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Marketing Workshop – 2021 Biostimulants World Congress

The AGD Consulting team is thrilled to be hosting a SOLD OUT workshop on biostimulant marketing at the 2021 Biostimulants World Congress in Miami on Monday 29 Nov 2021!

The workshop will focus on guiding marketing principles, the modern-day challenges with traditional marketing, alternatives to the outmoded strategies, and possible solutions linked to marketing biostimulant products through interactive group exercise and real-world case studies.

Key areas that we will cover:

1. Marketing strategy – what works and what doesn’t

2.  Marketing – your brand and how to position your product in the market 

3. Marketing : the difference as a start up vs established organisation – what can we learn from both?

4. Marketing biostimulants- how to ensure you know your customer – case studies and key learnings 

If you missed this opportunity, not to worry. AGD and New Ag International are considering making this a formal part of the mini-MBA courses in the future.

More to follow!

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Regenerative Ag Panel – New Ag International – Dawn and Grant Breitreutz

On June 14th, 2021, AGD’s Founder/Managing Director, Michael DeSa, had the opportunity to host a panel discussion on behalf of New Ag International with two of the early adopters of regenerative agricultural practices – Dawn and Grant Breitreutz of Stoney Creek Farms. Below is a transcript of that fantastic discussion. Enjoy!


Mike DeSa  00:03

Good day everyone, thanks for joining us as part of New Ag International’s Digital Week focusing on sustainable and high tech ag. My name is Mike DeSa and I’m the Founder/Managing Director for AGD Consulting – a veteran-owned strategic advisory firm serving the global food, investment and agtech portion of the value chain.

Let me first start by thanking New Ag International for this opportunity and our guests for the willingness to share their time and insights on regenerative ag. Grant and Dawn Breitreutz are founders and Operators of Stoney Creek Farms in Redwood Falls, MN.

Over the past 20 years, Dawn and Grant have converted a conventional row crop and cow/calf operation into a multi-enterprise regenerative family business. In the late 1990s, after noticing degradation to their own lands, they begin to research and implement sustainable practices in an effort to increase production and improve yield, first. The soil health part of this discovery would come later. They were early pioneers into regenerative agricultural practices, and not without scrutiny. But they persisted and are now recognized as leaders in this space. In 2015, they were recognized as the Minnesota State Cattlemen’s Association Cattlemen of the Year. In 2016, they were recognized as regional honorees of the Environmental Stewardship Award Program and in 2019, their farm was featured in a multi-part docu-series produced by Farmer’s Footprint focused on holistic management practices.

Their 100%, no-till cropping system has evolved from a conventional corn and soybean rotation to a three (or more-crop rotation) annually, with the incorporation of cover crops whenever possible. Cattle are grazed across nearly every acre of the farm today every year and they’re using adaptive grazing throughout their pasture systems and now graze longer, with many more head than ever before.

Welcome Dawn and Grant, thank you for joining me:

Grant  02:07

Thanks for having us.

Mike DeSa  02:09

I was hoping we could start today’s discussion with your definition of what regenerative agriculture is, right? There’s often so much back and forth about the definition of this term and whether or not it’s appropriate or whether we go with sustainable or whatever the case may be. But let me get your take first and foremost on what you believe regenerative agriculture is?

Grant  02:34

Well, you brought up a term there – sustainable. Our good friend Gabe Brown says it this way, why would we sustain a broken system or degraded system? So, the way I define regenerative is basically any improvements we can see in soil health, whether it’s organic matter, water infiltration, all the way to a wildlife, healthier livestock or higher density in our grains, those are all things that we monitor and focus on to make sure we’re going the right way.

Dawn Breitkreutz  03:12

And it goes a little bit further to it. It lends to happiness in the family, you know, happiness and enjoyment and in what we’re doing. It’s a completely different way of farming now, and I don’t think we’d be here, if we wouldn’t have started down this path.

Mike DeSa  03:30

Why would we sustain a system that’s broken? Does that kind of mean that the current practices are somewhat broken?

Grant Breitkreutz 03:36

Well, I’ll just give you an example on our farm. Like you said in the intro in the early or in the late 90s, we figured out we had a problem here. We’re doing soil testing, and we were testing soils that are done the 1.6 and 1.9% organic matter. Organic matter is a measure of carbon. We all survive on carbon. And if you look back in history here, and I’ve got some neighbors that have some unbroken prairie, it tests at 12% organic matter. Well, in 150 years of farming, we blew, you know, 75 to 80% of it? Something’s wrong, something seriously wrong and we’re seeing all sorts of problems that others see right now in the industry. I mean, we had crop failures. We had sick cattle. It was just a multitude of things that we saw and then being married to her the eternal question of why why why why are we doing this? Why are we making a second pass of tillage? Why are you going on spraying again? You know, why are we running these cows thru the shoot again? And it always kept me thinking, and I mentioned we got to where we are, I mean, we’re by no means done. No, we every year we try something else and push harder and harder and harder.

Dawn Breitkreutz  04:59

I think that’s the farmer version of “if mama ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy”.

Mike DeSa  05:10

You guys, this has been a third I think your kids now are the fourth generation farm. I mean, do you think it was – what was the tipping point there for you guys to finally say, something’s not right with the system? Was it someone like you, Dawn, that can kind of come in and ask the critical question, or was it finally at a point where it just wasn’t tenable anymore agronomically speaking?

Grant Breitkreutz 05:34

It was a combination of things. It was not paying the bank off at the end of the year. Yeah, we’d produce superior crops, we’d use all the latest and greatest technology, but there was no money left in our hands at the end. It was livestock health, that was a big part of it. We’re seeing all kinds of problems in the cattle. It was a lot of different things that pushed all at once. And some of it was just by chance. So, we were we were always running out of feed here for our livestock operation. And I started messing around after we cut corn silage off, I planted a cover crop in there, at that time, it was even called the cover crop, it was winter triticale. We’d plant it in there and the one year, we had rain, rain, rain, trying to harvest it you know, about a week ago, this time frame in Minnesota is when you harvest it. And it just kept raining and raining and raining and is getting so tall, we couldn’t get it through our harvesting equipment. And we had an inch and 43 hundredths one night, about two in the morning, when we got done feeding cattle in the morning, I told Dawn I said, you just got to go cut, we’ve got to get this stuff laid down to the ground and get it to the choppers or we’re never gonna be able to handle it. But she went and cut all day and never left the track. It was like “ding” – what just happened here? Why? You know, it was a trial of trial of different things for different reasons. And if you ever go through soil health academy, one of the main things they teach there is observation. And we were blessed enough to actually observe it and say, “Hey, something, something just changed here. Why? Why can we cut in the morning and eight hours later come through the choppers after that kind of rainfall never leave a track?” And right behind the choppers, we’re putting soybeans into the ground and had a wonderful soybean crop. You know, it was just things like that that hit us. The big side of it was eventually I studied grazing management and we were blessed to meet Ian Mitchell-Innes from South Africa and went through one of his classes, three-day classes. And we changed our grazing operations substantially. And it’s like, well, if we did this on the grazing land, why aren’t we focused on the cropland? If we made these huge changes out in pastures, why can’t we change where we’re producing grains?

Mike DeSa  08:00

Okay. So if I’m hearing you correctly, the first thing that you guys sort of tried in this was cover crop just a simple cover crop, but it wasn’t called that at the time. Was that to try to gain an additional revenue stream or was that to was that just kind of your first toe in the water as to what may happen if we if we put something like this down?

Grant Breitkreutz 08:21

Oh, initially, most all of them were for cattle feed. It was just a grow, grow three crops in two years, grow four crops in two years. Yeah, anything to grow more cattle feed. And you know, before we met Ian, we have been cover cropping on our farm for a long time before that, but had no knowledge of what we’re doing other than all of a sudden one year we’re not fighting cyst nematodes because we had a healthy turnip and radish crop after wheat crop. We didn’t even know we had cyst nematodes, you know, it’s just all these things that…

Dawn Breitkreutz  08:52

Instinctively we knew were, I mean, at the end of the year, you could tell that the cattle are what got the operation through. The cattle are what kept us going all through the years. And so we had to continually find ways, you know, to cut our costs to keep them alive. And, you know, it just happened that that was actually part of the circle of principles of soil health that we didn’t know we were doing at the time, that was actually benefiting us, you know, and we didn’t even know it.

Mike DeSa  09:25

You had mentioned both of you and you did a presentation a couple years ago as to just the way these practices, reduced input costs, and one of the examples that you gave was on vet bills. So, I’m curious as to what were those typical veterinary issues that you were having with cattle on the more conventional practices and then how did you start to see those problems fade as you moved into a more regenerative system?

Grant Breitkreutz 9:57

Well, we were we were calving out of sync with nature. We were calving in late February and March here in Minnesota, that’s not a good time to calve. So, we immediately had respiratory, intestinal issues and those cattle and those baby calves and fight that all summer and then get to respiratory issues again in the Fall. That was some of the main ones. I mean, you know, you bring that up, but I’ll never forget looking that up that one year, we spent $18,000 at the vet. And now with well over twice as many cattle, we’ll maybe spend $3,000 a year at the vet most of that is on vaccines that we just haven’t decided to give up yet. It’s not buying boxes of antibiotics, you know, cases of boxes of antibiotics anymore.

Mike DeSa  10:45

Were you guys giving any biotics those animals prophylactically before they were sick just to try to stave off some of those issues?

Grant Breitkreutz 10:54

Oh, yeah. early on. We did. Yeah. Early on in our feedlot days, we would run non-CTC through the feed on the first of every month.

Mike DeSa  11:02

You mentioned calving out of sync. Was that a result of trying to try to force production or forced calving at a at a time of the year that was more convenient for you guys? Like what do you mean when you say that?

Grant Breitkreutz 11:17

Well, you can’t calve of cows and plant corn same time. That’s the rule of thumb nationwide. Well, they’re wrong. You can. Our cows calved all during corn planting.

Dawn Breitkreutz  11:29

Yeah. It’s amazing they can have a calf without us standing by their side.

Mike DeSa  11:33

So, this idea was just to try to deconflict these two agricultural events for no other reason than just to free up time?

