Fifty-plus hours of ideation and iteration at the 2024 Escondido AgX Startup Hackathon, where teams built solutions around Salk Institute research on soil health. Local Basket won first place and will pitch to city council on March 20.
50+ hours over three days.
Three months of access to space and a 10-week program with over 20 mentors.
3rd place: Sunergy; 2nd place: Field Wise; 1st place: Local Basket.
March 20.
Well, hello, everyone.
Good to see you. Thanks for coming over to our neck of the woods here in Escondido. Everyone want to start a company this weekend. We're going to spend the next 50 plus hours ideating, validating, iterating and kind of telling the story of what does that mean? Time can be compounded to a certain regard. As much as you think that it might take this long to get customer feedback, we're going to do that quicker, I guarantee.
Welcome to the city of Escondido. Thank you for coming to our second AGX hackathon here at the Churchill House.
This is the place where we can get this technology quite literally in the hands of the growers. There are only a few places on earth that you could really do this functionally. Escondido is the best place for that. And I just want to see this thing happen.
We all face probably one of the biggest challenges that humankind ever has faced with the ongoing climate crisis. And what we're trying to do at the Salk is to find the plant characteristics that will allow carbon that's derived from the root system and make it so that the carbon stays for longer in the soil, to enrich the soil, to increase soil health. And so we need innovators and we need people who want to take risks to try out new things, things that never have been done before.
It's very rare for someone to show up to one of these hackathons and be like, I'm trying to figure out how to make as much money as possible. They have something in common. They're passionate about solving a problem. They want to make the world a better place. When we get a bunch of interesting people together with a lot of different skill sets and experiences and just mash them together, enough brilliant stuff comes out of it.
Ideas can come from anywhere. And not just the ideas, the businesses can come from anywhere. But actually takes a bit of a village to get it off the ground.
It does take a village, and that's why we're part of this community here. We've been sponsoring the AgTech hackathon since it started. You'll see that as you come up with new ideas, you'll have lots of different directions, you'll think of lots of projects. There's no shortage of problems. And that's the kind of thing that I am privileged to be able to help companies with in this ecosystem.
The process that we're going to practice over these three days together is designed to get us to think like a scientist. You're trying to disprove something to manage risk. What are the problems that we're experiencing right now that we have not solved, that are urgent, that are big, that are affecting lots of people? More often than not, teams come back from the field and say we didn't fully understand the problem.
The top three teams will get three months of access into our space and actually go through a 10 week program with us. We're going to be bringing in over 20 different mentors around the San Diego area, if not nationally, to come in and educate you guys.
And the winning team of the Hackathon will present their winning idea to the Escondido city council on March 20.
We can build the future together. We can solve all of these problems together.
Announcing the third place winner, Sunergy, come on down.
The second place winner is.
Field wise, come on up. The first place winner of the 2024 AG X AgTech Hackathon in Escondido. And it goes to the local basket. Local basket. Come on up. Come on up. Bring the whole team.
We hope that the advancements made here will not only benefit the city of Escondido, but farmers across California and throughout the food system. So thank you for being here today and thank you for supporting the future of farmers and food.
