Voices of the Valley

As the data for the next edition of Western Growers' Global Harvest Automation Report are being crunched, Mike Dentinger, the Director of AG OEM Development at Trimble, joins the podcast to discuss the potential of automated harvest becoming a day-to-day reality soon. "It's a really tough equation," he says. "How many carrot harvesters does California really need that Grimmway isn't already buildi...

Lori Taylor, Founder and CEO of The Produce Moms, joins Voices of the Valley this week to talk about how she uses her multimedia platform to pull back the veil for the general public about the process of produce farming. "Our mission is to simple: To get more fruits and vegetables on every table," she says. "We want fruits and vegetables to be the number one thing people think of when they write t...

Brent Shedd, CEO of Stout Industrial Technology, Inc., joins Voices of the Valley to examine Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the agriculture industry. Brent joined Stout with a background in technology and tends to approach farming issues through this lens. The decision for Stout to build its own hardware and software was based around Brent’s background with AI. Brent quotes agtech engineers: “If...

On this week’s Voices of the Valley podcast, Dennis Donohue and Candace Wilson interview Gary Loh, the CEO of DiMuto and the Executive Chairman of First Alverstone Group, and Claire Pribula, the Managing Director and Co-Founder of Yield Lab Asia Pacific. Gary and Claire discuss the changes in the marketplace that have resulted in an urgent need for supply chain innovation. The DiMuto AgriFood trad...

For Jack Vessey, President of Imperial Valley-based Vessey & Co., one fact of desert agriculture never changes: You have to do more with less. “We have to be proactive with trying things,” he said, noting that the pressures of labor, irrigation and crop protection lead him to always explore new technologies in his operations. The front of mind of these right now is, of course, water. “The futu...

Dr. Eugenia Saini, the Executive Secretary of Fontagro, joins the podcast to talk about her objective of strengthening public and private strategic alliances that enhance international cooperation between scientists and farmers. It's a goal that requires boundless curiosity and big picture thinking; Eugenia has three degrees from the University of Buenos Aires and was a Fulbright Scholar at Cornel...

In this week's episode of Voices of the Valley, Dick Rogers, Entomologist at Bayer Crop Science, discusses the need to meld nature and technology to create and monitor healthy honeybee colonies. Dick wants to move towards the creation of a "genius hive," which would use data to ensure the right conditions exist for thriving bee populations. Recently, "electronic scales have really helped beekeeper...

In this episode, Voices of the Valley continues to honor Hank Giclas, the produce industry veteran who passed away in August. Bruce Taylor, Chairman and CEO of Taylor Farms; Edwin Camp, President of D.M. Camp & Sons; Joe Pezzini, Sr. Director of Ag Operations at Taylor Farms and Peter Wren-Hilton, Founder of Wharf42 Ltd., all join the podcast to celebrate the life of their beloved friend and c...

This is the first episode in a special two-part Voices of the Valley that is dedicated to the memory of produce industry stalwart Hank Giclas, the former Senior Vice President of Science, Technology & Strategic Planning at Western Growers, who passed away in August. Western Growers President & CEO Dave Puglia, Secretary of the California Department of Food and Agriculture Karen Ross, and W...

From watermelon to stone fruit to table grapes, Sun World CEO David Marguleas has decades of experience in bringing vibrant new products to the consumer market. He visits the podcast this week to talk about how his company has made critical new hires and brought breeding in-house to stay at the forefront of molecular technologies. "In the middle of the pandemic we opened our new center for innovat...

Peter Wren-Hilton, the Founder of Wharf42 Limited and the mastermind behind the upcoming 2035 Agri-Food-Tech Oceania Summit, joins the podcast to discuss how New Zealand, Australia and the Pacific Islands are responding to the threat of climate change. "Climate change is real, it's happening, and it's happening much faster than we thought," he says. One real-world example: Growers of kiwifruit alr...

What do you do when you can't afford to make a mistake - but at the same time, you know you can't get risk to zero? In advance of the AgTechX Food Safety event on Aug. 18 at Reedley College, En Solucion CEO and Founder Alex Athey joins the podcast to discuss the potential of technology to mitigate the risks in food safety. A member of Western Growers' elite international Food Safety Cohort that wi...

