Announcing the San Diego AgTech Hackathon Oct 21-23 with Jennifer Schoeneck of the City of Escondido

Hello there. I am. Good to see you, Jennifer. We're really excited to share a little bit about the upcoming San Diego AgTech Hackathon. So I am Neil Bloom. I am managing partner at Interlock Capital and the founder of Fresh Brewed Tech, a San Diego tech media company. And this is Jennifer.

Hello. I'm Jennifer Schoenick, the Deputy Director of Economic Development for the City of Escondido.

Well, Jennifer, you and I have had the great pleasure of working together a number of times throughout our careers, which I think a lot of it in the different places we've been doing has kind of culminated in this. Like, we've been building community, we've been promoting businesses and business communities. And this is one of those great, not just stories, but events that is going to happen that showcases all that we've been working on for quite a while. So do you want to tell us a little about the city of Escondido, what Escondido has been doing to invest in its business community?

Sure thing. So Escondido, I really think right now lives up to its name, which is a good and a bad thing, right? Escondido, like totally hidden, unknown. And I think that speaks to the fact that there, there are a lot of great things happening in Escondido, but not a lot of people in the greater San Diego community really take advantage of all the great things that are here. So in addition to performing arts, murals that are happening in town, our historic downtown and our beautiful parks, actually, if you want to go camping at a local lake that it just makes you feel like you've transformed to a faraway place, go to Lake Dixon. It's really beautiful. But in addition to all those things, on the industry side, we have a lot of farms. And our agriculture community is really integrated into our city, which is quite unique. And the city of Escondido, we're an older city in San Diego, so founded in 1888 and a really big city. If you look on the map, it's about 34 square miles. So one of the biggest cities in the San Diego region and the Southern California region, really. And so in a lot of the outlying parts of our city, we still have a lot of farms. And to support our existing farmers, one thing that the city has done is invest heavily in a new infrastructure project. So this is a $50 million project. It's called the MFRO, the membrane filtration Reverse Osmosis Facility. And in addition to the actual facility where that system of purifying water happens, the City has built pipelines to these outskirt areas so that farmers can have access to this agricultural water. And as someone who's not an expert in water, what I like to think of it as, which makes sense to most of us, I think now at this point, is a purple pipe system. So it's water that's not suitable for drinking, but the salt has been taken out of it. It's been purified enough to be adequate for farm irrigation. And that will allow our farmers to stay and grow in Escondido and hopefully we can continue to expand those pipelines to reach more farmers in the area. And that whole system that's been under construction for years is launching in 2023.

Incredible. I mean, to see a city invest in its business community through independent water source, you know, because that is just the California story right now, which is our farmers really being hit hard by drought and being hit hard on dependencies of things that are not in their control, like resource, natural resources. And for a city to say that we can do both, we can help our businesses and, and help find locally available water is a great signal to business leaders that say, great, we should be also taking the lead and making investments when our city is as well too. And so anything you've seen from just business ownership and business attraction and business investment that is also kind of saying they're doing their job as well alongside the city.

Yeah, there's several businesses that have located to our city that are directly or tangentially related to agriculture. So of course we have some companies that grew up here, like Henry Avocado. Right. Big producer, distributor of Avocados. But we've seen tech companies like Aqua Cycle move to Escondido and they have a water filtration product that's for the.

Private sector, specifically in the food manufacturing space. Right. Which is a great application for water treatment.

Yes, great. Thanks for adding those details. And then I would also add Stone Brewing to that list as well. To have Stone grow up in Escondido is something we're really proud of. And of course, brewing is a water intensive activity and so it's impressive to see what they've done on their own facility to. To manage their water as well.

And Stone invested in their own farm at one point to, you know, be a part of the higher part of the food system. But their own value chain of saying that we could try to grow all the crops we would need to for our business, which was pretty impressive. Ultimately, I believe they gave the farm to their farmers who were running it which is. And it still exists, it's just not stone related. So I think they actually are still involved in kind of the agricultural part, higher up in the natural resources, what they're doing too. So. Yes.

