- Author: Pamela S Kan-Rice
The VINE at UC ANR partners with GO-Biz and CDFA to subsidize agtech companies
Agricultural technology companies in California are eligible for sponsorships to participate in the upcoming AgroBaja 2024, the leading agricultural technology event taking place in Mexicali, Mexico, on March 7-9. Applications will be accepted until Feb. 16 by The VINE, an initiative at the University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources, in partnership with the California Governor's Office of Business and Economic Development (GO-Biz) and the California Department of Food and Agriculture.
This effort is part of a broader initiative to encourage the growth and development of the agtech sector, providing a stage for California businesses to share their innovative technologies and services with the international community. The collaboration highlights a shared commitment to advancing California's position in the global agtech landscape.
To encourage participation, The VINE and UC ANR are extending a robust support package to attendees, which includes:
- Reduced participation fees: Offering subsidized registration costs ranging from $250 to $500, enabling a wider array of companies to engage.
- Hotel accommodations: Providing complimentary hotel stays to alleviate logistical challenges for participants.
- Exhibition space: Allocating a dedicated pavilion area for companies to showcase their technologies and services.
- Logistical support: Offering assistance with local transportation and equipment logistics.
"This initiative represents a significant step towards enhancing the global competitiveness of California's agtech industry," said Gabe Youtsey, chief innovation officer at UC ANR and co-founder of The VINE. "By reducing financial barriers, we are opening doors for innovative companies to showcase their solutions, connect with international stakeholders and pave the way for future collaborations. We believe that our support will ignite new opportunities for growth and innovation in the agricultural sector."
Feb. 16 is the deadline to apply. For application details and more information about AgroBaja 2024, please visit https://bit.ly/CA-Agrobaja-Delegation.
About The VINE:
The VINE, an initiative of University of California, Agriculture and Natural Resources, is California's agriculture, food and biotech innovation network. Our mission is to harness the power of open innovation to help industries and entrepreneurs grow and scale globally while catalyzing technology innovation and commercialization for productive, sustainable and equitable food systems. We connect entrepreneurs to a vast network of public and private sector resources, build collaborations that accelerate technology solutions to solve industry challenges, and grow regional capacity to support global innovation as an economic opportunity.
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- Author: Saoimanu Sope
A celebration of culture and diversity in honor of Black History Month
Agriculture makes up over 85% of Ethiopia's workforce and the journey into the field is not for the faint of heart, according to Oli Bachie, UC Cooperative Extension director for San Diego and Imperial counties. In addition to managing the research and program teams in these regions, Bachie provides research-based technical and educational assistance to producers, growers, farm operators and pest control advisors in agronomy and weed management
Bachie was born to two farmers of the Oromo ethnic group in Ethiopia. As the oldest of 12, his training to become a farmer was the most comprehensive and rigorous since he would set an example for his siblings to follow. At the age of six, Bachie was given his first test of responsibility: raising chickens in the backyard.
“Chickens is what everyone starts off with as a child,” Bachie said. “We then grow into specialization as we age, but it starts with raising chickens.”
Eventually, Bachie's parents sold the chickens on his behalf and used the money to purchase goats. When he mastered goat herding, Bachie worked his way up to managing oxen and farming.
“If you have a lot of oxen, you can do more for longer periods of time during the day,” he said. “You can start early in the morning with a few, then switch them out so they can break. That way you don't tire all your oxen out and the work will still go on.”
While Bachie's exposure to agriculture was inevitable, it required sacrifice.
In Ethiopia, if you are serious about a career in agriculture, high school is where you first make it evident. Because high schools were scarce and far away, academic performance was used as an indication of whether you were worth investing more time and resources into.
For Bachie, the nearest high school was a long way from home. “It was maybe as far as San Diego to Los Angeles,” he said.
Among thousands of high school students, Bachie was one of very few to be admitted to Addis Ababa University, the only university in Ethiopia at the time, where he earned a bachelor's degree in plant sciences.
When reminiscing about his childhood, Bachie couldn't help but acknowledge how special his homeland is to him. He described its rugged terrain but lush vegetation. He acknowledged the lack of transportation including paved roads in his area, and how traveling by foot prepared him for the experiences he has endured over the years.
“You ever see those skinny Ethiopians winning the Olympics as runners?” he asked. “Do you know why they win? Because they are prepared. You know why? Because they run for a living!”
In Ethiopia, most schools are located far away from residential communities, forcing students to run to and from school if they want to get there on time. “When I was younger, the nearest elementary school was a two-hour walk away,” said Bachie. “Running is connected to survival, and everyone runs.”
