Recording of the first San Diego / Escondido AgTech community social and hackathon (event video). The video features opening remarks by Neal (Neil) Bloom (Inteloc Capital / Rising Tide Partners) describing the goal of building an AgTech community and exploring an agtech incubator for Escondido; remarks from local partners including Jennifer Schoenik (city of Escondido), Oli Baje (UC Agriculture and Natural Resources) about a future ag technology incubator, a local restaurant owner describing zero-waste/regenerative sourcing and use of farm technology (irrigation controllers) to increase yields, and a county supervisor discussing North County agriculture and the importance of local production. The event concludes with the announcement of the hackathon winner: Tyco Pro (presenter Sam).
Welcome to the First San Diego AgTech community social and hackathon. My name is Neil Bloom. I run an investment fund called Inteloc Capital and also a community organizer with a company called Rising Tide Partners. My passion has been building communities that build good companies. And that's what we're all about this whole weekend is how do we build the right community to build good, great companies right here in Escondido. And so I am super thrilled to have partnered with Jennifer Schoenik from the city of Escondido. Jennifer and I have been working together for four or five years in a variety of roles through understanding what's been going on here in Escondido, from the success of the agricultural community and the success of the technology community and the city investing in resources for both areas. We thought, what better way to bring the communities together that probably wouldn't meet and do it in a really, really fun, different manner? And that's a hackathon. Through a curriculum and facilitation and experienced entrepreneurs, we will create businesses by Sunday.
So in Escondido, we like to say that we are rich in agricult and we are ripe in technology. And that's because our city was really built on the agriculture industry. One of the economic development goals is related to potentially forming an incubator in town. So currently our city is exploring the idea of does an ag tech incubator make sense here in Escondido to serve the Southern California region?
I'm Oli Baje. I'm with the University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources. I'm here at a place that is going to be a future ag technology incubator. And as a University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources, we believe that this would be a potential to bring in people in agricultural technology, education, nutrition, youth development and so on and be a place where we can dispatch all those needed by the clientele, our industry and stakeholders involved.
Five years ago I was at a gathering. It was a zero waste conference. And a lot of people like you, big ideas and a lot of passion about the things we all believe in. We're talking and I decided that I wanted to do something that was as zero compromise as I could come up with. And since I'm a restaurant owner and a food lover, I decided to do that in the food space. And that was really build a restaurant that checks all the boxes. As far as zero waste operations, sourcing from local regenerative farms, not wasting, not bringing in plastic, all the things that we feel might be wrong with our current food Systems.
We use a lot of technology and that's what I'm here to talk to you about. We want you to bring it on. We operate in a commodity market. You know, we have some of the finest quality in avocados, but it gets put into a 25 pound box and goes out into the market. And people don't recognize that we have to go for yield and cost and technology is the way to go. We've adopted a lot of technology in our farming operation. Technology has allowed us to bring irrigation controllers in so that we can farm soils, like soils. And we're seeing significant increases in yield.
This is really exciting. I'm glad to be here. When I showed up here and learned about all this, all the things you were doing with technology and agriculture is. It's a perfect fit. I represent north county as a county supervisor and I got Oceanside all the way to borrego. And about 70% of the agriculture is in North County. Here we've got. San Diego county's got like 3,500 small farms, which I think the smaller farmers maybe have to be a little bit more adaptive. But I think everybody can use this technology. With the way the world's going here lately, with gas prices and things like that, we gotta grow our own here locally.
Today we're talking about agriculture and you look and go, well, how is agriculture the future? Well, first of all, it is one of the three things that will never go away. We will always need to mine, we will always need to grow, and we will always need to manufacture. The difference between, particularly the manufacturer side and ag is that more or less, eating hasn't changed in 10 million years. And it won't change in the next 10 million years. But what will change is how many people we can feed and how few people it takes to feed them. That's the future of agriculture and it's the reason that it's so ripe for innovation. I'm here today because as an entrepreneur and an inventor and the man who goes back on patents, I know that in fact, intellectual property will come from people like all of you here today.
Winner of the first annual AgTech Hackathon in Escondido goes to Tyco Pro. Come on down, Sam.