Grant Breitkreutz 11:42

Yeah. Well, we kept pushing our calving date up earlier and earlier to have bigger calves and sell in Fall. We were going after production, production, production. You know, when you sleep on a pickup beside a barn, you know, five or six nights a week? I don’t know what kind of fun that is. No, it was just stupid.

Dawn Breitkreutz  12:04

It was scary. You know, he’d be over here at the farm. We lived off the farm at that time, and he’d be over here. And I’d wake up in the middle of the night and he wasn’t there. And all I had is these, you know, horrible visions of him being attacked by a cow that was mad because he was helping her calves. And so then I’d be over here. And so neither one of us would get any sleep. And it just, that’s not a way to live your life. It’s just not.

Grant Breitkreutz 12:28

And we were, I will say this – My brother bought a set of cows that were May calving cows. And we figured out that those cows didn’t need any help. And then the good Lord wiped our pretty much our entire farm off the face of the earth in 2011. And we, at that time, we already had half of our cows calving in May and then it was just a matter of – we got to switch them all because we had no buildings left, we had no intentions of rebuilding.

Mike DeSa  12:57

Was it a rain or storm event? What caused that?

Grant Breitkreutz 12:59

It was 115 mile an hour winds with embedded tornadoes for 43 minutes. Not much stands after that

Mike DeSa  13:08

Was it both the grass and the structures that kind of resulted in that or was there animal loss of life too?

Dawn Breitkreutz 13:15

We lost a few.

Grant Breitkreutz 13:18

We lost a bunch of cattle in that storm. We had some in buildings that went down. Pretty much all we had left was our houses. They withstood the storm.

Mike DeSa  14:04

So then that became a moment for you guys to then say, look if we’re going to have to rebuild. Why don’t we try to rebuild this way?

Dawn Breitkreutz 14:14

Yep. God’s nudge.

Mike DeSa 13:28

In that same lecture, you guys described the converting of the mind that has to happen. And you talked about it specifically with this transition between conventional practices and regenerative practices. But why does that resonate so strongly with you all? That particular saying?

Grant Breitkreutz 13:53

As we were going down this path, converting things. I was born and raised farmer she was not. So when something would go wrong, I’d resort back immediately to what we’re doing before that worked. Instead of, you know, my first thought was to resort back to what worked instead of figuring out what the problem was with the issue we were having with our changes.

Dawn Breitkreutz  14:14

But the whole problem was, it didn’t necessarily work. It’s what they were used to. How they were raised.

Mike DeSa  15:46

Right. This adage of this is the way we’ve always done it, therefore, that’s the way we’re gonna continue to do it.

Grant Breitkreutz 14:26

Oh, man. But the hardest thing for me ever is planting corn in May. Here, everybody was done in April. You know, in this in this last weekend, our corn is just barely out of the ground. We’re just finishing planting soybeans today. And what happened last weekend? A big big chunk of the upper Midwest froze. Oh, no, all of a sudden, I look like the smart guy. At least I don’t have to do it twice.

Mike DeSa  14:55

Why were you guys? Why do you say that’s one of the hardest things to plant in later May instead of April, just because you don’t have the same length of growing cycle like you did in traditional methods?

Grant Breitkreutz 15:08

Oh, farming is a big competition.

Dawn Breitkreutz  15:10

It is but they’re also they’re also like herd animals. You see one going and all sudden you got the itch. And now you got it all. It is a little bit competition and it’s just a little bit – well, they’re doing it, so we should do it. So it’s hard to break out of that paradigm and then to deal with the fallout from, you know, from breaking away from that paradigm is also a little difficult – the social elements of that.

Mike DeSa  15:39

Yeah. Yeah, you and I talked about that, Dawn, I’m wondering if you can maybe kind of elaborate on that? From what I understand, I mean, you guys are kind of a blueberry in a tomato soup, so to speak, right? Where you’re, you’re surrounded kind of by more conventional practices, and you’re operating in an unconventional way for your own rationale and for your own reasons. But what’s that been like for you at the beginning? But then now I think just as importantly, what is it like today? I think there’s been some progression, but maybe walk us through a little bit of that.

Dawn Breitkreutz  16:15

I don’t know. At first, it was a little bit painful just because you kind of like you’re on an island all by yourself, but you are under a microscope too. Eventually you get you get used to that microscope, but it you it also keeps you on your toes, and that has you looking at your operation yourself and double checking to make sure you are doing things that you hoped to do. A lot of times we didn’t. But that’s learned. And eventually, you know, at first we separate kind of basically separated from everybody. We just we didn’t have things common things to talk about anymore. Um, but we eventually kind of got over that and we’re kind of tiptoeing back into our local society again and reacquainting ourselves with everybody and making sure that we’re open so that they can ask questions that their comfortable asking questions. And they are. And that’s encouraging to us. The fact that they’re curious and not just talking behind our backs makes us hopeful that people will start looking at this in a positive light, rather than in a competitive light.

Grant Breitkreutz  17:39

So, I’m the president of Minnesota State Cattlemen’s Association right now. 1,000 plus members. One of my interview questions was, “are you going to tell other farmers how to farm?” And I said, “Absolutely not and I answered that by – if you ever went and watched any of our presentations, I don’t tell people how to farm. I tell people how we’re farming what we’ve done wrong, you know, those types of things so they don’t have to financial hits and steps.” It still comes back to it’s all between your ears when you’re ready to chain you know, come and ask the questions. And for a while we had just shut down. And now we get neighbors coming and asking and we will tell them what we’re doing why we’re doing it.

Mike DeSa  18:24

You guys shut down in the sense that look – I’m just tired of this kind of scrutiny. We’re a closed book now. That kind of shut down?

Grant Breitkreutz 18:35

We’d plant something different, do something a little bit different than the neighbors. They’d come over and they’d ask what we were doing. We’d go through 100% of the explanation of why and then watch them do absolutely nothing after they understood it.

Mike DeSa  18:49

In your own instance, where you’ve got three generations of these conventional practices, and I can imagine the tomato soup around you, so to speak, is in a similar type longevity of these practices. How do you begin to have that discussion on converting? How do you reshape the thought process from one of competition to collaboration? Is there a place you always start?

Grant Breitkreutz 19:19

Yeah, um, I always start with try something. You’re never going to learn if you don’t try. And it comes back to us as humans. I mean, what’s the two hardest things to do? It’s to change and admit you’re wrong. If all of a sudden you quit plowing? In a way, that’s admitting you’re wrong. You know, and then the other part is all you’re going to change and switch to something else. I mean, it’s human nature besides generational teachings. Besides so we always encourage people to just try something. Now in saying that, if you Michael, were farming, what I would call full bore conventional, and you wanted to convert what we’re doing, I will tell you hold the brakes. If you switch everything to what we’re doing in one year, it will be a complete failure. Soils are addicted to what we’ve done them for the last 75 years. They need to be weaned off, they need to be nursed back to health, you know, so there’s steps and there’s processes to it. But there’s all sorts YouTubes, there’s all kinds of seminars, there’s all kinds of people, right and local areas that you can go ask – how’d you get this far? What was your steps and methods to get there?

Mike DeSa  20:32

That’s such a great point. That it it’s an incremental change, from what I think I’m hearing you say. That if you just start somewhere, that somewhere is going to be different for everybody, based off of what you’ve done, where you are, what your geographic and financial limitations and requirements may be, but start somewhere. And I mean, you guys, if I’m understanding you correctly, started with cover crop, is that a fairly reasonable place, generally speaking, for folks to start? Or no till or strip till?

Grant Breitkreutz 21:08

Reduce tillage and a cover crop

Mike DeSa  21:15

And in terms of, you know, capital expenditure to begin to do those things – I know there’s special equipment for strip till, but if you can, are there are there ways of implementing lower till without buying, you know, lots of different or new equipment, or the ways you can do that with your conventional equipment?

Grant Breitkreutz 21:42

At least in our area there is. A lot of the co-ops that we buy our inputs from have no-till seeders. We’ve got a lot of neighbors that have the co-op come in and seed their beans for them. You know, that’s one step. Now, a bunch of these co-ops are starting to seed cover crops in the Fall to keep that piece of equipment making money for the co-op. There’s farmers, farmers could figure out how to do it. But when you bring up strip-till, and those types of things, we got a friend not too far away from us here. He, he understood soil health, got a grasp of it, spent the entire winter studying it for a while, probably for many years. And when he was done, he bought a strip-till machine, he bought a vertical tillage machine, and sold $1.8 million worth of machinery over and above what he spent buying those two pieces of equipment. And if you talk to the man today, he’ll never turn around and go back. Imagine that – $1.8 million of equity freed up plus got rid of the massive workforce needed to run all that equipment.

Mike DeSa  22:46

Because we’re talking about some of these different practices, I want to make sure that we talk about some of these principles that you guys have described in previous lectures. And I think you mentioned six in particular, I’ve got those six here, but if you would kind of detail those out for us, kind of what are those basic six principles that you guys use that have sort of shaped your regenerative practices?

Grant Breitkreutz 23:13

Now the first is Do Not Disturb. That was our toughest part. The corn was the last one we switched to no-till. And we had a plan that if no-till didn’t work for us, we were going to stretch back to strip tilling for corn. But we had perfected planting all the other grains no-till so – do not disturb. You know, the second one I mentioned that I don’t think we’re given enough credit is Build Cover and armor on that soil. We’ve over grazed pastures here because we’ve been extremely wet, couldn’t use some. And that covers missing. We got weeds coming in this year. You know, we got weeds coming in, we’re gonna spend all year building a cover back on these pastors. And it goes right direct to the cropland too. How can a weed germinate if it can’t see the sun? If there’s enough cover on the soil, that weed is not going to germinate.

Dawn Breitkreutz  24:10

And then Diversity is a huge part of all of it. That’s why we have the cattle across all acres. So not only do we have, you know, all the different livestock, we have hogs and cattle. Now we have chickens. But also when you have all the diverse plants out there, you’re building an environment where there insects and birds and wildlife also. So the more diversity you provide, the more diversity you draw, you know, to your to your farm, and it creates a bigger circle of life, you know, on your operation.

Grant Breitkreutz 24:51

And Keep a Living Root in the Soil all the time. Obviously here in Minnesota, it’s tough for us but we figured out how to do it. Ok, so we terminate cover crops when we planted the corn, the corns that are growing, keeping the biological life going. This next week now we’ll start inter-seeding annual rye, radishes, turnips, kale, some other stuff in between the corn rows so what then the corn starts dying, we still got to living root growing all the way till the end of the season. You know, that’s what we figured out, you know, and soybeans we don’t do that. We come in right after the soybean crop is off and seed a bunch of cover crops in there.