Yeah, they're really forward thinking.

Absolutely. You mentioned a few businesses which are great to see in that regard. So you have got business, especially ag businesses that are making their own investment and the city making investment for them. Where is that kind of culminating to? It's a pretty big leading question here.

Yeah. Right. Well, we know agriculture is a big part of our city's history and the region's history, but we're also seeing in our city and the region individuals in technology professions, that industry group just skyrocketing. So in our city over the last five years, professional, scientific and technical services has been the fastest growing industry. That's because we're seeing a large number of these tech companies come into town and we think there's a big opportunity to really bring together this agricultural history that we have and this technology future that we're looking at. We all heard that Apple purchased a big campus in Rancho Bernardo. So that's just a 10 minute drive south on the 15 from Escondido. So it's just great to see more tech talent being attracted to the region.

Absolutely, yeah. A few other pieces that we've seen from what the technology and investment community looks at is increased capital investment into early stage companies. Now this is a little bit of a lagging indicator in a sense because where great companies go, capital follows. So it's showing one that there are investable companies that invest venture capitalists want to fund. So that's a great sign. We have seen over the course of six years a tenfold increase in venture capital per year. We were at about a billion dollars a year in venture capital in about 2016, 2017 and last year we are at 9.6 billion or 10 billion in venture capital dollar invested in 2021 alone. This year is going to be a little lower, but still above the $5 billion mark, which is from a five year average. Huge. To see that kind of increase. That shows that we are building great companies in San Diego that are growing at rapid scale. These are companies that are building technologies that are going to change everything about our lives. So that's a San Diego county wide thing. But during the COVID timeframe we have seen many businesses move north and many move closer to home. It just obviously we can all relate to the fact that we want to live and work in a closer environment and the commute was not, not something we all wanted coming out of COVID as well. And so I think north county is really benefiting from that. Both increased capital, the ability to find talent, maybe you know, 10 minutes away with maybe they came for Apple and stay for the startups and this idea that we should, we should enjoy the place that we want to work. So that's all benefit north county, which we're really excited about, we're also really excited to see is the density of sub industries. So while San Diego county from outside San Diego may be looked at as a military, biotech and telecom town, there are a lot of sub industries that are benefiting from certain pieces of tech flowing into that. And agtech is one of those. So from the environment, from telecom and defense and, and biotech, all ag tech has benefited from that. So whether that's soil science and seed science from a resiliency standpoint, that comes from biotech, like learning things in the lab has flown into the field, or whether it's from drone technology, sensor monitoring, both satellite and in ground for say maybe that was a defense application. Well now we're seeing it into the field as well for hydration monitoring and weather planning and mapping and all of the kind of the data science that goes alongside that as well, of knowing when to plant and what to plant related to actual data, not just the almanac. So having like a leading industry, like I said, around some of these tech players now flowing into agriculture, that is what agtech is, agriculture technology. And so seeing those trends, you know, and seeing that what looking in the county, what city is investing in these industries, it's an absolute natural to say let's bring these two communities together, agriculture and technology. Bring the companies already who are building ag tech and showcase the, showcase that we already are doing this. We've already got the companies and what, what could we be doing to scale that up, give them the resources to surround these companies to say let's build bigger, better and solve the problems that haven't been addressed yet. And so all that is leading into the AgTech Hackathon. October 21st, 22nd, 23rd. This is coming up in October and it actually is leading just before San Diego Startup Week, which is the following week. And we're really, really excited to bring together communities that seemingly might, you might not on the surface see them running into each other very often. Right. You would not see a farmer and a coder, you know, sharing a cocktail together. Maybe in East County, San Diego actually, where that developer has his own farm, which actually is really the case. I'm going to give a quick shout out to Katie Fellons, the VP of marketing for Trust and Will, who has her own farm. And so whenever I'm talking about, you know, talking about SaaS software with her, she kind of reminds me that, like, hey, all these things I'm learning in tech, I'm bringing home to my farm business as well, too. And so that's what we hope to bring together during this specific weekend. Anything you want to share specifically around what the city hopes to kind of bring together around this too?

