Agtech Alchemy With Walt Duflock, Sachi Desai and Rhishi Pethe

This quarter of the Future of Agriculture podcast is made possible by Case IH: https://www.caseih.com/en-us/unitedstates

Download the Agtech Alchemy Quarterly: https://agtechalchemy.substack.com/p/agtech-alchemy-quarterly-winter2025

GenAI Whitepaper: https://www.rhishipethe.com/genai-in-ag

Today's episode features the founding members of Agtech Alchemy. This format is a little different from our normal show. It’s a lot less formal, you’ll hear some jokes and laughter, but really it’s just four guys who all really care about agtech and its ability to improve agriculture in the future. 

If you’ve been around agtech circles for very long, especially if you’re on LinkedIn, you know all three of our guests today: Walt Duflock is the vice president of Innovation at Western Growers, which represents family farmers growing fresh produce in Arizona, California, Colorado and New Mexico. Sachi Desai is with Bayer Crop Science. He has over 20 years of experience in AI and machine learning research, development and application across multiple industries including agriculture. Rishi Pethe has guest hosted this show a number of times. He is the author and publisher of the twice weekly newsletter, Software is Feeding the World. He also just released a whitepaper today which is a practical guide to generative AI and explains how organizations can go past proof of concept phase of these new capabilities. Make sure you go download that. I’ll leave a link for that in the show notes. 

I will also leave a link in the show notes where you can read the Agtech Alchemy Quarterly, which is what we’re going to talk about in today’s episode. I knew it would be filled with insights, but it surpassed my expectations, and it’s 116 pages long, so obviously we will just barely scratch the surface in today’s episode. Make sure you go read the full digest to understand what’s happening today in agtech. 

It was really cool to read thought pieces from creators back-to-back in the same document. I started making connections that I don’t think I would have made if I read them independently. If I had to summarize an overall theme for this one, it would be an exploration of if and when technology can be a true competitive advantage. There is a lot of talk of AI, especially generative AI, but the pieces run the gamut. Some of the authors you’ve heard from on this show in the past, like Janette Barnard, Matthew Pryor, Rishi Pethe, and Dan Schultz. Others are household names in agtech thought leadership like Shane Thomas and Walt Duflock. It’s a great mix and I think you’re going to enjoy today’s conversation which serves as a bit of an overview. 

A quick disclaimer: I will admit that this episode does get a little bit wonky because all four of us like to nerd out about agtech, but but it’s also a lot of fun, so stick with it. I think there are some really important concepts discussed. Then after you listen go read the full digest. 

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