Oromo communities truly embody the saying, “it takes a village to raise a child” – another aspect of Bachie's culture and upbringing that makes him proud. “Children belong to the community,” he said. “There is no hurting of children. Anyone who passes or sees a child will take care of them, will take them back to their house, or they will feed them.”
The values he grew up with like education, independence and discipline, have made it possible for Bachie to work in additional fields like computer network administrations and forestry, and in places like the Philippines and Canada. Eventually, he made his way to the United States and earned a doctorate degree in biological sciences from UC Riverside.
When asked about his experience as an African man working in agriculture in California compared to Ethiopia, Bachie acknowledged the everyday struggles that come with being Black in America, like navigating unwelcoming or unpleasant assumptions and biases of who he is based on his skin color.
“I remember when I was a professor, a student asked me if I was qualified to teach the class,” said Bachie. “I responded to the student and asked, ‘Are you qualified to be my student?'”
Since it was the first class of the year, Bachie said that he did not understand what prompted the student to ask such a question. If it was his physical appearance, he wanted the student to know that skin color does not correlate with qualification.
“It's frustrating,” he said. “But what they think about me has more to do with them than it does me.”
Today, Bachie continues to help growers improve crop productivity and yield with minimal impact to the environment. He is also focused on opportunities for innovation in Southern California. Last October, the City of Escondido proclaimed October 21 as “Dr. Oli G. Bachie Day” in recognition of his vision to explore the future of agriculture and technology.
Bachie wholeheartedly believes that growing up in Oromia, Ethiopia prepared him for the leadership role he now has, and he hopes that his story is an example of how strength will take you farther than you can ever imagine.
/span>/h3>- Author: Pamela Kan-Rice
The International Conference on Digital Technologies for Sustainable Crop Production (DIGICROP) will be held March 28-30. The conference is a fully remote event with presentations in video format followed by discussions.
DIGICROP 2022 is organized by the German Cluster of Excellence “PhenoRob – Robotics and Phenotyping for Sustainable Crop Production” at the University of Bonn and the AI Institute for Next Generation Food Systems. It brings together researchers across disciplines who develop, propose, use or evaluate new digital technologies to enhance the sustainability of crop production, crop breeding, biodiversity and ecosystems. The goal of the event is to foster a robust international and interdisciplinary dialogue in these topic areas.
Although scientists and researchers will be delivering fairly technical presentations, the conference is open to the public, said Hanna Bartram, education and public engagement coordinator for the AI Institute for Next Generation Food Systems. The institute is supported by the U.S. Department of Agriculture's National Institute of Food and Agriculture, as part of a larger initiative led by the U.S. National Science Foundation.
Participants can view all of the talks ahead of time and explore the program for the live event at https://digicrop.de/program.
“All of the talks are already on the website. People can watch them now,” said Andy Lyons, program coordinator for Informatics and GIS at University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources, a partner of the AI Institute for Next Generation Food Systems. “The live event March 28-30 will be devoted to Q&A with the presenters.”
Examples of presentations include:
- Keynote speaker Stavros Vougioukas, professor of biological and agricultural engineering at UC Davis: Robotic harvesters and harvest-aids: Challenges and opportunities
- Steve Fennimore, UC Cooperative Extension specialist at UC Davis:
Automated Weed Removal Technologies Greatly Improve the Resilience of Vegetable Weed Management Programs - Christine Diepenbrock, assistant professor in the Department of Plant Sciences at UC Davis:
Digital and AI technologies to improve crop nutritional quality and abiotic stress tolerance - Isaya Kisekka, associate professor of agrohydrology and water management in the Department of Land, Air and Water Resources and Department of Biological and Agricultural Engineering at UC Davis:
Evaluating the effect of Soil Heterogeneity on Root Zone Water Dynamics in Almond Orchards using Electrical Resistivity Tomography - Joshua Viers, professor of water resources management in the School of Engineering at UC Merced:
AI for Ag for the San Joaquin Valley: using inclusive innovation to break the productivity paradox
Registration is open until March 24 and free of charge. To register, visit https://digicrop.de/register.
Join the live event March 28-30 starting at 8 a.m. Pacific time via Zoom. The Zoom links will be made available a few days prior to the conference via the conference area (login required) at https://digicrop.de/conference-area.
For more information, please contact the conference organizers at digicrop2022@phenorob.de. To join the discussion on Twitter, follow #DIGICROP2022 and @ai_nextgenfood.
The AI Institute for Next Generation Food Systems brings together more than 40 researchers from six institutions: UC Davis; UC Berkeley; Cornell University; the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign; UC Agriculture and Natural Resources; and the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Agricultural Research Service.