Yeah. Well, to your point, there's a lot of activity and movement. Right. We. We see tech companies growing in the area. We see agriculture having different needs and trying different solutions to meet their needs. And I feel like it's a really good time to bring these communities together around an event like this. Something else I'm excited about is every time I talk to a farmer, somebody who has their own land and is actively seeding, growing, they tell stories about the technology that they've tried and tested, whether it's worked or not worked, whether they've kept it or they've moved on. And I'm excited to hear more of that or to share more of that in the wider community as well, because I think in our region, everyone's exploring how to integrate farming into our daily lives more often. Right. I think people are seeing or feeling a need to not just go to the grocery store and pick out their fruit, but maybe have a better understanding of how the food got to the store, maybe growing their own food in their own gardens at home, visiting farms, being a part of a community garden. So it feels like a really good time to bring these communities together and then also share that with the general community as well. Just yesterday I was having a meeting with the Escondido Unified High School District leaders. And I work with businesses, so I rarely communicate with education institutions, especially K through 12. But I was so impressed with the programs that they had around in general, but also around agriculture, because we were talking about that during this meeting. And they're training their students on ag tech protocol right now so that their high schoolers can immediately go into jobs right after high school or easily transition into a higher ed area where they could expand their skills. So I think there's a lot of knowledge sharing that will Happen K through 12 and also at the university level as we continue this conversation and bring these players together around agtech.

Absolutely. And I think while the event will be in Escondido and we're going to talk in a second about what the year round presence is going to be like. I think the fact that it we are calling it the San Diego Ag Tech Hackathon because we really are bringing together a much larger community around this. I'm being invited to speak to the Valley Center Business Bureau and they're. And they want to make sure that their farmers there so that they can invite them to our event. Right. And the CEO of Coastal Roots Farms in Encinitas which is helping train the Encinitas I think San Dieguido Union School District on food supply, they want to be involved too. Right. So this is not a only Escondido thing. It happens to be that Escondido is very forward thinking and very accessible in the way that they want to bring the community together. Um, but I think we should talk a little about the kind of audience we want to see there. The incubator that is coming from this as well too. So why don't we start with what that weekend's experience is going to be like, what a hackathon is. Does that sound good?

That sounds great. I know I've gotten a lot of questions about that so it'll be great to dive into it and answer some of those questions. For people who might not know what a hackathon is or feel like it's inaccessible or just like some crazy tech concept.

Yeah. And I've heard different ways of expressing it. An idea thon is another one. But here's here. I'll use the agenda of the weekend to really explain what we're going to do. So Friday, October 21, 3pm we'll be kicking off an ag tech community social. This is both a gathering of a really multi disciplinary diverse group of people like we've been mentioning from farmers to technologists to students to engineers at large companies and generally just companies themselves who say we've got this R and D program or project. What if we brought that team out into the community and work on it publicly for the weekend? And so the community social will be a large gathering of people few hundred. It also will be a showcase of a large amount of existing early and late stage companies. These are companies maybe like Upcycle who has got a fertilizer business specifically around using only reuse waste stream products or a company like Mercado which is a marketplace for grocers and those looking for groceries but they're using federal and state budget to connect those on SNAP and food stamps to find available food using and the budget is on the platform Itself companies like we mentioned Aqua Cycle, which is in the food manufacturing water treatment space, or companies like Plantable Foods which has built a platform for those in the alternative protein space. They have built a ready to use alternative protein that others can turn into food products. So these you can tell there's like a pretty wide ranging existing footprint of companies. It also could be like the vehicles that are being used. So electric vehicles for tractors and harvesters or robotic harvesters and tractors in that area as well will also be there on showcase. So main thing is showcase companies bring together groups. We know when you bring together different groups, magic happens, you get these random bumping into's already. So we will kick it off with some, some thoughts from some of our local leaders as well as some of our business leaders as well too. And from there we will already be at the Synergies center coworking space right in the heart of downtown Escondido. And the hackathon will begin pretty much there. We really want the whole community to see what the participants are going to be joining in on, what they're going to be embarking on for the next 48 hours. And that kicks off with part of the hackathon. Attendees will be pitching their ideas. Hey, I have an idea for blank. And they'll be using that to recruit attendees to join them as a team for the weekend. So some attendees will come with ideas, some will come knowing they're going to join another person's idea. And there's actually a lot of curriculum that will show Friday night of how to work as a team, how to look at strengths and weaknesses in each team member so that not everyone's doing the same thing, that you're kind of a force multiplier. So yeah, we will actually lead the, we'll have curriculum through the whole weekend. And the team building and bonding is kind of the start of Friday night. You've been a part of a weekend hackathon. What was that Friday night experience like for you of just joining a team?

