Transcript of a panel/fireside chat at the Escondido AgTech Gathering (May 2023). Speakers introduce themselves and organizations (a law firm, city economic development, UC agriculture extension, and Veritas Substrates). Key themes: building ag‑tech community, supporting local agriculture businesses, sustainable growing substrates (moving from peat moss to coco coir), and practical advice on how ag‑tech companies must engage directly with growers.
Questions this video answers
Eric Kozzo.
Four years old.
Morrison Enforcer.
Foreign. I am thrilled to be here and really thrilled to have all of you here where we are building community in the ag tech community. Agriculture, food production, technology. Hopefully got to mingle and meet a little bit. Tonight we're going to hear from a few different people. We're gonna have a great fireside chat with Eric here in a second. We are Morrison Enforcer. We're a full service law firm. We represent companies from the early side, just formation all the way up through the Fortune 500.
So the city of Escondido has a strategic economic development plan and in that plan we're really focused on supporting our agriculture businesses. The mission of UC Aga Natural Resources was always to translate the amazing science and technology from the University of California to the people of California. Hi everyone. It's great to be here. My name is Eric Kozzo. I'm the chief operating officer at Veritas Substrates. We are a four year old startup that traditionally was focused on helping growers, farmers around the world move from less sustainable substrates like peat moss over to more sustainable substrates around things like Coco Coir.
Look, the biggest thing you could do.
I think in agtech is it's a lot different than traditional tech going and finding in the dark recesses of the Internet users, right? That sort of comport with the thesis of your product is really easy. Ag is not like that. If you're building an agtech company, you spend time with growers, right, and understand their issues. You can't just go out into the Internet and go find users somewhere in the world. You know you're going to have concentrations of your customers in very specific places with very specific problems. So if you're not building an ag tech company embracing that reality, I think it's going to be a harder dream.
