Businesses begin in the minds of entrepreneurs, and they take root wherever that hard-working person calls home, whether it’s San Diego or elsewhere.

Examples of emerging technologies competing to change a traditional California industry can be found about six hours north of us, in Salinas, where more than one new business is rising.

Enormous lettuce farms there still have workers going out to tend and harvest crops with age-old tools such as hoes and rakes. However, Salinas is investing in new technologies that city leaders hope will put its agricultural industry on the cutting edge.

At a Salinas farm, a man recently showed off to an NPR reporter a big piece of new tech: a tractor armed with water pistols blasting out 20,000 pounds per square inch. These water jet knife machines, as the devices are called, are intended to pick the lettuce.

Instead, the high-powered jets of water are dismantling and killing the valuable crops. But the innovators aren’t going to fold up shop; they’re going to try to adapt romaine lettuce to the machine.

“So we’re spending money and time right now to try to figure out an upright, light-bulb-shaped romaine lettuce that tastes the same as iceberg, that handles the same in the process,” the man tells the reporter.

Another technology start-up offers a lettuce thinner operated by a laptop computer in the cab of a tractor.

The “smart tractor” can thin out heads of lettuce growing too close to neighboring heads, so that all heads wind up being 10 inches from one another.

So the once-backbreaking thinning is done by one person in a tractor rather than many workers hunched over with hoes.

Will these start-ups succeed? Salinas officials hope so. If the technologies and businesses flourish, the city might well find itself attracting jobs and generating tax revenue.

Anyone putting their ideas into action by starting a business is wise to talk to an experienced business formation attorney who can help them weigh the various options and choose the business form that makes the most sense for their circumstances.

Source: NPR, “A City Turns To Lettuce Fields To Grow High-Tech Startups,”by Aarti Shahani, Dec. 19, 2013