I have. So this idea kind of intrigued me. And I saw there was a hackathon in downtown San Diego related to city government. The city of San Diego, help put it on. And so I showed up by myself, no idea to pitch. I just wanted to be able to join a team. And it was very cool that first night to hear people who were inspired to put an idea out there. They would stand up casually in front of a group, all of us that were just hanging there after having enjoyed some pizza and they everybody pitched their different ideas. And so through listening to that, I kind of walked over to a group and I said, hey, I kind of want to be a part of what you're building. Is that cool? It kind of reminds me of elementary school, right when you're like forming teams to do things. And what I can say is the mentors that were there were really helpful and in bringing people who maybe weren't sure what kind of team they wanted to be a part of or for helping teams form their groups. And so I want to encourage everyone who's thinking about participating to just go. Because this whole community and atmosphere is very, very welcoming. Right? Like, no idea is bad. Everybody wants to accomplish something together. And I do not have a tech background, but because I've been interested in government and I, I felt like I could bring that expertise and interest to my team. And so everybody on our team had different skills. There were a couple of software engineers and it was a really great experience.

That's great. And you bring up a great point on the mentorship part. We want to surround the team with not just business leaders, not just experienced technologists, but also the voice of the customer. What are we all here to build? And so we want just as many people who are going to be attending the community gathering to hopefully stay as well, whether you're in farming or some part of the food value chain to also be there so that you can give firsthand voice of the customer expertise as well. So we're looking for mentors from all those areas, technology to, to farming and everything in between to help these groups to quickly iterate their ideas. And that's actually what Saturday is about. So Saturday will all will be bright and early. The teams will come back, or maybe some of them won't leave Friday night and be working through the night, which we have seen. Luckily, Synergy center has given us the key on Friday and all the way through Sunday. Saturday will be a talk on customer validation. So how do you take an idea and turn it into a business? And that's really what we're going to be going from, from Friday to Sunday. So we are going to teach that. There's some great speakers lined up who have done this many times before and will help guide every team to say, all right, here's, here's the idea and the premise. If you're in science, maybe this is the hypothesis. And over the course of from Saturday morning to Saturday midday, we will have more mentors there and more voice of the customer representatives, farmers and more to be interviewed and to give direct feedback that says here's what we're using now, here's what I wish we had. And we'll be teaching groups how to not ask leading questions, how to ask really good questions to then listen and take in and hear what, what the customer is saying, potential customer, and hear what they're not saying as well too. Saturday afternoon will be about data really like understanding what did you just hear? Assess, analyze and start turning that into a first prototype. We call this a minimum viable product. This could be as much as creating a survey that you know, all right, we know we need to go get 100 more data points or maybe it's a landing page that we need to direct a few people to, to see what does their actions really show compared to what they've been saying. Because saying and doing are very different. Right. So we'll have teams around to help with this idea of minimal viable product and prototyping around Saturday afternoon including creating coding careers team which are bringing out a number of their both instructional developer, their, their team of instructors and they'll be fielding some teams as well of people who are workers in industry who are learning how to code. So that part of the prototyping will be great and I'm sure people will stay nice and late Saturday just working away. And that'll bring us into Sunday where the Sunday midday around noon will be the pitch competition. And so all Sunday morning we will be coaching training with mentors again around how to build a pitch deck and a pitch and get ready to not just the deck but how to present and how to get your, your point across. Tell the story of where you were on Friday, where did you end up on Sunday? What did you learn? What are you going to go do all you know within three to five minutes and build a presentation around that as well too. Culminating in Sunday's noon pitch competition where we actually have some real agtech investors lined up. Sara Ventures, which is a Midwest focused agtech company that has a partner also in San Diego, will be a pitch judge as well as a number of other investors. So these are people who see pitches all the time and they're really going to give a lot more feedback than anything. But we're going to give scores and we're going to give prizes. So the community's invited out to also see the pitch competition. So there are separate tickets to come out and see the pitch competition Sunday midday as well too. But I'm just so excited to see where the ideas that come because there's so many areas that need solving and where they end up on Sunday as well. I'm sure you had that experience in yours that whatever you started working on on Friday was, was, I'm guessing probably different. You know, 48 hours later. That's something that you went through.

