Tech firm aids Salinas Valley farmers after flooding By Caitlin Fillmore
network of local and regional farmers across California, Arizona, Colorado and New Mexico. Some tech companies associated with the center chose to relocate to Salinas, Donohue said. Two companies producing autonomous agricultural robots—Farmwise Lab Inc. and Naio Technologies—now call Salinas home. Others in the center’s list of three doz- en affiliated startups are headquartered outside the Salinas Valley but connect to the Western Growers network through this hub. Others, such as renewable energy company Concentric Power, and Heavy Connect, a mobile app to assist produc- ers with regulatory compliance, now op- erate out of the center, Donohue said. GeoVisual Analytics had no connec- tion to Salinas Valley agriculture before partnering with the technology center. Soon, the company was making connec- tions with farmers, said McGregor, noting the center “is how I met most of our cus- tomers in the first place.” He added, “It’s hard for us to do what we did without them in some ways.” McGregor said the firm was founded to help farmers “digitize their expertise.” But he credits the Salinas technology center with helping GVA “speak the right
After January’s deluge of atmospheric storms breached berms and levees on the Salinas River, flooding more than 20,000 acres of Monterey County farm fields, growers turned to technology to help as- sess the damage and determine which crops were salvageable. GeoVisual Analytics, a Denver firm that opened in the Salinas Valley vege- table-growing region in 2017, got busy mining its trove of digital data to help guide farmers. Growers in the famed Salad Bowl look to the firm’s technology to help forecast planting and inspect crops, us- ing drones and NASA-funded artificial intelligence algorithms. By layering maps of the flooding dam- age with the digital maps of a grower’s land, GVA helped farmers quickly assess which areas faced the highest risk for crop damage, the company said. Charles McGregor, GVA general manager, said the technology offered farmers a sophisticated data-gathering
Floodwaters from the Salinas River pour into Monterey County farmland during January storms. Afterward, digital data helped some farmers determine which crops could be saved and which were lost.
service as an alternative to “everybody running around, manually inspecting and hoping.” The company is one of several firms that operate out of the Western Growers Center for Innovation and Technology,
which is housed at Taylor Farms’ head- quarters in Salinas. Dennis Donohue, executive director of the center, said GVA is an example of the type of companies the center has helped attract, so farmers can benefit from new technologies. “The basic idea is to get a company to the right people,” Donohue said. The center serves as an agricultur- al business incubator and networking hub for members of Western Growers Association, a nearly 100-year-old
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