Dawn Breitkreutz 25:36

Then Incorporating Livestock. That’s really important. And I know that there’s a lot of row croppers out there that have livestock, and they don’t want to put livestock on their farms. And that’s fine. All of this can be done without having livestock on your acres, but the livestock part of it just kind of speeds it up. And I think that strictly row crop producers and livestock producers can cooperate and work together to get that to happen and to do it properly. And that’s helped heal things here on the farm faster than we could have imagined. But I think the biggest the biggest one that that we’ve been and they brought in is the principle of Context. Each operation has a different context. And everything that you do has to be within your context. So, what we do here on Stoney Creek Farm is not going to work on somebody else’s operation. We’re further along we do different things. We have different goals. You know, we have different people involved. So, you have to find out what works in your context. And each field has its own context. So there isn’t an easy button for this. Yeah. And I think that’s one thing that keeps really interesting. You do not get bored ever, ever.

Grant Breitkreutz 27:03

And we get we’ve got a really good friend we just went on to help marry one of his kids off and he and his boys farm with him. They wanted a prescription they wanted a recipe of what to do. I cannot do that. You are three hours north of me. You got different equipment, you run your cattle different times of the year, you’ve got different cropping rotations, you know, they wanted a prescription. And they’ve been asking for that for the last 10 years, right? And I said, No. I said you need to come to a school or come down to my place and look and see what we’re doing implementing at their place. It was just neat being up there this weekend to see how far they’ve made it. Like Don said, they did it in their own context, what they were comfortable with, financially wise, you know, and it was, like Don said, there’s no ease.

Mike DeSa  27:37

Give us a sense of why this pattern is circular, and why it works in a sustainable and regenerative way.

Grant Breitkreutz 27:47

Because look at Mother Nature, is it ever in a set system? You know, like I say, we just froze here the other day? Well, that’s not common. Rainfall patterns are shifting all the time. Nothing in Mother Nature is the same all the time. And, and we’re very fortunate to finally realize that here on the farm, we’re managing and ecosystem. Dr. Allen Williams has been awesome to teach us this. There’s compound cascading effects. And they’re always either positive or negative. But disruption is good. So in our in our grazing, or even in our cropping fields, we don’t do things the same two years in a row or a cycle of five years in a row, just because disruption is good. Like I said, we over graze some pastures, we know we need to rest them longer this year to get the to get the biomass back up there. You know, if we have a crop failure in a row crop field, we need to get something going out there or an extreme drought or something that prevents us having cover on the soil, we need to get something out there and get that crank and we need to fix we need to fix the six principles and realize that we’re managing an ecosystem. And the grazing heights and stuff of grasses that. For a long time we had Department of Natural Resources here wanting to change some land to warm season grasses, so graze all the cool seasons off, graze all the cool seasons off, graze it short, graze it short. Well, when you’re only focused on one thing, you can’t imagine the disaster you have by just focusing on those warm season grasses. It was horrible. Yeah, they got some warm season grasses, but you have to watch, you have to observe everything and realize that you’re managing an ecosystem.

Dawn Breitkreutz  29:41

I think I need to say that, this probably to some people, it sounds really complicated and really hard. But once over the hurdle of looking at it from that lens, you actually realize that it gives us a lot of flexibility and that’s a positive. That’s a huge positive. Everything we do gives us flexibility because we have the livestock. That’s the flexible part of it.

Grant Breitkreutz 30:16

Two springs ago we’re calving with nature. And we can’t have by our crest time of the year, so we have on our flat land. And we had grazed all of our flatland. We were out of feed. Dawn and I were standing on the hill at the end of the driveway here, and we’re like, what are we gonna do? There’s nobody around here that’s got feed. And she looks at me and she’s like, “well, what the hell’s wrong with that rye field behind us?” Well, here, there’s a cover crop of rye that’s 18 inches tall already. All we did was walk the cows across the road, okay, kept them there for a couple weeks and all of a sudden a grass again, you know, it just, that’s just one example of the flexibility that we get, by doing things so much different.

Mike DeSa  30:58

This kind of picture and phrase is circulating in my mind now of managing an ecosystem where you’re permitting diversity, but you’re almost doing it in paddocks. so to speak, right? You’re allowing the livestock to move and operate in a particular paddock where their manure and their urea goes back down in the soil as fertilizer, maybe you pass hogs behind it, maybe you pass chickens behind it to kind of spread it all back out again. And then you take that whole system, and you move it to the next paddock, or you move it across the street to the rye field that hadn’t originally maybe been a part of your diversity management, so to speak, but Mother Nature gave you an opportunity. And you capitalize on it because you had the mindset and the flexibility to adapt to what was being presented to you.

Grant Breitkreutz 32:05

You said it very well. I guess it’s gotten to the point…how do I say this? Twenty-five years ago when Dawn and I started, if you’d have told us we were going to win conservation awards, we would have said no, we’re not the tree huggers in the neighborhood. We don’t want that. Now, after the first award in 2010, and we realized what we’re doing, we can’t work hard enough to do this. You know, we used to fight mud holes on this farm in the pastures or in the tillable land. We don’t fight that anymore. We don’t fight moisture extremes. And for the most part, we don’t fight moisture stress. I mean, there’ll be they’ll still get us but it’ll be after the neighbors get burnt up first, but just watching what’s happening out there, you know, we’ve been taught to observe, observe, observe all the wildlife, the insects, the birds, the it’s just unbelievable. That we actually affect that through our management.

Mike DeSa  33:08

Since you mentioned not fighting this, I’ve got to ask – what are you fighting now? What has switching to regenerative practices, what challenges have arisen that are either constant or consistent? Everybody has challenges in any profession. What are yours is as regenerative practitioners?

Dawn Breitkreutz  33:39

Dandelions.

Mike DeSa  33:42

What do you mean by that? What do you mean by that dandelions comment?

Grant Breitkreutz  33:46

I’m the best dandelion farmer in the county

Mike DeSa  33:52

They just have no value

Grant Breitkreutz 39:54

As we made all these shifts and changed all these practices, we just weren’t watching the dandelions. I never knew how bad it could be. But you know, that’s in a row crop side of it. But we’ve got that under control now.

Mike DeSa  34:07

How are you controlling that?

Grant Breitkreutz 34:10

With herbicide

Mike DeSa  34:11

Okay

Grant Breitkreutz 34:11

We’re coming out with herbicide. We are not we’re not organic. We just with organics, I’m letting some of my friends figured out how to do no-till organic first, and then hopefully we can feed off of their lessons learned doing it and get ourselves to it. But the biggest challenge right now on our farm is getting the hell out of the commodity market. We so desperately don’t want to sell corn into the commodity market. We don’t sell anything in the commodity market. We found a lot of places to get out of that and get on our own. But we have been picking up a bunch more land. And so we’re going to be in the commodity market again this year a little bit. But you know, we’re growing non-GMO soybeans. And we’ve got a grain terminal just two miles or three miles away from us as paying us 80 to a buck 20 over market value. Now, I’m out of the commodity market. You know, plus I’m getting a premium. This Fall, we’re going to take a bunch of our open pollinated corn and make it into chips. And we can make a good chip and market chips. You know, we got we got friend is doing he said that’s 30 bucks a bushel net. Well, good Lord, how many bushels of corn do I got to raise at $30 a bushel net? Well, maybe I’ll have a machine shed full of chips. But we’re, you know, we planted some red fife wheat this year, the kids want to mill that and sell flour. You know, that’s the old heritage breed wheat. It’s all that type of stuff that we’re just trying to get away from the commodity market so we can control all the end prices. You know, we planted a bunch, we planted a bunch of seven grain mix last year that turned out awesome. I planted a bunch more this year. Well, that seven green mix is the perfect chicken ration year-round all by itself, I don’t have to buy any inputs off the farm. You know, I still buy some supplementation, but I’m not buying soybean meal anymore. And there’s customers that don’t want soy in anything, you know, it’s just those type of things that we’re struggling to find them. That’s our biggest challenge. And obviously, I’m pushing our soil to maximum health faster than we are. And we fought some awful wet years up here and didn’t make much progress but this is just a treat. Cody, my son-in-law, he’s out planting beans right, you know, just thinking the biomass that’s gonna lay down tomorrow or whenever we go through with the roller cramp now, just amazing how when Mother Nature helps us out a little bit we can get cover back on that soil again.

Mike DeSa  36:57

One of the challenges is pushing soil health to an optimum space faster. Right. So if I’m kind of understanding that correctly, one of those challenges is repair in a faster way than what may be conventional. Are there practices you guys are using that have you found some success with as to making that regenerative process for the soil faster?

Grant Breitkreutz 37:35

Yeah. Cover crops and like I say the last four years we’ve really struggled getting cover crops even putting on time and then throws off early or later. That really sets up but if we’ve got a successful cover crop life is really good for Grant. I mean like this year, you plant corn and a bunch of stuff. But plant corn, we spray is three days later we’re done for the year. We’ll go out and apply some nitrogen. But that’s it. No more herbicide, no cultivation, just get the cover crop interceded in there.

Mike DeSa  38:14

Say that again. So with a cover crop down, you plant no-till into it. You do one pass herbicide early, you maybe do a later shot of nitrogen. That’s it til harvest?

Grant Breitkreutz 38:31

That’s right. Intercede our cover crop and we’re done until harvest. We’ve even gotten that working on soybeans. Where Cody’s planting today, that’ll be a one pass system on soybeans. I sprayed it yesterday to kill the rye and the dandelions that we had in there. And we will not have to re spray that this summer and they will be the cleanest beans in the community. And they’re non-GMO.

Dawn Breitkreutz  38:54

And we don’t need any fungicides and no insecticides on any of our acres.

Mike DeSa  39:00

I was going to ask how you’re controlling pests without pesticides.

Grant Breitkreutz 39:08

Rotation.

Mike DeSa  39:10

That’s it, rotation?

Grant Breitkreutz 39:11

Rotation, rotation. All of our corn that we plant has no seed treatments on it at all. No neos, no fungicides, no nothing. It’s it looks like corn. We’ve got a bag of corn left over we can feed it’s to the cattle or hogs

Dawn Breitkreutz  39:26

It’s not pink or green or blue.

