Chaz Berman

Apply by this Friday for the VINE Connect's September 2025 cohort, focused on Soil Health and hosted at University of California, Merced 's Smart Farm. 5-7 soil health solutions will be selected to demo on Wed, September 17, following free, virtual field-trial readiness programming. So far, 10 companies have participated in Connect around the state, and a 3rd cohort will be presenting later this month in Fresno. Our programming is designed to be a light lift for startups seeking to enter and expand into Californian markets. It's entirely non-dilutive for companies. To-date, participants have successfully sold products on the spot, developed regional trial partnerships, and more. Alumni, selected in partnership with our state-wide industry advisory board, include: agBee Cropscience Pvt. Ltd. L5 Automation Inc Bonsai Robotics AMOS Power Lumo AKSATA Verdi Verdant Robotics Gather Agriculture RapidAIM Pty Ltd Spornado Inc. - Disease Alert System CropVue Technologies Edete Precision Technologies for Agriculture HotSpot AG Fill out the application (link below and in comments) to be considered for participation in the September cohort.

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An Interview with Wine Economist, Robin Goldstein Robin is an economist who at the time, was Principal Economic Counselor at the University of California Agricultural Issues Center, but later moved on to cannabis economics. His (along with co-author Alexis Herschkowitsch) book, The Wine Trials, is a practical guide as well as a fascinating look at what different groups value in wine. This interview was conducted in November of 2019. RM: Robin, can you tell me what you're up to these days? “I finished my PhD in Economics recently. I went back to the heart of the original study of wine snobs, studying price and other properties of wine and expanded it to several categories. My thesis is called "The Bullshit Horizon," and it covers wines, beers and restaurants. After I set up a prank on Wine Spectator in which they bestowed an Award of Excellence for a wine list at a nonexistent restaurant (web site and phone only) that featured the Spectator's worst-rated wines, I was interested in these kinds of awards and their impact on the prices that could be charged. Since there seemed to be a lot of them, these awards are what economists call "non-rationed goods." The entry fee to be considered for a Wine Spectator Award of Excellence is $250, and as the example of the fake restaurant shows, they hand them out pretty freely, as in "non-rationed." We wanted to know how good an investment that is. We looked at Zagat as far as pricing and looked for correlation. W-S awarded restaurants had higher food prices, but there was actually a negative correlation between price and ratings at a certain price categories.” RM: You became pretty well known with a book called The Wine Trials, in which various wines were blind tasted by different groups, from expert to rank amateur, and the results bore little resemblance to price. “I've got another study coming out in the Journal of Wine Economists. We did a "half-blind" tasting. We took two identical bottles of white wine, and put one in a brown bag, and left the other one with its label and also a price sticker showing. We tested the same wine at two purported price levels: $5 and $50. When we asked people to rate the wine, the low-price wine was rated lower than the brown-bag (nobody noticed they were the same), while the $50 wine was rated as higher than the anonymous one. I was a wine and food critic and writer before the Wine Trials (Book: The Wine Trials, a cross-country experiment in blind wine tastings), and was trained as a sommelier. I really felt I was not a snob or a bullshit artist. But after the trials, it became apparent to me that there was absolutely no relationship between wine price and drinker preference, except maybe that most people preferred inexpensive wines to expensive ones. So I had to admit to myself that I was one of the people who was full of shit...

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UCLA Report Reveals Unsafe Working Conditions, Wage Theft in California Cannabis Industry https://lnkd.in/eC75jmcW #WageTheft #CannabisIndustry #CannabisWorkers #EmployeeRights #UCLALaborCenter #UCLA #UnsafeWorkingConditions #WorkplaceSafety

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We sat down with legendary cannabis cultivator Jeremy Moberg, Founder, CEO, Grower, Lead Lab Guy of CannaSol Farms — one of Washington State’s most respected living soil and organic sun-grown cannabis companies. Here, he talks with us about Lish Organics & their moves to push 100% biodegradable and recyclable packaging to the Cannabis Industry Full interview on our YT, Respectmyregion365

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