Walt Duflock is the Vice President of Innovation at Western Growers focused on helping AgTech startups
scale faster and work with growers better. WG Innovation is focused on helping to solve some of
agriculture’s biggest challenges related to labor, water, and food safety. The WG Innovation team is
leading global initiatives around harvest (Global Harvest Automation Initiative) and educating the next
generation of ag workers (Next Gen Ag Worker Initiative) that will be part engineer, biologist,
agronomist, computer scientist, and entomologist and will help all the needed innovation get
implemented successfully into specialty crop farming operations.

Walt is also a 5th -generation family farmer from Monterey County that operates cattle, specialty crops,
and wine grapes. Walt has over 25 years of experience in Silicon Valley startups, including eBay,
MerchantCircle (acquired by Reply), and APTARE (acquired by Veritas). Prior to Western Growers, Walt
helped SVG-THRIVE build the top AgriFoodTech Accelerator.