- Author: Steven M. Worker
- Contributor: Karen Giovannini
Golden Hills 4-H club volunteer project leader, Jemetha Cosgrove, and her two children, aged 12 and 7, repurposed their 3D printing equipment – part of a 4-H AgTech project – to make face shields to help in the COVID-19 pandemic. As of April 13, they've made around 120 and are donating them to medical and other essential workers in the North Bay.
They are using a Prusa MK3 printer. Prusa popularized the home face shield 3D printing movement from its headquarters in Europe and it has continued to spread around the world. Their shield design and others are being widely used by health care workers during the pandemic. The Cosgroves have been printing a design approved for use in hospitals by the U.S. National Institute of Health.
Each print takes about 2.5 hours and can take longer or shorter depending on the shield design. They are also printing bias tape makers, used to make mask ties, to support the cloth mask sewing efforts. They invite others who own 3D printers to join the effort.
Those interested in making masks can connect on the Facebook page:
Making a Difference Sonoma County.
Old coffee cups, laptops streaming code, baggy eyes deprived of sleep: all the usual signs of hackers at work. But a poorly lit hacker hideaway this was not.
The overnight competition, called the Apps for Ag Hackathon, featured farmers, food science students and UC Agriculture and Natural Resources (UC ANR) extension specialists. They teamed up with software developers to craft quick technology solutions that addressed deep challenges in the planet's food systems.
A summit for solutions
The hackathon, in partnership with the World Food Center at the University of California, Davis, was one of a series of events at the Food, Ag and Health Solution Summit, held Dec. 1-3 at UC Davis. Each chapter of the summit brought together uncommon collaborators to partner on a range of possible agtech solutions.
On the first day, the World Food Center's Precision Ag Workshop focused on paving a long-term roadmap with potential industry partners. Ranging from small startups to global corporations and well-established California commodity associations, each organization was investing in front-end irrigation technologies and looking for new opportunities to collaborate with academic researchers.
The pace switched to rapid-fire for a panel at the summit forum on day three: entrepreneurs from eight different agtech startups had seven minutes to pitch their products to the audience. Delving deeper into the world of agtech financing, a later panel discussion asked professional investors what they would look for in startup models.
Hacking through the night
The hackathon ran alongside the forum and other summit events. Participants had only a 32-hour window to fuse together teams, brainstorm a product, develop rough cuts of their software and present their final pitches to the judges.
"People get a little low on sleep, they get a little silly, the creative juices really start flowing," said Apps for Ag organizer Patrick Dosier to Capital Public Radio. "Software developers often have their headphones on and they're in the zone writing code."
With $10,000 in total prize money and a paid trip to Zurich, Switzerland, at stake, the hackers in their final minutes before turning in their presentation slides were actually focusing more on the human network. The conversations evolved away from talk of web hosting software and .png files to meeting for a coffee later and talking about ways to collaborate in the future. While some groups rehearsed their pitches, others exchanged business cards and phone numbers.
From the Central Valley to Silicon Valley
By presentation time at the tail end of the conference, the hackers were visibly exhausted, some carrying pillows and others seen napping in vacant rooms. Thanks to blankets donated by AT&T, many were able to grab quick rests during the hack.
On stage, the Ag for Hire team showed off their app. It connected contract farmworkers to farmers looking to hire. A "LinkedIn for agricultural labor," the app idea took first place at the competition.
"As a worker myself, it's hard to find a job where I can apply my skills," said team member Alejandro Avalos, who has worked on farms since he was 12 years old. "Our app helps a worker find a job based on his skills and actually get a decent wage for it."
Nick Doherty, a UC Davis undergraduate student and recent pick for Apple's 20-Under-20 list, was also on the team.
Along with the $5,000 award, the team will be flown to the Thought for Food Global Summit in Switzerland next year.
Second place and a $3,000 prize went to the team for CropRescue, an app that allows growers to communicate directly with food banks to make excess food donations easier and more efficient. The final $1,500 prize went to the Green Thumb team, which created a task-tracking app to enable better communication among crop advisers, growers and foremen.
UC innovation goes global
Patrick Brown, a UC Davis plant nutrition professor and pomologist at the Agricultural Experiment Station, advised the hackathon teams, as well as taking part in other events. UC ANR small farms advisor Margaret Lloyd also participated in the summit.
Sponsors for the Solution Summit prizes included Intel, UC ANR, the UC Global Food Initiative, UC Innovation Alliances and the Royse Law Firm. The Global Food Initiative also sponsored travel for two doctoral candidates at UC Berkeley and UC Riverside. The Solution Summit was held in partnership with the Innovation Institute for Food and Health, the Mixing Bowl Hub and the SARTA AgStart incubator.
See the Food Hackathon that inspired the competition.
Author: Brad Hooker