vice President of Innovation Western Growers has rolled out the first-ever HarvestWiki—a Wikipedia-like platform to help farmers share information about growing operations, allowing agtech startups to have as much crop-specific information as possible when they design and develop agtech solutions for growers. HarvestWiki is focused on specialty crops—so if you’re a…
Many rural California economies revolve around agriculture, which produces healthy fruits, nuts, and vegetables, as well as crop revenues and local jobs for both agriculture and service industries that support agriculture. To maintain these rural economies, three major problems need to be addressed—labor, water and food safety. California’s annual crop output produces close to $50…
By Walt Duflock, Vice President of Innovation The 2022 Automated Technology Field Day was held in June at the Hartnell East Campus in Salinas, Calif. There was a great crowd with over 150 attendees and a great mix of growers, startups, and equipment dealers were in the audience. It was probably the largest agtech field ...