Tech Is the Key to Climate Smart Success
Walt Duflock, Senior Vice President, Western Growers
For the grower, Climate Smart Agriculture is really a series of business decisions. When I think about Climate Smart Agriculture through the lens of Western Growers, for a lot of our members it really comes down to two key areas. Number one, how do we adjust on the growing operation side to changes in climate? Do we need to move acreage, change crop type, change growing patterns, or change regional focus from certain months to other months?
Next, as a grower, what technology can help me take advantage of programs that are out there to fund and verify some of these production practice changes that can be big and costly? A lot of times this comes down to, “Can I use regenerative ag practices like cover crops and less tillage to store carbon in the ground?”
I think there is a larger willingness on the part of ag operators now to use insets to offset their own carbon use than there is to sell the offsets. They are using it as an internal accounting mechanism.
With carbon, the decision generally plays out in one of two ways. The grower can sequester the carbon and take it as an inset to offset their carbon footprint and help their buyers up the supply chain. Or they can sell offsets to third parties who then have the right to use carbon.
What I'm seeing in the marketplace is interesting. I think there is a larger willingness on the part of ag operators now to use insets to offset their own carbon use than there is to sell the offsets. They are using it as an internal accounting mechanism.
There are tools out there like Agrology to measure and track the carbon that's being sequestered in the ground. The challenge is always one thing: How verifiable is it when you measure the baseline, track the stored carbon incrementally from these practices, and then go out and sell this or use it as an accounting vehicle? At some point there will be audits. When that time comes, you need to be rock solid — like any audit— and that's where I see a lot of work.
But we're still very early days on this. I think there is good progress on both getting carbon stored and making the growing practice changes. There is less progress on whether I can actually feel 100% confident that it's verifiable, and that the audit will stand up to 10, 15, or 20 years from now. We're not there yet.
Specialty crop ag tech is another area related to Climate Smart that Western Growers is very involved in for producers. Our Innovation Team is focused on two areas: labor and increased regulations around chemistry.
Automation solutions are coming fast, but they’re not here yet. Biological solutions are coming soon, but they’re not here yet, either. So, to help move things forward, Western Growers works with a lot of startups.
The reality is that not only does the product need to work for the grower, it also needs to do it in a way that works for the grower’s economics.
We have identified over 700 startups in the automation space, doing everything from weeding, to thinning, to planting, to harvesting, to harvest assist, to spraying. In a couple of key areas — weeding, spraying, and harvest assist — I feel like we're getting critical mass. We have Burro out there with 350 robots doing harvest assist. We've got Carbon Robotics with 50-plus robots in market doing great stuff with the LaserWeeder. We've got Stout Industrial Technology doing weeding. We have companies like GUSS and Ecorobotix and Robotics Plus.
But the reality is that not only does the product need to work for the grower — it needs to weed, or spray, or do the stuff they are doing with labor crews — but it also needs to do it in a way that works for the grower’s economics. That's where, for example, harvest is still struggling. It turns out it's really hard to pick fruits and vegetables with a robot. It's so delicate, the robots are just having a hard time getting that last mile of “pick and put in the bin” correctly so that the economics work.
But for weeding, spraying, and harvest assist, the math works for the growers. They're able to reduce that gap between the labor they have and labor they need with automation. Stay tuned on other areas like harvest.
On the biologicals front, we identified and vetted 1,200 startups and put 400 of them into an Ag Biologicals Landscape with the Mixing Bowl team last year. We recognized there are several key biologicals segments but the two that matter most for us are biocontrols — the chemical pesticide alternatives, and biostimulants — the yield enhancers. We're focusing first on biocontrols, because we see massive regulatory pressure from Western Europe, the US, and the State of California being placed on the chemical set of solutions.
Western Growers decided to focus on 10 to 15 of these biocontrol startups, push them out through field trials, and write up the case studies under the Western Growers brand. We want to be that third-party and help the startups. We need that biological portfolio to be ready.
From a Climate Smart perspective, biologicals can help make healthier soil, make better use of the soil, and make more efficient production operations. On the equipment side, things like EV (electric vehicle) tractors or using less water will make climate resilience more real. So, we're working with those startups as well.
Over the last 10 years Western Growers has become a lot more engaged in areas like these. One of our big focuses behind automation and biologicals is developing a next-gen workforce to be ready for all those fancy robots and biological solutions.
To make that possible we've rolled out a California Department of Food and Agriculture (CDFA) Grant to help make community college students ag-tech enabled. We are identifying the skills gap from the growers, designing curriculum to fill those gaps through community colleges, and then marketing to get those curriculum components spread out widely across the state.
We worked with 500 students last semester and are hoping to get to 800 to 1,000 taking our modules at local schools in spring of 2024. Then the last mile is really the key: getting them into an ag tech job with a large grower, an equipment manufacturer, an input provider, or a startup. We're focused on getting 3,000 ag-tech enabled students through the program over 4 years.
These tools save time and money. That's the whole objective. If we can keep startups from going down the wrong path, that's a great outcome for the whole space.
We are focusing on the next generation of startups, as well. Our partners at University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources (UCANR) rolled out a farm robotics challenge with farm-ng. We want to get students in both community college and four-year universities plugged into robots, building robotic solutions. Maybe some startups come out of that. We're supporting these challenge events and want to see more of them.
Western Growers is building tools to help startups get to what I call “Product 1.0” faster and cheaper. We have a startup Agtech Toolkit that gives you all the data you need to understand the crop you are working with, as well as subject matter like how to fundraise, how to work with growers, and how to protect intellectual property. In partnership with Axis Ag we are also building a library for startups with high-resolution images in key crops like lettuce, tomatoes, apples, and strawberries.
Finally, Western Growers is focusing on events that help further Climate Smart initiatives. We are a co-organizer of FIRA USA in a three-way partnership with UCANR and the GOFAR team from France, the Global Association of Ag Robotics. Last year we brought 2,000 people to Salinas to talk ag tech robotics in specialty crops. This year we're going to the Yolo County Fairgrounds October 22-24. We will have demo space on the fairgrounds and every grower can come for free. We also launched the Salinas Biological Summit last year in June. That was a success, and we are going to host that event again June 25-26, 2024.
The more we can continue to push these discussions forward and help growers and suppliers develop and adopt new solutions, the better off we will all be for the long run.
