Steve Forbes comments on Ag-Tech Summit

The Salinas Valley is home to a two-day conference hosted by Forbes on agriculture and tech and started Wednesday evening.

Forbes is bringing together the “two valleys,” Salinas and Silicon because of their importance to the entire world; the ag industry alone a multi-billion dollar business.

According to Forbes, the central coast needs to start producing more food and fast.
That is because estimates show by 2050 the world’s population is expected to reach 10 billion.
“We’re not going to get more land. And if you look at the water scarcity here in California, that’s happening all over the world. There’s a lot of things that aren’t changeable and aren’t in human’s control but how we adapt to those things…We see that not only in our control but one of the great business opportunities of our time,” said Forbes Magazine managing editor Dan Bigman.

Big name companies are making appearances including DuPont, John Deere and Monsanto. News Channel 5 interviewed the man behind the summit, Steve Forbes.

Forbes is excited about the future of technology and agriculture and how energized people are about continuing to merge the two.

“You can do precise planting in a way that’s never been done before, increasing yields per acre in a way, on an exponential scale, and this is just the beginning. Tractors using computers instead of the human hand, getting vastly more precision there.”

Forbes also talked about California’s drought and the water shortage. On a recent trip to Israel, he says he say how that country has been sustainable with even less water, ” There’s a place that has less water than California but they don’t have water shortages because of what they’ve done with conservation and desalination and the like. Technology in terms of drip technology, there’s a lot that can be learned. There’s no reason why California can’t once again overcome the water shortage even if we don’t get a lot of rainfall and not have to worry about being the agricultural center of the world.”