Bilge and Charlotte have spent the week June 17-21 in the San Joaquin Valley with the California Specialty Crops Council learning from specialty crop farmers about their growing and harvesting practices! We spoke with growers about their experiences with pests, and explored the current technologies being used to produce high-yield conventional and organic crops. At the USDA ARS research center, Beto Perez de Leon and Spencer Walsh introduced us to some of the research being conducted in the Central Valley, and how the USDA gets new pest control tech from R&D into the hands of early adopter farmers. Steve Fennimore and Mark Mason from UCANR demonstrated a few new crop protection methods for us, from Dr. Fennimore’s innovative steam machine for weed control, to drone pesticide application, and even some spore collection field trials being performed by Root Applied Sciences!

We visited an artichoke farm in the Monterey Bay area, where we learned about how protected land like the Salinas River National Wildlife Refuge and legislation such as the Endagered Species Act can dictate how farmers perform pest management. From an ecological perspective, our environmental DNA sampling could help protect these endangered species while allowing farmers more peace of mind about pests on their land. Another major issue facing California farmers is water availability, and we heard from a local water district about the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA), which has changed a lot about how farmers decide where to plant which crops. Understanding how legislation impacts farmers is paramount to how technology can be implemented and how yield can be maximized in an ecologically responsible way.

We discussed pesticide usage and how the ever changing availability landscape of different chemical formulations creates a massive pain point for farmers’ integrated pest management strategy. At Gar Bennett, a chemical supplier for the Central Valley, we discussed the dynamics between PCAs, CCAs, farmers, and ag companies. In California, Pest Control Advisors are required to create pest management plans, so they are an important influence point in the integration of our technology at Wild Genomics. We visited melon, grape, pepper, and garlic fields, hearing directly from farmers and their field managers about how pest management needs to change to keep up with variable and unpredictable regulations, as well as climate change. Our technology can help mitigate a lot of these headaches by keeping growers as informed as possible about potential threats to their crops. It has been so valuable to experience firsthand where so much of the country’s food comes from and hear directly from the people who grow it!