Earlier this month, in Monterey, Calif., a meeting organized by the Produce Marketing Association provided an opportunity for a group of local growers of crops such as lettuce, artichokes and strawberries to find out how the latest digital technologies were changing agriculture. Participants heard about how technologies like robots, drones and predictive analytics could help them improve their operations.

That same week, just up the road from Monterey, a conference called AgTech Silicon Valley was held at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. Along with actual farmers, the meeting was attended by a dozen venture capitalists, who identified agriculture as a field that is ripe (pun intended) for disruption by technology. In good Silicon Valley fashion, the meeting included a session in which entrepreneurs from agtech startups pitched their companies to angel investors and VCs.

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