In addition to entertainment and beaches, California is known for earthquakes and agriculture.
Farming contributed $50 billion to the state’s economy in 2017, despite growing obstacles including drought, labor shortages and rising land prices.
Southern California has 10,000 earthquakes a year, according to United States Geological Service data and “the big one” would bring $200 billion in damages.
These fields have shaped California’s past and advancements will influence its future. Two women-led University of California-Irvine Applied Innovation Wayfinder startups are tapping technology to increase productivity in the agriculture industry, and mitigate the damage and destruction of the next big earthquake.
Consigned
Martha Montoya for years bought produce for New Zealand-based food supplier Directus from its Orange County office. She began to notice farmers often operated with little real data besides prior years’ performance of their own crops and that of their neighbors.
People don’t realize farming is a consignment business, Montoya told the Business Journal. Farmers can’t know how much they’ll be paid for their crops until they arrive—not just at harvest but ready to be sold, and following inspection.
In a wide-ranging discourse on foodstuff trends Montoya, president of Irvine-based AgTools, said she’d found 67 variables that can affect produce shipments—and noted that farmers must pay truckers and other middlemen first, and regardless of other issues.
It’s easy for farmers to lose money.
Montoya began sending out a weekly report to clients, detailing things like storms, wars, droughts, and updates from other markets to help them make better decision about what to plant and where and when to sell crops.
“Everything starts with the farmer,” she said. “If we don’t take care of the farmer, it doesn’t matter what else we do.”
Vision
Demand for her farming-related information grew and she realized it could be a business, but she struggled with how to make that happen. After taking classes at Stanford and UC Davis, she began working with her brother Gustavo Montoya, a data sciences student at UCI, to build an algorithm that would aggregate, integrate and make greater sense of the mass of material she was collecting—data from government agencies, industry associations, universities, retail markets, banks, and other sources—and, not incidentally, streamline the labor-intensive work.
She launched AgTools in 2017 with an initial investment of $700,000—from two female investors in the technology and banking industries, fellow members of NorCal women’s business groups—and joined the Wayfinder program in 2018. The company now has a dozen employees and 350 clients in seven countries.
Montoya likens AgTools to the Bloomberg system used in financial circles because it provides data for decision making. If a farmer is sending tomatoes to Chicago but knows a storm is coming that might affect demand or hinder the shipment, it can be diverted to a destination with higher demand and fewer obstacles.
There was a steep learning curve but Montoya’s excited to be part of an emerging industry.
“For a woman, technology is a great place to be,” she said, noting the ability to multitask while retaining a sense of the big picture—not a little like what her services offer clients.
“We’re a little afraid of thinking big because … we might feel overwhelmed,” she mused. “But if we do, we can … use technology to be ahead of what’s coming.”
Seismic
Noemi Bonessio’s vision helped invent a new material to limit death and damage caused by earthquakes.
The Italy native pursued an education in seismic engineering—eventually earning a Ph.D. in the field, where about 2% of practitioners are women—after a 2009 quake hit Central Italy. The trembler reached her hometown of Rome, some 75 miles away, and killed more than 300.
Poorly prepared officials and substandard buildings were called out in the quake’s aftermath.
Bonessio was also spurred to a public safety focus by her father, a firefighter often at the forefront of responses to natural disasters.
Ten years of study and research, including post-doc work at University of California-San Diego—with its massive, outdoor “shake table” that simulates big earthquakes—helped lay the foundation for an idea: a material as flexible as rubber and as strong as steel, to mitigate damage from quakes.
It didn’t exist, so she invented it.
Disruptive
Bonessio launched MetaSeismic, based at UCI’s The Cove, in 2017.
She said the material can absorb up to 90% of the energy from an earthquake’s impact and can be used in building retrofits to improve their stability.
The company has won several awards, including, ironically enough, “Most Disruptive” from angel investor network Tech Coast Angels, as well as a $225,000 grant from the National Science Foundation.
Her firm is in its final R&D phase and demand for the product looks promising—and possibly an upgrade on current retrofitting techniques which include base isolation, in which part of a building’s foundation is replaced by layers of steel and rubber to help lend strength and flexibility to a building during earthquake motion.
Dr. Monica Kohler, a research professor in Civil Engineering at California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, said these techniques have been tested during small to moderate quakes but she doesn’t know how they’ll perform during a very large one.
According to the California Earthquake Authority in Sacramento, there’s a 99% chance of a 6.7 or higher magnitude earthquake striking the state within 30 years. The 1994, 6.7-magnitude Northridge quake killed 57 people and caused $20 billion in damages.
Kohler said excluding schools and hospitals in some counties, there are no legal requirements to retrofit buildings and Southern California isn’t ready for the next big quake.
L.A. Mayor Eric Garcetti contributed a letter of support for Bonessio’s NSF grant application, noting the potential: “My office is intrigued and excited by this developing work.”
Artful
Bonessio is currently working with a data center company to help protect its expensive hardware and she envisions expansion to other industries, including medical devices, semiconductor makers—and museums with expensive art to protect.
Kohler sees demand in “a strong, inexpensive way to isolate units within a building [and protect] anything that has the potential of collapsing,” protecting life and property, “that’s going to be attractive.”
Bonessio’s goal is to help where seismic activity is heavy including California, Japan—and Italy.
“There is where you save lives,” she said.
