today, having clearly listened, and listened some more, until he grasped growers’ concerns and views on things. Bernstein learned that approximately 50 to 70 percent of high- value crop production costs are tied directly to labor, yet less than two percent of agricultural production tasks are automated. California’s regulatory complexities continue to stymie meaningful agtech advancement and its use in the fields. Western Growers’ Walt Duflock, Senior Vice President of Innovation, and Ben Palone, Senior Director of Commercialization, aligned themselves with Bernstein, and the Reservoir eventually earned the trust of Western Growers as a whole. The future of California agtech, woefully underutilized and underfunded at present, will directly influence the future of California farming; the strength of rural economies like the Salinas Valley and the Central Valley; and Americans’ very access to fresh produce. Make America Healthy Again? Not if we allow California fields to fallow. That is not to say that hard-working startups and extraordinary new technologies in the agricultural sector do not exist. Companies across California, Washington, Arizona, the U.S. and global stage are actively aspiring to become expert agricultural system thinkers and are quite literally out in the field. However, their experience can be more akin to a farmer alone in a harvester with no one around for miles; their pathway relying upon independently sought and hard-earned partnerships without much institutional support behind them (unless one is lucky enough to be friends with Duflock). As one can imagine, the startups scoring such meetings and winning partnerships with respected companies are overwhelmingly “top of the totem pole.” Creative and determined upstarts remain on the outside looking in for years, or worse, until the company and their gifted engineers move on in a different direction—to a sector with fewer barriers to entry and more opportunities to apply and scale their technology.
rural California has bloomed into the Reservoir and its first-of- its-kind on-farm robotics incubator, Reservoir Farms, just seven minutes’ drive from downtown Salinas. Reservoir Farms will be an intuitively designed, programmable and managed environment replete with world-class R&D facilities and land access. Tanimura & Antle, an immensely respected Salinas Valley grower and Western Growers member, generously leased 40 acres of prime farmland for the original Reservoir Farms location. Bernstein highlights this collaborative foundation as critical to Reservoir’s early momentum. “It was when Western Growers, Tanimura & Antle and other industry partners each leaned in— from their respective positions—that we knew this wasn’t a niche effort; it was a shared priority. Once startups saw this alignment, momentum quickly followed.” His initial leap out of Silicon Valley a year and a half ago involved self-funding six months of feasibility research, and proudly and necessarily conducting more than 100 conversations with agricultural companies. His considerable research and boots- on-the-ground approach is evident in the language Bernstein uses
17 Western Grower & Shipper | www.wga.com July | August 2025
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