Ricky Stephens

Bringing the world's most exciting AgTech startups and talent to @ReservoirFarms

[Ricky Stephens @rickstephens01]

👋 Dipping my toes into X. I hear it's a very welcoming, warm, and gracious community.

Quick intro:
- I work with the best #agtech #startups around the world to help them succeed in CA specialty crops ($50B market)
- I want to work with more
- Send me your favorites?

[Danny Bernstein 🍇🥬 @bernsteinres]

Beagle Tech (@BeagleTechAI) is running the V100 in celery this Wednesday in Gonzales. Live in the field, 10am, at the @RijkZwaan field day.

Celery is a hard crop to automate. Heavy, variable, and you cut low and blind. Worth seeing what holds up in real harvest conditions.

[Danny Bernstein 🍇🥬 @bernsteinres]

here is a day in the life @reservoirfarms. the first on-farm startup / deep tech incubator on planet earth.

our focus is on 3 areas: physics for chemical replacement, AI for chemical reduction, and automation of farm jobs nobody wants to do.

situated on 40 acres in Salinas Valley, 1 hour down from Silicon Valley.

[Reservoir Farms @reservoirfarms]

build agtech where agriculture actually is

[Robert Scoble @Scobleizer]

America can innovate, I was reminded of again today.

Met some amazing farmers from Florida today learning about farm automation. California style.

What this really represents is much better food.

Robots either reduce or remove entirely the need for spraying crops with pesticide and other crap you don’t want in your food.

We need to invest more in AgTech. Great jobs and lifestyle.

Silicon Valley used to be a farm.

This startup incubator is inside a famous and old barn in Salinas.

I get the attraction many have to farming.

As one put it to me “every day I feed people, what is wrong with that?”

[This Week in Startups @twistartups]

For some popular crops, like grapes, labor is 80% of production costs. Meanwhile, out of 400,000 US farm jobs posted last year, fewer than 1% got a domestic applicant.

That’s why Danny Bernstein and Reservoir Farms are funding AgTech startups automating the most difficult, back-breaking tasks (like picking stone fruit in 110-degree heat).

Find out why JCal praises his innovative strategy and notes “everybody wants to eat the pie, but nobody wants to pick the apples” on a brand new TWiST.

PLUS the Dept. of Education’s “do no harm” policy for colleges, will AI kill design, and some fresh streaming recommendations for the weekend.

0:00 Jason's ongoing World Tour
1:43 Danny Bernstein joins live from Reservoir Farms
3:38 What is "specialty crop agriculture"
5:15 Why strawberries are the "white whale" of AgTech
6:55 The labor crisis in farming
9:20 Why AgTech never scaled
9:51 NetSuite - For the first time ever, you can try NetSuite Next for free. If your revenues are at least in the seven figures, go to https://t.co/31xbojpKUm
10:51 Inside Reservoir's business model
17:44 Agriculture as national security
20:09 Squarespace - Turn your idea into a beautiful website! Go to https://t.co/lNpYRXjlCJ for a free trial. When you're ready to launch, use offer code TWIST to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain.
22:15 Did AI beat a designer at design?
30:56 YSecurity - The on-demand security team for startups. Need enterprise-grade security without hiring a $400k CISO? YSecurity gives you 40+ expert engineers, matched to exactly what you need, by the hour, with your first six hours completely free. Go to https://t.co/Wk0PLw34kT
37:23 The "do no harm" college earnings test
43:27 Brown University students cheated on their midterms
52:22 Lon's streaming recommendations
59:46 Jason's new snake grabber

cc: @bernsteind, @ReservoirFarms, @bonsai_robotics, @jason, @lons
🎥 Watch the full episode here 👇

[Danny Bernstein 🍇🥬 @bernsteinres]

this is @beagletechai doing it in the dark.

the hard part in celery is finding the cut point under the canopy and holding cut height across ground that moves under you.

too high, you leave yield in the field. too low, you get dirt and grade docks.

unreal @reservoirfarms

[Danny Bernstein 🍇🥬 @bernsteinres]

3 months ago we opened @ReservoirFarms. 1 hour from Silicon Valley. 90 minutes from SF.

it's become the densest concentration of agtech startup activity on the planet. founders, growers, robots, real dirt. every single day.

July 8 we open the farm to the public for the first time.

you should come. more details soon.