Episode Summary
On this episode of Spilled Salt, host Moren Bellator talks with the three founders of Agtech Alchemy — Walt Duflock(Western Growers), Sachi Desai (Bayer Crop Science), and Rishi Pethe (Metal Dog Labs). Agtech Alchemy is a community-based movement bringing founders, operators, investors, and practitioners together in-person — to break the echo chamber, share real experience, and accelerate useful progress in agtech.
What Agtech Alchemy is solving for:
Agtech remains a difficult category — capital is constrained, customer learning cycles are slow, and the stakeholder landscape is fragmented. The group was created to make it easier for startups, farmers, corporates, students, and new entrants to actually collide, learn from each other, and remove friction.
Why the in-person meetups matter:
The founders talk about the difference between Slack/LinkedIn content vs. what happens when you get 40–70 people together in a room with no agenda, no pay-to-play stage time, no optics game — just operators comparing notes honestly. They highlight that trust, introductions, recruiting, partnership formation, and “non-performative” conversations happen far more naturally that way.
What these convenings are enabling:
- knowledge transfer that stops people from repeating known dead-ends
- investors and founders aligning on expectations and reality
- shared problem discovery between startups + growers
- collaboration opportunities that wouldn’t surface in structured conference formats
- bringing in outside industry mental models + cross-pollinating new thinking
Agtech Alchemy is also publishing a Quarterly, modeled after the McKinsey Quarterly — curated essays and analysis from inside AND outside agtech — to give the sector narrative cohesion and to surface real signal vs recycled content.
How to follow + stay connected:
LinkedIn (Agtech Alchemy) and the Slack community are the primary coordination hubs for meetup announcements, calls for contributors, and discussion threads.
This conversation is a good primer on why this community exists and what gaps they’re trying to close in the current agtech innovation stack.