Yeah. And it's amazing how much you can get done in an intensive weekend like this. And even out of it, some people decided to continue on with their idea and create full on businesses with what they had produced through the weekend. And that's that I think is really exciting. Because your point, all sorts of ideas will come out of these pitches and we want to make sure that if individuals want to continue an idea that they have a pathway to do that afterwards.

That's a great leading point to the pathway afterwards, the long term effect. So you know, by bringing this disperse so seemingly dispersed communities together for the weekend, we know a lot more lot is going to come out of it and we hope to kind of keep that energy going and that momentum going after. So this is not just a weekend exercise. This is a multi year and year round community that we hope to help to continue to convene and we hope to do it at Escondido's upcoming AgTech incubator. Something you can tell us about, Jennifer?

Yeah, this is an idea that the city is exploring. There's no formal commitment on this yet. However, there is an opportunity and I know as entrepreneurs, entrepreneurs love opportunities. So I think it's good to get the community involved in the conversation about what's possible. So the city owns several properties, right. That's where we have city hall, our lakes. But we do own a couple of commercial properties. Some of them we lease out to the private sector. But there's one property that the city owns that's three and a half acres. There's a 40,000 square foot warehouse on that property that is not currently in a state for us to visit and have our, our hackathon there. But we want to explore the idea of updating the building and bringing it to a place, a condition in which we can use it for an incubator, even a pilot incubator and bring in educators and early stage companies so that they can convene with mentors and capital to really accelerate their growth. We've seen this model be very successful in other parts of the country and California is such a leader in food production that it makes sense to have more of these facilities here. There is one incubator up in the Sacramento area outside of Davis that's been really successful. They recently expanded their wet lab space with a $1 million federal grant. And within five months of doing that, the companies that moved in, the startups that moved in, ended up generating $2.5 million in payroll and attracted $45 million in investment. So in speaking with the executive director of that program, he said that there is additional demand. And what I want to make sure is that if this community takes off, right, if we all get together and we continue meeting, let's make sure that there is a way to share information that is being learned at other value centers around the state and the country. So that if someone in Fresno has a really great tech transfer program or idea or workforce development item related to ag tech, that we can learn that and bring that information down to the Southern California region. But then also whatever we create and develop down here, that is going to serve the greater good of the future food and food systems, we want to have a vehicle to bring that information together and share that. But specifically around agtech, there's really great organizations in the region working with farmers. So the San Diego Farm Bureau is located in Escondido. They're a wonderful statewide organization that has a local chapter that brings together farmers. There's the San Diego Food Systems alliance that's been doing great work in bringing to me community together. And they have a Great Food Vision 2030 that they're sharing with the community. But we think that there's a special place for Ag Tech to fit into this overall conversation of the future of food. And we're hoping that this agtech incubator might be a great place to convene individuals in all of Southern California. One group that we're working with is through the UC system. So they have an agricultural and natural resources arm that serves all of the UC campuses. So our contact there is Ali Bachi, and he'll be a mentor throughout the weekend. His role is to help bring all the great research that's happening at the universities and help farmers and agriculture companies really expand and grow. He is really an expert in the space. So he'll be there kind of representing the farmers and on the ground, ag expertise throughout the weekend. And the head of the UCANR system is Glenda Humeston. And so we did a tour of the space with several individuals from the UC system. And so we're exploring, you know, is there an opportunity with the UC system to turn this into a real. A real hub for agriculture? I'm doing a tour of the facility too, with CSU San Marcos soon as well. So it's a big. It's a big lot. I think there's a lot of potential. And right now what we're saying is here is a piece of land is not currently being used. Who wants to use this for ag tech experiments? Because there's no reason why it suggested there. If you have an idea that involves ag tech and I have a piece of land that you can use to further your idea, like let's do that. We can do that tomorrow.

