New York gets its own AgTech Meetup

The NYC AgTech Meetup Group will be kicking off its first monthly event in New York on Thursday, November 6th,  at 7pm. As this was the first event the organizer Rodrigo Valiente originally set an attendance cap of 15 and was hoping to attract a half dozen or so participants for this first event. And so he was a little overwhelmed when over 73 members joined the group. He’s since expanded the cap to 25 and the event it at capacity.

“It is great to see the remarkable interest that the AgTech Meetup has generated”, said it’s organizer Rodrigo Valiente, who created the group in October.He found that there was no space for those interested in the AgTech sector in NYC and wanted to create a platform where those keen in the field could exchange ideas and build relationships. On October 23rd, the group began accepting members and rapidly grew at a rate of 10 AgTech enthusiasts per day.  “I am truly confident that this group will become The Arena of New York City in which to showcase and discuss the latest AgTech trends and challenges. Our goal is to present guest speakers such as journalists, scientists, academics, growers, entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, advisors, etc and many other experts related to the field to engage in current topics, generate thoughts, and discussions.”

Valiente, was surprised when he arrived in NYC to find that there were several local groups and Meetups covering technology, food, startups and venture financing; yet, there was none covering AgTech (Agribusiness + Technology) specifically. “Although agriculture was developed thousands of years ago, in the past 100 years we have only seen major innovations through synthetic fertilizers and pesticides, selective breeding, and mechanization. In the last decades the only major breakthrough has been in the development of GMOs. However, just in the past few years and thanks to the emergence and development of many new technologies such as drones, robotics, harvest automation, mobile computing, smart wireless sensors for soil, crop and weather monitoring, telematics, image recognition, big data, electric drive systems, RTK navigation, autonomous vehicles, hyper precision agriculture, etc the sector is entering into a new technological revolution”.

The NYC AgTech Meetup Group will focus on educating and promoting the fundamentals to mobilize investments from NYC backers towards this nascent sector, which are extremely necessary to offset the challenge of feeding 10 billion people in a sustainable way”, Valiente announced.

Rodrigo stems originally stems from Argentina, one of the world’s big power houses and so you can imagine why agtech is close to his heart. Rodrigo worked in agribusiness for more than 13 years. Over the past year and a half, Rodrigo has been working with tech startups, accelerators, and incubators in Barcelona.

For more information on the group you can find them here: http://www.meetup.com/The-NYC-AgTech-Meetup-Group/members/

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