When I was a young lad spending much of the year in Monterey County on my mom’s ranch and some of the summers in Imperial County on my dad’s ranch, there was a lot of asparagus in Imperial Valley. Asparagus acreage continued to grow in the US until it reached…

AgTech startups should think about the labor problem they are solving with some specificity, and that specificity should be around the exact problem they’re solving and the impact on the organization of rolling out their solution. Labor usage is about both a set of individual activities for growers and an…

I wanted to pass along a recent story on AgTech automation partnerships. It is a reminder that AgTech channel partners are a great opportunity to help you sell your product, particularly in a new market. But they are also partners that need to be actively managed. Once the deal is…

One of the things that is becoming apparent as the number of automation solutions on farms continues to increase is that there is a hidden cost of automation that not everyone sees initially. I talked to Western Growers members and conference attendees at World FIRA and World Ag Expo and…

I mentioned the Western Growers Image Library in a prior post announcing the first two components of the Tech Stack to help AgTech automation startups reduce the cost of getting to MVP and Product 1.0 by providing pre-built components they can leverage and re-use instead of building from scratch. The…

AgTech entrepreneurs — are grower-backed data aggregation startups or venture-backed startups the better play for data aggregation and predictive analytics models? — (Note — I’ve had a few conversations on this topic at World FIRA and World Ag Expo the past couple of weeks — and really excited to get this first post with a few thoughts on the topic out. …

Spoiler alert — the best hardware + software platforms have the best odds for success (and long term software matters more than anything). — There are a lot of AgTech automation solutions that are built and/or delivered to the market as a single solution with the long-term objective to provide multiple solutions off of a base platform. For example, most of the weeding robots do plan on doing more than weeding. But, as is…

There is a long history of ecosystem ownership in technology providing huge economic benefits to a region. One of the earliest examples is semiconductors, where the “Traitorous 8” left Shockley Semiconductor Lab to form Fairchild Semiconductors and then some of them spun off Intel and the rest, as they say…

(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…