Absolutely. I think from the technology and startup community what we're excited about is what density happens when you convene people. So even just having a space to randomly bump into like minded people already sparks a lot of things. And then when you layer that in with content, whether it's our going to be our weekly, monthly or quarterly, different kind of speaker series and events, you start getting ideas flowing. So let's say someone's working on their very first startup and someone who's working on their fourth. Maybe it's not ag related, but all of a sudden you get like knowledge transfer that happens just from you were working there alongside each other the same day. Let's not also discount the fact that because we have so many farms in the county, there's a lot of other ag tech companies who are maybe traveling to the area and selling to their customer farms that now will also have a space to come and hang out and work in their ag tech space as well too.

Yeah, to demonstrate their technology to the wider community. I mean you need a lot of space to fly around drones and bring in electric tractors and things like that.

Absolutely. So even just like a meeting space, but even a soft landing zone for people who are traveling and traveling through knowing, oh I could work here as opposed to a coffee shop and find the people who are working on the same things that I am, I think is going to be a great thing as well too. So really excited about that. And I think the AG Sac hackathon honestly is a microcosm of that. Like the, the magic we hope to have year round of bringing business people together. I think we're going to have a lot of intrinsic data points just from the AgTech Hackathon weekend as well too. And so if you go to san diegoagtech.com right now, it'll lead you to the webpage for the AgTech Hackathon October 21st, 22nd, 23rd. You can join us just Friday, you can join us the whole weekend and you can join us just Sunday. We'd love to have you in any and all the spaces, the areas that we continue to need help or we welcome the community to reach out to is company showcase on Friday. Mentors for any part of the hackathon participate team participants and sponsors. We plan to give away both in kind and cash prizes to the pitching companies. And we would love to have some more resources through through sponsorship to hand out and help these teams really get off the ground and running. So on the website san diegoagtech.com, you'll find the email address, which I think is eventsfreshbrewedtech.com. feel free to reach out to that and you'll get in touch with our team with us here and we will help get you plugged in for that weekend and the greater community. Well, after a busy, busy weekend of ideating, validating, community building, people are gonna be hungry. And we know Escondido's got some taco spots. Jennifer, do you have a favorite taco spot of your own?

That's a tough one. There are so many good taco spots here in Escondido. I would have to say my favorite is Frida's Tacos.

It's a good one. A good Escondido spot. Another good Escondido spot favorite of mine, TJ Tacos as well too. We will have tacos at the Hackathon, so make sure you come participate so you can enjoy the local tacos as well too. And we'll see you October 21st, 22nd, 23rd. Thank you again, Jennifer. Excited for the weekend.

Thank you, Neil.