As part of our Week 4 activities during the Adult Virtual Summer Reading Program, (color Green for the Environment), the San Benito County Free Library presents an author talk with Amy Wu, author of “From Farms to Incubators: Women Revolutionizing How Our Food Is Grown”. Amy will be presenting with panelists Martha Montoya and Peter Ruddock on July 9th at 2pm, live via Zoom. Be sure to sign up as this is sure to be a great event!
Amy Wu is the Creator & Chief Content Director of From Farms to Incubators, a multimedia platform that uses documentary, video, photography and the written word to tell the stories of women leaders and innovators in agtech. It has a mission of highlighting women in food, farming, and farmtech, especially women of color which includes an award-winning documentary short that has been screened at SXSW, and a best-selling book “From Farms to Incubators: Women Revolutionizing How Our Food Is Grown” that was released in May 2021.
In 2020 Amy was named on Worth magazine’s “Groundbreakers 2020 list of 50 Women Changing the World” list. She was also a recipient of the Women in Agribusiness Demeter Award of Excellence. In 2021 she was named by Food Tank as one of “27 Inspiring Women Reshaping the Food System.”
Prior to starting From Farms to Incubators, Amy spent over two decades as an investigative reporter at media outlets including the USA Today Network where she reported on agriculture and agtech for The Salinas Californian. She has a bachelor’s degree in history from New York University and a master’s degree in journalism from Columbia University.
Martha Montoya is the founder and CEO of AgTools and is also an award-winning cartoonist and previously worked as a librarian. Her story was featured in From Farms to Incubators and also excerpted in the King City Rustler. Martha is great to work with and her story is inspiring: “Sourcing across the world is one of my passions and have done it for over 27+ years of worldwide on trading commodities, IT, ingredients and agricultural in general. Dealing with both small and industrial size farms, government entities and sophisticated buyers in Europe, Russia and the United States, I have set up production lines of lettuce in Arizona and Mexico shipped to the Netherlands, banana puree from Costa Rica to Australia, guided a peach crop from South Africa to England, and many more. In parallel I have worked on social impact programs such as government finance programs for women farmers in Mexico; and CRA (Community Reinvestment Act) funding for low interest credit program in California for small organic farmers. With my brothers Gustavo and Oscar Agtools won the Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence Microsoft award among several for the creation of Agtools, a SaaS product, (software as a service), to address the need of on time information for everyone on the supply chain from farm to buyers, fresh, ingredients and others to avoid waste and reduce carbon footprint.”
Peter Ruddock is the policy director of COOK Alliance and a steering committee member of EcoFarm. Peter has moderated dozens of talks and events in California related to food and farming. Peter Ruddock is a sustainable food advocate. He works toward creating a more sustainable world by changing the way we interact with our environment and with each other. He concentrates on food system change because, given that everyone eats, everyone should be able to relate to a healthier, more sustainable food system. He believes that there are four areas where he can best work to foster this change: educating people about sustainability; creating a resilient local economy; creating vibrant, equitable, inclusive and just local communities; and changing policies to foster such changes. He is active in a number of grass-roots non-profits to help accomplish these goals, including: the California Food Policy Council, where he acts as coordinator, and the C.O.O.K. Alliance, where he acts as the California Policy and Implementation Director for AB 626, the Homemade Food Operations Act.. Peter reports about food, environment and community as Green Omnivore (on the web and on Facebook).