Mike DeSa  39:28

Right. That’s what I’m thinking so the rotation of the crop in that particular paddock or field where you’re planting in and of itself through your positive or beneficial nematodes in the soil actually performs pest management for you. Or/and the biological insects that As a result of that diversity that are natural predators.

Grant Breitkreutz 39:51

Well, basically when you look at it, we’ve broken the cycle. If you’re just corn on corn, you got a compounding increase in harmful insects. above and below the soil. We offer habitat for beneficial insects, maybe not in that field, but in a bordering field or on a part of the farm. Where instead of in Minnesota here in August, the spray planes run non-stop spraying for soybean aphids was sprayed for soybean aphids, and eight or nine years, you open up our bean canopy and it’s just full of freakish insect life that’s eaten those aphids. Do we have aphids? Yes, but never economic threshold where we have to spray, you know, we’ve created the environment where the beneficial insects can be there. I think as Gabe Brown, one of those guys had a slide years ago, it really caught my eye – every time we go after, say that soybean aphid with the plane and insecticide we kill 1,700 beneficial insects. Well, we’ve given them the habitat and we don’t kill them. So they’re here, they’re our friends.

Mike DeSa  41:10

To our earlier point about mindset, right, that’s just you just changing this sense of the presence of insects, right as being something that can be beneficial, instead of something that is a detriment to the crop itself is just such a foundational shift in the way you look at it as a system. One of the things that I’m hearing you describe as a challenge is finding those kind of value-added opportunities, where you’re growing a particular corn variety that you can make a chip out of whether you’re, you know, taking something else and turning it into something with a higher premium, with a little bit of extra value-add, etc. Do you do you see your path to growth and the future as one of either scaling these opportunities that you’ve already found through more land and the similar practices? Or do you see it as a culmination of lots of different value-added opportunities where you have 20 or 25 instead of four or five on double the acreage?

Dawn Breitkreutz  42:42

Well, the simple answer would be four or five on all the acres, but, you know, it’s hard to say right now. In that regard, it’s early times for us. You know, we haven’t spent a lot of time focusing on that part of things because of other things that you know, we’ve had going on that you know, we’re shutting doors right now. But they’re not shut yet. So we have an opportunity to look into it and spend the time to do that. But bringing our daughter Carly and Cody on the operation and having them do the direct marketing; they are opening doors like crazy. And so we’re you know combined between the two of us among the four of us we’re working through those steps.

Mike DeSa  43:33

What type of doors have you shut?

Grant Breitkreutz 43:36

Years ago, when we weren’t making ends meet, we decided to buy a baling business. And you want to run your life into the ground, go bale 40,000 bales of corn stocks every Fall. You know, I added it up, after 10 years we put 49,800 hours on equipment. What the hell for, you know? 50,000 hours on equipment, pay all that help, all the labor? You know, so we’re just we’re just finishing up getting all the property cleaned up and out of here and that’s taken too much work to get that stuff. But we got to get it out and then we get on with what we’re doing.

Mike DeSa  44:18

Yeah, and I can certainly respect that. I appreciate you sharing that first of all, but Dawn I can certainly respect the kind of uncertainty of what the growth future of Stony Creek farms looks like. That’s always one of the big questions, I think is that are these regenerative practices? scalable? Can you can you take them on to more acreage? And I don’t know, if just maybe in the form of the question that I just asked, it sounds like you can, it’s just a matter of doing it in the context in which you’re operating? Because it’s so important. Right? I have to ask, right? Because I think there’s so much chatter about it. Now, I want to see if it resonates with you all – carbon markets? Are these I know, and I won’t ask you about regenerative or I won’t ask you about impossible or lab grown meat? I just I don’t think that’s quite relevant here. But I will ask you about carbon markets? Are these an additional revenue stream? Or are they a bridge too far? How are you viewing that?

Grant Breitkreutz 45:28

My view on that is they are additional revenue stream for farmers. But once again, the middleman is taken way too damn much out of the pie. You know, it’s just like I said, I want to get out of the commodity market. Why? Because they’re making all the money, you know, right now on cattle, they’re making over $1,000 a head? Well, if we get out of that market, that’s money, maybe not all money in our pocket, but at least a good chunk of it’s in our pocket. I’m afraid this carbon market is being set-up very similar. And some of the contracts that I’ve looked into are scary. You know, they’re asking for 20-year commitments on some of these farms for some of these programs. That’s, to me, the way our farm has evolved and changed so rapidly from year to year, in the last 10 years, in the last 20 years, why would I lock myself into something for 20 years, and the other part of the carbon market is – they ain’t gonna pay me jack for what we’ve already done. These carbon markets are going to be focused on the guys that are trying to get him to do no-till or cover crops, and those guys will probably the biggest rewards out of it. Now, if all of a sudden that carbon market falls apart again, are they gonna affect their old practices because there’s no subsidy? I would just about guarantee it.

Dawn Breitkreutz  46:54

But let’s go back. You said you wanted to avoid the Impossible Burger question?

Mike DeSa  47:00

Yeah. No, tackle it, Let’s go.

Dawn Breitkreutz  47:04

Okay, so there’s a company up-state a little ways, and we are growing peas for that company. And the reason why is because it fits our context. Those peas, yeah, their vegetable protein, and I don’t care what they’re going to do with them. They if they want to compete against our beef, that’s fine. People want to eat it, that’s fine. That’s your choice. But it fits our context because those peas go in early, they come off early. And then we have the opportunity to go back in and plant cover crops and run our cattle across those acres. And it’s helped us heal our system. So why wouldn’t we take advantage of that? We’re getting a decent price for them

Mike DeSa  47:52

Yeah, that’s so that’s… go ahead Grant.

Grant Breitkreutz 47:55

They’re not competitive with soybeans right now. I mean, I’m sure our neighbors are saying what hell Why did you do that? Why not? We’ve got so many acres of corn, we’ve got so many acres of soy that we’re getting a good price on, if we market it correctly, obviously things are very hot. To me, this was the time to find out how to grow these other crops. You know, we got high corn and soybean prices. I don’t need to get rich all at once. But I know corn is going back to three bucks. And I want to know how to grow yellow field peas for Puris potentially going into a vegetable protein market that competes with our beef. But I’ll harvest these peas the end of July. If we get moisture and successful cover crop on there, I will grow corn on there next year for just about nothing. There will be virtually the only synthetic input will be a tiny dash of nitrogen. Well then when corn is $3 and I’m producing corn for $2.50, I’m still making money. We got a look at the whole system. You know and that’s, that’s why we’re doing this.

Mike DeSa  49:03

Yeah, but I mean, the for the forthrightness that it takes to think about growing something for a competitor to your own product, so to speak. I mean, again, we’re kind of back to mindset shift here. Where, yeah, you can grow these and… go ahead

Dawn Breitkreutz  49:25

They’re not our competitors. They really aren’t. We know that our that we’ve got good quality beef. In the in the system, yeah, maybe. But we know that, you know, we’re confident that the eating experience and the flavor and the nutritional value and all of that, the whole processed system. It doesn’t compare, they don’t compare.

Grant Breitkreutz 49:50

And this company was in this long before the Impossible Burger came. I mean, they’re a storied company. I’ve met the owners. I mean, we really like the company.

Mike DeSa  50:00

Let me ask you one final question, if I could. Dawn, you mentioned in one of our first interviews that adopting these practices has brought joy kind of back into and I Grant I think that may be the case for you as well, but joy back into the practice of agriculture, rather than one of competition. Describe if you could kind of your thoughts around that sense of joy that’s come back with these practices versus maybe what your mentality was prior to that.

Dawn Breitkreutz  50:44

I think…a friend Gabe has put it really well, rather than getting up in the morning and trying to figure out what you’re going to kill that day, you go outside, and you observe all that you have here and all that you’ve helped create, and what life you can bring to the farm now, and what life you’re going to see as you’re, you know, going around and seeing the improvements that you’ve made, rather than Oh my God, we’ve got a weed, we’ve got to kill it. What are we going to spray? All those things. It’s just it’s living positively. For the moment. I mean, yeah, we have bad days. But this is so much more uplifting and being able to be a part of it and to see it and to look through, you know, God’s eyes. You know what, what we see out there that that He’s given us and that we can remove it rather than keep on degrading it. It’s refilling. It really is.

Grant Breitkreutz 51:52

Just a simple example today we just got done loading Cody up with seed to go and seed it and Carly was walking by and she’s like, what is going on that field? Where’s all that smoke and dust coming from? we all looked out there. Here the pollen coming off of that rye. It looked like a dust storm. So we were just talking about this we got we’ve got dust in the air from our conventionally tilled neighbors fields. We’ve got pollen blown air, I mean what’s pollen gonna hurt other Cody’s like, I’m gonna die, I’m just going to go inside right now I got allergies. But you know, it’s just fun. It’s just fun things like that, that we get to see now that where before. If we were standing in the exact same spot, the way we farmed 20 years ago, we’d have been worried about dirt ball, instead of a big pollen cloud going across the farm, you know. It’s just daily and weekly things like that all the time.

Mike DeSa  53:00

And I bet you guys could at this point could fill a book with those tangible examples. Because it in my mind, those are, those are key moments to sort of capture and try to articulate. So I’m glad you shared that Grant because I think that shows, in my mind two things: It shows how your perspective on something can change. If you’ve if you if you’re looking at it through a different lens. But then I think it also shows it shows the way that these the system should operate. That’s what happens when wind blows on plants that are flowering is that their pollen spreads for a natural reason. I don’t know. I don’t know if that example speaks to the rest of the folks listening, but it sure speaks to me. Is there anything else that I’m not asking you about regenerative agricultural practices that I should be that you want us to know?

