Agriculture technology innovation, education bring farming into the future

Global Business

agriculture-technology-innovation-education-bring-farming-into-the-future

Salinas, on the central coast of California, is agriculture country. It’s even known for being the birthplace of author John Steinbeck whose Pulitzer-prize winning novel “The Grapes of Wrath” is about the plight of farmers during the Great Depression. But Salinas is also embracing the future and looking toward tech to take it there.

CCTV America’s Mark Niu reports.

In Salinas, Carson Britz, the son of a farmer, brainstorms how sprinkler piping can become part of the shared economy.

Britz is the co-founder of Harvest Port, an online marketplace that allows farmers to rent everything from bins to heavy machinery from each other.

Because so much farm equipment sits around after being used for a short time, HarvestPort believes it can become the Air BNB of agriculture tech.

Because of the extensive variety of crops grown here, Salinas has earned the nickname “Salad Bowl of the World.” But it’s only roughly an hour or two away from Silicon Valley, so it’s hoping to leverage that proximity to become the ag tech capital of the world.

Twenty four tech startups work from here, including Concentric Power founded by Curtis, who also spent five years in China building a chemical recycling plant in Shenzhen.


Digging deep to root out plant disease

Agriculture disease causes more than $200 billion in losses globally each year. More than a third of that stems from soil-borne diseases. But a new San Francisco startup is merging genetics with machine learning to tackle the problem.

CCTV America’s Mark Niu has the story.

Jim Cochran has been growing everything from strawberries to artichokes for nearly four decades – but today’s he’s doing something different.

He’s purchased a testing kit online for $200 that will tell him the biological makeup of his soil.

The soil samples arrive at a lab in San Francisco, where scientists from Trace Genomics extract the genetic material. Through their proprietary technology, they’re able to turn the soil sample into a liquid form that contains the DNA.