Jeff Morrison, the Director of Innovation and New Technology at Grimmway Farms, joins the podcast to discuss how he uses his interest in the business side of agriculture to dictate the choices his company makes on the technology side. For Morrison, solving the puzzle of how best to use agtech to make a return on a company's investment is a universal concern, and he's traveled extensively throughou...

The Nunes Company President Tom "T5" Nunes joins the podcast to discuss how his company remains nimble and open to technology adoption in an industry beset with challenges. The Nunes Company, known for the Foxy label, grows 40 conventional and 35 organic commodities. With that breadth of product, Tom is looking for common technologies that can scale across his production to create efficiencies. So...

Hadley Date Gardens President and Western Growers Chair of the Board Albert Keck returns to the podcast to talk about what it will take for farmers and rural communities to change the narrative about the realities of earning a living in agriculture. "We've been playing defense for so long...boy, I would love to be able to shift gears and play offense," Albert says, noting that real-world shortages...

Albert Keck, President of Hadley Date Gardens and current Western Growers Chair of the Board of Directors, joins the podcast to talk about his family's history in farming and how his decades of experience in the industry leads him to believe that the future could be bright for specialty crops.  “You want to talk about pessimism? When I was a kid all I could hear from the industry was: ‘Only o...

This week's episode of Voices of the Valley explores the opportunities for agtech innovation and investment in Latin America. Accelerator The Yield Lab is dedicated to funding companies across the globe and then assisting with their growth and development for the long haul. "We're not in a rush," says Tomás Peña, Managing Director, The Yield Lab Latam, as he visits the podcast. "This is a business...

Priority Sampling Founder and CEO Rafael Davila joins the podcast to talk about his company's efforts to improve the safety of the food supply chain. "I focus on the tissue sampling process, which is between the grower and the harvest," Rafael says of his company, which is currently focused on the leafy greens industry. In recent years testing has gone from a "Z-pattern" to a "serpentine pattern,"...

Fresh off being accepted into the elite THRIVE agtech accelerator and winning the Innovation Award at THRIVE Demo Day 2022, Space AG Co-Founder and CEO Guillermo de Vivanco joins Voices of the Valley to discuss the evolution of his company in the digital agriculture arena. Space AG is a software platform that increases efficiencies through digitization and data collection - but always by keeping a...

In the digital age, information is power - but data in a silo can't reach its full potential to create prosperity. Enter Farmer's Business Network, a farmer-driven information source that provides agronomic precision data to all its members. "We wanted to level the playing field for farmers," says Amol Deshpande, FBN's CEO and Co-Founder. With a goal of providing competitive opportunities for smal...

Verdant Robotics Co-Founders CEO Gabe Sibley and COO Curtis Garner return to Voices of the Valley to continue their discussion on how they make sure their company focuses on creating agricultural solutions - instead of just showing off shiny robots. The duo envision a future where farmers and technologists work in tandem to turn fieldworkers into data workers, bridging the perpetual gap in the lab...

Verdant Robotics Co-Founders CEO Gabe Sibley and COO Curtis Garner join Voices of the Valley to discuss the power that digitized precision farming gives to the industry. Verdant Robotics wasn't "a solution looking for a problem," Gabe says; instead, the multi-action robot that provides both data analytics and crop applications is the result of a six-month road trip that was spent talking to farmer...

Don Cameron, Vice President and General Manager of Terranova Ranch, joins the Voices of the Valley to share his experiences with agtech start-ups looking to gain traction in California agriculture. "The ones that tend to come early and listen and hear what we're saying are the ones that tend to be successful," he says. Currently Terranova is using cutting-edge technology for automated irrigation,...

Sarah Nolet, Co-Founder and General Partner at Sydney, Australia-based VC firm Tenacious Ventures, focuses on investing in early-stage agtech startups with an eye towards how they will help provide innovations to assist with the ramifications of climate change. "Ag can actually be a solution for a lot of the challenges we're facing," Nolet says in this episode of Voices of the Valley, noting that...

Dr. Jerry Buckley, the President of Reedley College, joins Voices of the Valley to talk about the vital need to expand the relationship between agriculture and community colleges in California. "Across the country, community colleges are the best-kept secret that we have," he says, noting that with its 2.1 million students in attendance every year, California community colleges represent the large...