Grant Breitkreutz 54:03

I guess the big thing is for farmers that are thinking about pursuing regenerative agriculture, it should not…a cover crop should not cost you money – long term. There might be a short term upfront expense, I mean, changing practices should not cost you money. There might be a short-term upfront expense, but eventually the returns come back, you know, like here with us with the cattle, it really helped us a lot because we could plant a cover crop we could graze it. Well, if you’re just a corn and soybean farmer, you’re not going to see that type of return right away, but increase in soil health and water infiltration, the nutrient replenishment, it’ll come eventually in reducing synthetic inputs, you know. And really, as a society, we need to look at this, you know, two years ago, we tried going down I-29 three times and it was closed for flooding. You know, in our farm, where we’re at eight to 12 inch rainfall infiltration rates, and I can step right across the fence and a half to eight tenths of an inch in an hour. You know that regenerative agriculture is more than just our economic and social life here on the farm. It can heal a nation, you know, Dr. Alan Williams, he’s a very, very smart man, when Hurricane Harvey hit down there in Texas, I was on the phone with him for something and he was in his hotel room. He’d done the calculations, if every farmer and rancher in that region had increased organic matter by 2%, there’d been no flooding. Look, increased organic matters here four and 5%. Already in a short period of time. I mean, it can be done, we can heal, and we can fix a lot of the stuff we deal with other than an agriculture.

Mike DeSa  55:51

That’s a great way to end is that there are…you talked about second and third order effects of actions beyond what we intend to. And those I think, largely speaking can be positive, within regenerative agricultural practices beyond just what we’re doing for our pocketbooks or for our livelihood. But to fix things around us. So,I’m just I’m so grateful for the both of you for what you’ve done, for what you are doing the education and encouragement that you’re providing others in this space. I hope that you continue to do it for decades more and that your kids and your son-in- law continue to do it as well. So thank you guys so much for taking the time and for being a part of this discussion.

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Military Veterans in Agriculture E-Book in Partnership with New Ag International

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The Veteran Crowd Podcast – From Marine Corps Infantry to International Agri – Preneurship and Investing

Our Founder/Managing Director – Michael DeSa – was invited by Bob Louthan last month to join him on the Spotlight podcast hosted by the Veteran Crowd Network. They discussed everything from Mike’s time at Texas A&M, his diligence trip to South America, the power of making long-lasting connections, and tips for transitioning veterans looking to step into the entrepreneurial space.

When Mike was 10-years old, he sought to join the US Marine Corps by writing a letter to his local recruiter, expecting to join soon thereafter. The recruiter wrote back telling Mike to come back when he was 17. Steadfast on becoming a Marine, he completed his education at Texas A&M in Agricultural Engineering, and after receiving a commission into the US Marine Corps, went on to be an Infantry Officer for the next 7 years.

Today, Mike is the masterminds behind the company that is AGD Consulting. He is also a published author in Global AgInvesting News, Global AgInvesting Gazette, AgTech Nexus, Agri Investor, Huffington Post, and the Marine Corps Gazette.

Listen to the full recording here

Or enjoy the transcript from the conversation below!

——————

Bob (00:14):

Welcome everybody. This is Bob Louthan and host of the Spotlight, and I’m pleased to have as my guest today, Mike DeSa, the Founder and Managing Director of AGD Consulting. And just to give a little background on him, he’s a Texas A&M graduate, a member of the Corps in the Class of 2007. We’re going to talk about some of those nice high boots those seniors got to wear. He went to Texas A&M on a Marine Corps scholarship and commissioned as an Infantry Officer in the United States Marine Corps. Mike, welcome to the program. Thanks for being here.

Mike (00:50):

No, thank you for having me, Bob. It’s really a pleasure.

Bob (00:52):

Well, it’s good to get to know you. I always like to start out with our guests and learn a little bit about their background. Where’d you grow up and how’d you end up you know, pursuing a Texas A&M [degree] and going into the Corps. I want to hear all about that. I like the Aggies.

Mike (01:09):

Yeah, sure. I grown up in San Antonio and I had always been interested in the military, but it wasn’t until I was really 10 or 11 that I can remember sending a handwritten note to the [local] Marine Corps office. I think it was one in the San Antonio area saying, “Hey, I’m interested in joining. What’s the process?” The head of that office actually responded back with a typed note that said, basically thanks for writing, but you can’t really join until you’re 17. Come back to us then.

Bob (01:47):

World War II veterans lied about their age to get in the Marine Corps, right?

Mike (01:52):

Sure. Even at 10 or 11, I think that would have been a hard sell, but I can remember thinking, wow, that’s really impressive that they would respond. And at that point it looked like it was a typewriter generated-note that they had hand signed. Enclosed with the note was a poster, the typical picture of the Marine in camouflage with a dark background and a weapon. That poster hung on my wall basically until I left for college. And it just so happened that I joined the junior ROTC program at the high school I went to in San Antonio and lo and behold, the senior enlisted advisor at that program was a retired Master Sergeant – Tony Cavazos. That was pretty much it. I graduated high school, got a scholarship in the Marine Corps, spent some time at A&M and then was commissioned in the Marine Corps in December of 2007. And I remember asking Master Sergeant Cavazos to come back at commissioning. He actually gave me my first salute. And so you had this sort of full circle kind of mentorship. So it was really impactful for me.

Bob (03:09):

I’ve always been impressed with the Corps at Texas A&M. You’re one of the seven senior military colleges like Norwich, Citadel, VMI, Virginia Tech’s Corps as an example. And of course, you’ve got the Texas Aggie band, which I just, you know, that’s probably a bucket list item for me, see them perform at the halftime of a football game. But tell me a little bit about being in the Corps there. I mean, it’s a pretty big enterprise, but part of a much larger school.

Mike (03:46):

Yeah, it was. And candidly, I didn’t know much about it at first. I had it set in my mind that the Naval Academy was really where I wanted to end up and I had made it all the way through the Senate application and approval process. And I was set on going but for some reason, towards the end of the process, it didn’t feel right anymore. And I remember a relative saying to me, well, what about A&M, what about the Corps of Cadets? And it opened at that point, a whole other door for me that I didn’t even know existed that was four hours from where I grew up. So, I went down there, spent the night with the Corps of Cadets, where you go and you stay with either a sophomore or junior in their room. And you experience an evening formation, an overnight, and a morning formation. If you’re lucky enough to go on a Saturday, you can stay through a march-in. And at that point that I realized that there was a lot about the Corps of Cadets that was fitting as to how I wanted to spend my time in college. It was not obviously a typical public university time, but one I very much enjoyed.

Bob (05:05):

What is the first year like? I mean, they put you through sort of a Plebe year, correct?

Mike (05:13):

Yeah. From what I understand, it’s very similar to what Rats go through at VMI. A guy whom I served with in the Marines was a VMI guy, and we exchanged stories about it. It turns out that there was a lot happening that was similar to what we experienced through the Corps of Cadets at A&M.

Bob (05:31):

What do they refer to first year cadets?

Mike (05:40):

Fish. All of your time, from the time you wake to the time you go to bed, is structured. So you’re up early, you’re doing some type of activity with the unit (the Corps of Cadets is all broken down into different units). And because I was on a Marine Corps scholarship, I was in a Navy/Marine Corps unit. And it just so happened that my unit, K-2, was also the same unit that my future wife’s father was the CO (Commanding Officer) for as well as the First Sergeant, sometime in the 1978/1979 timeframe. And so it was just sort of divine intervention I think at some point. But you do a morning formation and then usually about seven or eight, after breakfast with your unit, you’re off to classes most of the day. But what you still do during the day and how you treat upperclassmen and interact when you get to certain areas of campus are all very regimented and controlled. And then when you show-up in the afternoon, we’ve got an entire two hours or so of afternoon activities. Some are good and some are not so enjoyable. And then

Bob (06:55):

It’s a lot about time management, isn’t it?

Mike (06:58):

Time management, physical fitness, responsiveness to orders. I mean, a lot of the same stuff that you experienced. It was pretty tough through that entire first year, both semesters until you finished that year. And then you show up the next year as a sophomore or a “pisshead” at that point, and your sort of directly responsible for training of the [new] freshman class. So it was really a unique experience, one I didn’t really know existed at all, but one I wouldn’t change.

Bob (07:36):

So you graduated from A&M in 2007 and go into the Marine Corps?

Mike (07:43):

Correct. After A&M, I went through The Basic School in Quantico, which every Marine goes through after they get commissioned and depending on how you perform there, you pick up your Military Occupational Specialty (MOS). And I was in the top 1% of the class, so I picked up infantry, which is where I knew I wanted to go. And then the Infantry Officer Course which is actually right across the street from The Basic School. So, I spent another three months there and then went to 1st Battalion, 9th Marines (1/9) in Camp Lejeune, North Carolina as my first duty station as a Platoon Commander. And that really started a seven-year career. My first deployment was with the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit (MEU), which 1/9 was the Infantry Battalion in support of the MEU. My Company, Charlie Company, was the helicopter company for the MEU. They have other companies like the Truck Company, Tracks, etc. As part of that deployment, we first stopped in Haiti after the earthquake 2008, where we performed some disaster relief and damage assessment work. We did some small unit training and program development work in East Africa and the Middle East (Jordan) before coming home later that year. After that, I moved up to the Executive Officer (XO) position and then deployed to Afghanistan 2010.

Mike (09:17):

At that point, it was a really decentralized footprint, very partnered-focused. As a company of 250, we took over a 350-square kilometer battlespace that had previously been held by 2,000 Marines. We were tracking and maneuvering against an enemy that used anonymity to the best of their ability. We had Marines and DoS supporters spread out across 15 to 18 different positions across that area. There was a lot to manage and track, but the interesting thing in a way, I think, is how many of these learned skills relate to agriculture. We learned to deal with fluid, interconnected environments and people, the benefits of putting a local face on a solution. We learned to triage and solve the most pressing problems first. We actually used a lot of data; patrol-generated data to facilitate operations, human data and intelligence to drive operations. These challenges and learned solutions, I would find out later as I stepped into agriculture, were not that dissimilar. In fact, they were very similar to some of the same challenges that you face in agriculture.

Bob (10:47):

So, here’s the transition question – how did you get into the ag industry? Tell us the story of how AGD came into being.

Mike (11:01):

A couple of years before I left the active duty, I felt like I was being called to walk a different path, one that was more entrepreneurial in nature. It just happened that at that time in my life, I was looking to invest in something tangible, uncorrelated – an asset class with appreciative value. And I also wanted something that was geographically diversified away from the United States. I had previously invested successfully in Latin America in the past, so I had a general idea of how it worked and what the region was like, but I had never really considered the production side of agriculture as an investable asset class. The previous deal was more land development than it was production agriculture, but as I started to look at [production agriculture] more, it had a lot of the same criteria that we were looking for – lack of correlation, tangibility, positive appreciative trend, etc.

