How can farmers and technologists work together successfully?

While the overall goal of Propeller is to help develop a startup community in Devon, we are conscious that local startups are more likely to be successful if they address issues on our doorstep.

As such, agritech should be an area of opportunity. We should be able to find a wide range of real issues addressable by cheap, iterative development by a single engineer - as opposed to expensive, slowly developed solutions that poorly address the issues, flogged to farmers by large companies.

The challenge is to integrate two different communities with very different experiences and practices. The initial goal, in running a program of talks on agritech at Propeller, is to begin to bridge that gap. If that is successful then we can explore more practical steps.

In our first agritech meet up, we have an amazing panel of speakers:

Mary Quicke (MBE) - passionate cheesemaker, surfer and columnist. She has very strong views on how technology companies should NOT work with farmers.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/mary-quicke-mbe-66763315/?originalSubdomain=uk

John Cass - founder of Smallholdr, a platform for collecting and analysing data, managing field teams and tracking produce in smallholder supply chains.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnpcass/

Laura Black - curriculum lead at Duchy College and formerly team lead for food science and innovation.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/laura-black-00729525/

The talk will be hosted by Jasper Westaway from Propeller, and Robin Jackson, agritech project director at The Duchy College Rural Business School.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasperwestaway/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/robin-jackson/
www.agritechcornwall.co.uk

This talk will be fantastic for farmers, agricultural students and hardware & software engineers looking for new challenges. Devon has the potential to create agriculture technology products that the world can adopt, but we need the culture and community that ensures such startups can thrive.