Mike (12:11):

So, this really set off about a two-year research endeavor for us into all regions of the world that could support increased demands on agriculture in the coming years. And what we found was that Latin America had a lot of these different criteria we were looking for. So, we understood the fundamental challenges of investing in a foreign region without boots on the ground experience. Therefore, we knew very quickly that we needed to see this for ourselves. When I left the active duty service in the summer of 2014 and in early 2015, our family executed what would probably best be described as a six-month, six-country due diligence trip down into Latin America. I think all total 15,000 miles or so traveled. We looked at a 100+ different assets across the agricultural value chain and ended up investing again in a mixed ag project in the Southern cone, which we still manage today, but Ecuador, Peru, Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Panama, and Colombia [later].

Mike (13:27):

We tried to really see and experience as much of it as we could to build the groundwork for the consulting company, AGD, which I started in the early part of 2016 after we got back and got resettled. Today, we’re on a small farm near the Longview, Texas area, a couple hours East of Dallas. You could probably best describe it as a subsistence farm or a small-scale farm where we grow and raise most of what we consume – vegetables, leafy greens, garlic tomatoes, some tree fruits. We do some greenhouse work hydroponically. We have bees for honey and pollination, laying hens for eggs, broilers for meat, goats for milk and cheese, and cattle for beef. I mean, you name it, we’ve tried it. We also try to do as much of the processing and storing in house and ourselves as we can. It’s not a commercial endeavor for us. It’s more of a way of life and it’s something that’s really a part of both who we are personally and professionally.

Bob (14:42):

You’ve got an initiative for veterans in ag and talk some about that and some of the skillsets that you think veterans bring

Mike (14:52):

Yeah, I would have never really, again, put these two things together until about two years ago. I had started writing for a publication group called New Ag International – one of the largest, if not the largest, publication organizations and events groups for high-tech and precision agriculture. So we had published a couple articles with them and developed a relationship with their staff. After we wrote an article for our own organization about different tools of the trade, if you will, their staff reached out and said, look, we’d like to do something bigger together here. There’s lots of coverage on the mental health benefits and the transition benefits of a veteran going into production agriculture – a sense of purpose, a part of something bigger, producing something again with your hands. And so…

Bob (16:05):

Do you have any statistics about veterans in agriculture? I mean, this is an underserved market? Is it hard to figure out?

Mike (16:13):

There are no numbers that come to mind off the top of my head, but there are a number of organizations that support this. The Farmer Veteran Coalition, the USDA has several programs that specifically target veterans. There are certain pockets of money through different organizations that are designed to help veterans transition into these kinds of organization. There are lots of these sorts of intangible benefits that are specific to ag that veterans, I think, find attractive that they used to do in the service, but things like we had talked about – the ability to cope with fluid situations, etc. Agriculture is very interconnected. There’s lots of different factors that influence it, just like there’s lots of factors in a military member making a decision about an enemy or a unit action. We understand, as veterans, the idea of skin-in-the-game also, right?

Mike (17:16):

As veterans, we have vested sometimes our own lives and wellbeing in a mission, just like producers today are vested in their land. This is their livelihood. This is what they do to survive, but it’s more than that, right? It’s generational and this ability to understand skin-in-the game, triage these different problems and which to solve first that will make the most impact to yield, the same way that military members triage problems. And so, there’s all these soft skills, if you will, that I don’t think have the voice they need yet. And so, what we wanted to focus on with New Ag was bringing to light the skills that are unique to agriculture and, and the business side of agriculture in particular – running teams and organizations – all the way through to perhaps entrepreneurship. And so, what we’re starting to put together with New Ag is as holistic of an approach as we can as we can think of, targeting different parts of the transition process. So groups like Bunker Labs, Patriot Boot Camp, Centurion Military Alliance (CMA), HireMilitary, etc. We want a voice for them and to bring to light the issues that veterans face during transition that perhaps corporate agriculture or the business side of agriculture do not know about yet. Then we want to bring together the sort of recruiting end of things because sometimes veterans are not great at talking about the things that they did. There’s a humility factor in there that maybe feels uncomfortable to come veterans.

Bob (19:07):

No, I don’t think there’s a whole lot of farming that got done in the Marine Corps either. You know? And so, it’s a translation of skills and disciplines that sometimes you get stove-piped, you know as there are not a whole lot of positions from machine gunners in the private sector either. What are some of the steps you’ve taken so far that have led you to where you are you today and then paint a picture of where you’re going, where you hope to be? I don’t know, next two years from now.

Mike (19:46):

Yeah. And so, I mean, we have tried to grow as a firm as organically as possible. So, one piece of advice that I would want to give to a transitioning veteran that might be thinking about going into entrepreneurship – start to save and plan for it as early as you can. Tuck a little bit of money away every month, try to live as modestly as you can, because if you’re going to start something, oftentimes the easiest and most efficient way to do it is to bootstrap it, which is what I’ve tried to do and what we’ve done to date. But that takes preparation which starts while you’re still in the service and while you’re getting a paycheck. The other thing I would say is that I never would have guessed how valuable the construction of a network is and would be to starting a business. And I’m not just talking about the Aggie or, A&M network. I’m not talking just about the veteran military network either. I’m talking about the network that you build within the industry that you want to go into. It takes time to build this network and often, that time that you’re spending building it is not generally paid time.

Bob (21:03):

Well, let’s talk about that for a second, because you know, when you’re in the military, you have a military network, right. But you were in Jacksonville, North Carolina and now you’re in the Plains of Texas. You picked up and moved your family. So part of the transition problem is that veterans typically don’t stay where they are. The second thing is they have a military-based network and they haven’t cultivated a professional network. So if you could give one or two pointers on cultivating that professional network, I mean, how did you do it? And did you use tools like LinkedIn or what was the approach?

Mike (21:46):

I’d say there’s a couple of points. The first is that you would be, at least I was, surprised at how diverse the network base can be from within the military community. So there’s group of guys that I’ve served with and mentors and leaders at different points in my career, whether that was teaching at the Infantry Course, 2nd-in-command of a company, etc. Those leaders that you respect have their own networks, and maybe they did careers before the service, but there were lots of instances where that’s the first place I would turn. Again, you would be surprised what recommendations and networks they may be able to point you towards. So, you start where you’re comfortable. The second thing that I did that doesn’t cost any money and is a very efficient way to start to build a network is to start writing, to whomever will listen.

Mike (22:43):

A little bit a day, write a couple hundred words a day describing what it is that you want to do, or what you find interesting about where you want to go. And then before, you know it, you start to get decent at thinking about the things that are important, the challenges with an industry and possible solutions. Start to write and put your thoughts out there and lo and behold, that not only builds your network within the industry that you want to go into, but it also starts to get your brand out there.

Bob (23:17):

You are blogging? Where are you blogging about the subjects you’re interested in?

Mike (23:21):

I first started writing a little bit for the Huffington Post. They had a travel section when we were in Latin America, so I started there and we quickly realized the value of what that could bring. When we came back and started AGD Consulting, we dedicated a section on the website to our own content. And then we realized that there are gobs and gobs of efficient and respected publications within the industry that we just started building relationships with. “Hey, I’d like to offer you some content,” or “I’ve got this idea on sustainability and technology within the cotton industry. Do you mind if I put something together for you?” Most of the time they’re always looking for content as well, so if you can develop a technically-supported piece of content that speaks to the industry that you want to go into, adds value, a new perspective, or perhaps incorporates some of the things that you experienced in the military, then you’re talking from a base of experience and also getting your point out there and building a reputation.

Bob (24:37):

So, to the listeners, I mean, you just hit on a very important point. I mean, so creating content, it creates value. We’re an open society now with social media and so forth. So how do you get your message out there and in doing so you know, you create the image or become a thought leader or an expert within the industry. And it’s a great way to expand your network. And I can’t say enough about the importance of this. I sort of call it “digging the well before you get thirsty”, or you just never know where these relationships are going to come from. And when you might need somebody who has connections in a certain place. If you only have 250 people on your LinkedIn you know, connections, you need to get to work, you need to have thousands and play that to start.

Bob (25:42):

What was the number? Hundreds of millions of people I think on LinkedIn right now. And it’s just, we don’t know them all yet. We’re not finished. So tell me a little bit, who are your competitors and how are you, how do you sort of fit in the market? I mean, if called you up tomorrow and said, I need your help. What are the services that you provide if you were going to list them?

Mike:

Yeah, I would categorize them as things like independent due diligence, business development and market access and access to earlier stage or later stage type capital, depending on where you are. And I think in support of diligence services, we’re unique in that we can work on behalf of either a buyer or a seller as we’re generally unencumbered by return hurdles or geographic mandates typically associated with private equity groups and institutions

Bob (26:44):

What are the type of client’s you’re working with?

Mike (26:45):

So typical clients are private equity funds specific within agriculture, asset managers, agricultural technology start-ups, and/or producers themselves to which they need one, if not many of those different kinds of services. But as a…

Bob (27:03):

Let me interrupt you. A lot of people have heard about aquaponics. And so what’s sort of an interesting agricultural technology that maybe I haven’t heard about. Is there something out there that’s just really cool that comes to mind, Mike?

Mike (27:21):

Oh, there’s so many. You talked earlier about [the reality that there] may not be a direct applicability in agriculture for a machine gunner, for example. But the point I would make back is probably not a machine gunner, but if you were a drone operator in the Air Force, then all day long, you’ve got applicability in the agricultural space. If you were…

Bob (27:46):

I’ve heard about people flying drones over fields and kind of assessing the moisture and, and those types of things and figuring out how to affect a unit.

Mike (27:56):

So that’s one. They have drones that have different sensors on them, different cameras. Most of them are autonomous. They fly out on a pattern and those images can be used to build different kinds of agricultural maps that help you make decisions. They also have ones that have payloads in tanks that you can fill with crop inputs that fly a certain distance off the ground that deploy that crop input chemical.

Bob (28:35):

So that’s kind of fascinating stuff, you know, in the U S agriculture, are we leading the world in productivity in terms of agricultural output or…

Mike (28:46):

In terms of what we actually pull out of the ground?

Bob (28:50):

Are we lagging behind others, you know, and in different areas?

Mike (28:53):

In the permanent crop space like almonds or stone fruits, they have a strong presence in Western United States and the Pacific Northwest. When you look at more row crop type, soybean and corn, we’re generally isolated what we can grow based off of climate in the Midwest. But when you look at a country like Brazil or Argentina, where land masses capable of producing crops are significantly larger than they are in the US. And so again, it kind of depends on what you’re raising and who you’re trying to sell it to because that has a big factor as well. If you’re a European producer, you’re a lot closer to China than, than we are. And so, there’s a lot of nuances…

Bob (29:48):

It just all depends. I’ve also seen an enormous amount of investment recently in greenhouses to bring things like leafy greens, closer to the markets. Right now, a lot of lettuce comes out of California as an example, so why not have a greenhouse in Pennsylvania and serve New York City?  You can get fresher product, less time to the table, those types of things. There’s a lot of investment going on there. Have you done any work with in, within that side of the industry?

Mike (30:20):

Yeah, we have, actually. We looked at some renovation work for one of those kinds of larger-scale, more localized greenhouse producers. They were looking to transform what they had done into a different crop type. But I think you hit on it when you described what these localized greenhouse production companies are trying to do, which is – bring the food source closer to its consumption. Right? They’ve got these display shelves now that they’re talking about putting these miniature greenhouses within supermarkets. They’ve got these kinds of standalone units that can go right into a display area. The whole thing is about number one, bringing that food closer to the consumer, it’s about making the supply chain that brings that product to the consumer more efficient. And if COVID has highlighted one thing within the agricultural space, I would say it is the fragility of our supply chain.

Mike (31:29):

In a lot of ways, it’s very complicated. It’s lengthy. It comes from operations that do things at scale, right? And so, when you look at right now abattoirs or smaller scale processing companies, on the rise, you have to wonder why? When Smithfield shut down several of their plants because of concerns over COVID, they shut down millions of pounds of product that was supposed to be destined for the consumer market. Well, consumers then said, “where am I going to get my meat from?” And they had never really looked locally or within their own communities that said, “Hey, there’s a local processor, 10 miles down the road here. It may cost a little bit more, but I know exactly where that food came from. I know exactly how it was produced and I can buy it right now.” And so right now you have these small-scale, decentralized processors that have months-long waiting lists of getting producers and product, their cows, or their pigs to their processors, because they can’t keep up with the demand. So, it’s really interesting.

Bob (32:42):

And then you have an E. Coli breakout somewhere, and all of a sudden, you know, you’ve got real issues there. So, a final couple of questions – if you could go back and talk to you know, Lieutenant DeSa right now, you know, go back 10 or 15 years, what would you say to that young second Lieutenant in the Marine Corps? And you know, what’s the next six months look like for you?

Mike (33:13):

So, I struggled a lot in the service at first in the sense of, I think I’ve got a fairly strong work ethic and attention to detail tends to be at the top of the things that matter to me. But what that did in the service as a young second Lieutenant was slow me down. Because I was always waiting for all of the information. I was always trying to put together the plan that could not be undone by the enemy. And it just, it just didn’t work.

Bob (33:51):

That doesn’t exist. Does it?

Mike (33:52):

I had to make a lot of decisions over time without all the information. And what I found was that the more I did it, at least in my experience, the better at it that you got and the faster that you got. As the Company XO (Executive Officer) in Afghanistan, the day-to-day operations were really sort of my responsibility. I can’t tell you a number of times that you’re in a command type center, whether it’s where you were stationed or where you had set one up, where you have to make a very fast decision with not a lot of information and then task those units to support that decision. And I wouldn’t have believed you had, you told me when I was 23, that you kind of suck at this right now, but the more you practice it, the more you do it, the better you will get at it.

Bob (34:49):

You’re not old enough yet, but you know, it takes 20 years to get 20 years of experience. You get comfortable with that decision-making process. The good thing about the military for a young person is it forces you into a position where you have to make those decisions. And some of them have a great deal of gravity to them right now, they’re life and death decisions. How does someone get in touch with you? How do you how do we reach out to you?

Mike (35:20):

You can check out our website at www.desaconsultingllc.com, or you can just do a Google search for AGD Consulting.

Bob (35:33):

Do you participate on any social media platforms and putting any stuff up?

Mike: LinkedIn

Bob: We’ll put links to Mike’s connections here on the show notes. Really appreciate you coming out today and speaking with us. We’ve been talking with Mike DeSa, the Founder and Managing Director of AGD Consulting. And you know, this is the Veteran Crowd Spotlight. We publish on Tuesdays and Thursdays and are available on Apple podcasts, Google, Spotify, and Anchor among others. And I really appreciate Mike being our guests today. And thanks so much for coming out.

Mike (36:19):

No, my pleasure, Bob, really thank you for the opportunity.

Bob (36:22):

Again, you’ve been listening to the Spotlight on Veteran Crowd, and we appreciate you joining the show. Look forward to hearing and speaking with you again, take care.

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The Modern Acre Podcast – Michael talks International Ag Investing Strategies and Insights

Earlier this month, AGD’s Founder/Managing Director, Michael DeSa sat down, virtually, with Tim and Tyler Nuss from The Modern Acre podcast. They covered a range of topics from the impacts and opportunities within ag from COVID, starting a consulting firm, Michael’s take on agtech, and much more!

Every week on The Modern Acre, Tim and Tyler Nuss, brothers and fifth generation farmers and entrepreneurs, put a spotlight on the entrepreneurs, innovators and leaders that are changing the food and agricultural industry on and off the farm.

Enjoy the transcript from their conversation below!

—————

Tyler: Hey guys, you’re listening to episode 126 of The Modern Acre, presented by FarmTogether.

Tim: We have a really great episode this week with Mike whose the Founder/Managing Director at AGD Consulting.

Tyler: Well, guys, super, super thankful you guys are tuning in. Really appreciate you listening, excited to really kick off this sponsorship with FarmTogether, and I appreciate their support. But today we have an awesome episode with Mike DeSa, he’s the Founder and Managing Director of AGD Consulting, and we just have an awesome conversation about his background and what he’s built in the consulting space. I think it’s very unique, and he focuses a lot in South America and overseas investments, which I think is really interesting.

Tim: Yeah, Mike’s a veteran, so we talk a little bit about his experiences there and the carry-overs into agriculture, which I thought was really cool, and we also talk about his thoughts on COVID and how he sees that impacting the agtech space.

Tyler: Yeah, there’s a ton of nuggets, as I like to say, in this episode, Mike just has a ton of value to shares about starting his own business, but how he’s thinking about the industry as a whole. So without further ado, let’s jump in.

Tyler: Hey, Mike, welcome to the show. Great to have you here.

Mike: A pleasure to be here, guys. Thanks for having me.

Tim: Yeah, we’re super excited to talk to you about what you’re building at AGD, but before do you  were sharing a little bit about your perspective on how COVID is impacting the small producer space? Maybe talk to us a little bit about that.

Mike: Yeah, I think that it’s no surprise that traditional supply chains have been disrupted. I think that consumers are concerned about empty grocery store shelves, and so we wanted to sort of take a look at this as an opportunity in some ways for both tech and localized production to kind of re-shape some of the supply chain, and so we put out something not too long ago, an expert round-up of forms, if you will, where we interviewed several experts from across the value chain, representatives from the US Grains Council, The Yield Lab Institute, Bonnefield, Texas Farm Credit, to kinda gather some insights as to how COVID was impacting subsistence, hobby, smallholder type farmers here in North America, and what we found interestingly, was both anecdotal and concrete evidence of the increasing number of consumers really beginning to care more about where that food is coming from, and that it was coming from somewhere local, and in some ways raising it or producing it themselves. And this sort of rise and interest in locally grown food with shorter supply chains, we think may be beginning to propagate down into the sector with the shortest supply chain.

Your own backyard.

Some of that anecdotal evidence includes an increase in purchasing for laying hands, locally sourced protein for consumption and rearing, etc. Obviously more people jumping into backyard gardening and hobby farming with more time, and we think this may be the beginning of or signal and accelerated shift in our supply chain towards not only resiliency and sustainability of which tech can play a role in.

I think that historically, smallholder farmers have not been the target market for agtech startups for a number of reasons: disaggregation, lacking in scale, often lacking in discretionary income and spending for that kind of adoption is not there, but what if this was a way to aggregate this class of growers in a meaningful way that could increase adoption? What if animal processing was done in a decentralized way with smaller processors all over the world? What if a CSA type models that set up more purchasing power for producers, lower barriers to entry? What if these were the beginnings of momentum to bring together what has been historically a separated market to one that could be taken advantage of with technology. Certainly this trend is still in its infancy and will continue to evolve as consumer preferences sort of settle into a new normal. The longevity, I think of the hobby or subsistence or backyard farmer remains somewhat to be seen, but what I think is really clear is that today can present an opportunity for this kind of grower to adapt technology solutions and in some cases, sustainable farming practices or the right grower with a bias for, I think, change in innovation.

Tyler: Yeah, I totally agree. Tim and I have had multiple conversations about this exact topic about how COVID is really opening up some of these conversations about how do you have a more distributed supply chain and open the doors to local producers and connecting them with markets and so I think you’re spot on. And I think to your point, we are in the infancy of these concepts and local resiliencies and distributed supply chains and how all this plays out. I think we’re watching closely, but I think to your point, there is a big opportunity for agtech companies that wanna jump into this space. A lot of times, we see the agtech companies focusing on the vertically integrated supply chains, the highest volume crops versus what some of what you mentioned. So I think it is time that we start seeing some of the investment and the companies focused on this.

Mike: And that by no means me, it will be an easy challenge for that path to be paved, and it’s unfortunate that it took a pandemic to perhaps serve as that tipping point, but I certainly think we’re there.

Tyler: Totally

Mike: The momentum is behind us now.

Tyler: Totally, yeah, I think to your point, there was already a lot of interest from the consumer about where their food was coming, and then the fact the pandemic hit at that time, I think really did, potentially will prove as the tipping point. But, Mike, let’s jump into a little bit more of your background. Tell us about where you grew up and your early career.

Mike: Absolutely. I am originally from San Antonio, Texas, and while not a farm kid, we always did have some kind of backyard garden growing up. My technical background is in Ag Engineering with an emphasis on power and machinery from Texas A&M. I was a member of the Corps of Cadets there. I was on scholarship actually with the US Marine Corps, and so when I graduated, I then spent the next seven years in the Marines on the infantry side. Had the chance and opportunity to do some disaster relief work in Central America. We did some small unit training and program development work in parts of Eastern Africa as well as the Middle East, and then a combat deployment to Afghanistan in 2010. A very decentralized, to our points earlier, partnered mission that was across a 200+ square mile battlespace while we were trying to track nearly $40M worth gear and an enemy that utilized anonymity at every opportunity. And in that role, was second in command for that 250 personnel group. It really was an experience in learning how to deal with fluid, interconnected environments and people. We learned the benefits of putting a local face on a solution, the ability to triage problems and then sometimes and instances people themselves to solve and render aid to the most pressing ones first. We learned to pool and then task resources, use data and intelligence, human intelligence, to drive operations, and I think a lot of the same learned skill sets have a unique applicability to the agricultural sector. I was fortunate enough to bring everybody home Christmas time of that year to where I then transitioned my last two years in the service in instructional capacity. Got selected to teach it a couple of the Marine Corps’ more rigorous schools. And in that capacity, formally lectured class sizes from 80 to 250, etc. The unique thing, I think, is that in the final school I was at, it was very infantry-specific, but at its foundation, was rooted in how to train and evaluate leadership skills in uncertain and dynamic environments. Not that dissimilar in many ways to what we just., or are currently going through.

And so I think a lot of these skill sets are and will be applicable within the private agricultural sector as we as a firm or aiming to try to transfer some of these skills to investment funds, accelerators, private equity groups, to help them build out the objective measures they need to evaluate, for example, leadership or unity or cohesiveness.

A couple of years before I left, so I left in the summer of 2014, but a couple of years before I left, our family felt like we were being kind of called to maybe walk a different path, one that was more entrepreneurial in nature and separate from military service. Coincidentally, this was also at a time in our lives where we were looking to invest in something tangible, uncorrelated that had appreciative value and was also geographically diversified outside the US. So we had previously and successfully invested and exited a more raw land type development project in the region in Latin America in 2010- 201 time frame. So we understood the region, but we had never really considered the production side of agriculture before as an investable asset class. So this sort of epiphany set us off on what would best be described as a couple of years’ worth of desktop research into all regions of the world that could support long-term demand requirements on ag and had under-valued potential. What we found through that research was that Latin America, at least foundationally, met many of these criteria, but having invested in it before we understood the challenges of putting capital to work in a foreign country without boots on the ground experience and a network, and the regionally-specific support. So we said we need to go see us for ourselves, and in the early part of 2015, my wife and our three boys, who at the time were four years old, two years old, and six months old, executed a six-month, six-country due diligence strip down in the Latin America. I think total, we spent traveled about 15,000 miles. Ecuador, Peru, Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, and then finally finished in Panama in August of that same year. We looked at over 100 different assets across the value chain, and we ultimately ended up investing in something, a mixed ag project in the Southern Cone, which we still manage today.

I think in addition to showing the boys that there was this whole world out there that they could explore that had different people and cultures, and that there was more beyond what was in front of them, was really important to us as one portion of that trip. The second was to really build out a network of producers, land managers, financial relationships, which laid the groundwork for AGD Consulting, which I started in 2016. Today, we’re settled back in Northeast Texas. We live on a small subsistence farm ourselves, where we grow and raise most of what we consume: vegetables, leafy greens. We do a lot of what you guys do on the Nuss Farm – like tomatoes, although not to the same extent, obviously. Some fruit trees, we do work in greenhouse production, bees for honey and pollination, we’ve got laying hens ourselves, boilers for poultry, goats for milk and cheese production, pork, cattle for beef, and we really try to do as much of that in-house as we can. We butcher and process all of our own animal protein, store and can and manage all of land ourselves, and so it’s very much a way of life for us.

Tim: Wow, there’s so much to get into here. What an amazing background. And first off, thank you for your service. That’s incredible to hear your story and background there, and I guess to start, there’s so many things you brought up, which I think could be podcast episode in and of themselves, but maybe talk to us about this initial investment that got you started, maybe talk to us about how you got that in first investment going that led into AGD.

Mike:  We had always kind of looked at the geographical, the benefits of geographical diversification, and we knew that we had some criteria that we had built: tangibly, un-correlation, the ability to appreciate, but we never really connected the dots before until we had started just reading about the region and looking around, and we made our first trip down into Ecuador in, like I said 2010/2011 timeframe, and said, “this is a phenomenal region, it’s a phenomenal culture, the people here are fantastic, there is underutilized, undervalued potential, etc. There’s a lot of opportunity here and so that first investment was more of a kind of “get your feet wet”, there were some other co-investors, there’s less production, more development, but we were able to navigate some of those initial challenges of bringing capital overseas, putting it to work in a foreign jurisdiction, it was easier because it’s the US Dollar in Ecuador like it is here. So we wanted to do that process incrementally, and when we had success in that and were able to repatriate some capital and knew that we wanted to put some more back to work, and all of these sort of things and situations, I think divinely kind of united with my time in service coming to an end and us looking to put money to work as a family as well, and this idea about Latin America, so all of these things kind of aligned and then we said, “let’s go check this out for ourselves.” That prompted this diligence trip, which led to the second investment in, its actually down in Argentina.

Tyler: Tell us about… You go on this diligence trip, you obviously have an incredible experience and a successful investment, so talk us through the origin of building that out into your own firm, AGD Consulting.

Mike: It originally started with this idea of offering two services, one being strategic or advisory work and diligence for expedition trips to begin to take investors to showcase them, some of the same opportunities that we found.

So we actually built several, five – seven day all-inclusive trips to Argentina, Uruguay, Ecuador, Chile, and Colombia to both support, showcase and guide retail, high net worth investors into the region to experience it for themselves, and if a client was interested, we then have the network in place already to perform secondary or diligence, help that investor negotiate terms, close, etc.

So we work both of those avenues for over a year, but what we found was that the investors who wanted to put that kind of capital to work themselves or in the region, were the kind of people that wanted to digest those asset themselves. So we had that real market feedback in hand, and at that point, pivoted full-time and exclusively to the advisory services. So today, we are still 100% veteran-owned, strategic advisory firm that services the food, agtech and ag investment sectors globally. Clients typically include asset managers, private equity groups, agtech startups and producers, to which we provide services such as independent due diligence, market access and business development support, strategic partnership, sourcing, and access to capital for early stage and later stage, more institutional type, capital. When we originally started, we were focused heavily on just Latin America as an emerging market, but through the last several years have expanded into other emerging markets, such as Sub-Saharan Africa, parts of Eastern Europe, as well as here in our own backyard in North America, Australia, New Zealand as well.

Tim: Mike, when you look at the industry, maybe talk to us about what trends you’re seeing. You have a pretty interesting perspective evaluating investment opportunities and looking at a lot of businesses besides the one that we started with with the decentralized supply chain. What are you seeing as the highlight this year?

Mike: Domestically or abroad, or collectively

Tim: Maybe lets stick domestically in the US market

Mike: I think that the challenge is still the noise. There are so many new technology companies coming to market today and it is becoming more and more challenging for farmers to extrapolate out what’s the most unique and what would be the most applicable for them. Your discretionary incomes to be able to adopt that technology from a hardware standpoint, in today’s commodity cycle being towards the bottom with corn, wheat, soy, those kinds of crops, is challenging. So you tend to see, at least from our experience, broader adoption for hardware in sectors that have more margin in which to be able to deploy that capital, permanent crop space, for example, tree nuts, stone fruits, perennials, those kinds of crops are more able to adopt newer technology, at least hardware technologies, because they have a wider margin in their cost structure to be able to free up some of that cash. Farm management services and platforms, software as a service, data management, these kinds of models that have revenue basis around subscriptions or monthly participation; those tend to be in a little easier to adopt in smaller-margin producers just because they can execute it in a trial way and really kind of prove it out for themselves. Marketplaces are there, but there are some nuances depending on which kind of sub-sector with ag you want that marketplace to go in, but those are certainly at present nor do I think they’re going away any time soon. But in my mind, the biggest trend is still this somewhat of a disconnect between what the technology can do for the end user and which end user your targeting, and I think a lot of that message is lost because the economic, either economic value to the producer is not clearly articulated or the efficiencies that can be gained from that adoption aren’t readily apparent. You can’t just create a technology for the sake of creating a technology that doesn’t solve a real problem, and producers have real problems, but they want to know how that technology can either make them more efficient, save them money, or make them money. So, if technology companies can focus that economic and efficiency message to a specific target market in terms of what’s the return on this upfront investment in dollars or time, how quickly can they recoup that upfront cost if it’s a hardware adoption?

And so we still have to try to cut through some of this noise with a more clear message to the end user. It’s getting better, but I think we still have some work to do.

Tyler: 100%. I think you nailed it at the end there, about how it’s hard to find the sweet spot in terms of the technology that you provide and the value to the farmer, just because, to your point, I even think about my Dad right now, just how much he has going on on the farm, and it’s just a head down one day to the next, solving problems in real time, and it’s so hard to come in and convince someone like our Dad of technology, if there’s not that clear real-time feedback and value presented and you clarify it was either time or money.

So I think that’s so true, and I feel like there’s been probably the exception rather than the rule of companies that are able to really hit that sweet spot, so… I definitely agree.

Mike, maybe talk us through some of the challenges you’ve faced building this firm. You started this from scratch, and obviously you had some connections in the space, how have thing has been so far? And how have you scaled?

Mike: I would say those challenges have been many, but I would not say they have been unique to us. I think almost every start-up experiences these in some form or fashion, where you’ve got months of uncertainty about when that next client may come. You are trying to decide between spending revenue on growth of the business, putting some of that away for future uncertainties or just providing a living for your family, trying to stand out amongst other consultancies in our case, the Deloittes, the McKenseies and those kinds of groups, and trying to find the opportunity, and that’s really what I think it boils down to for us in terms of challenges, is just the opportunity to get in front of a potential client and communicate the story. It’s not even about at that point converting that prospect into a client, it’s just the opportunity to present the case, right? In some cases, that’s all you ask for. So that’s really been… I think if I had to sum it up would be one of our biggest challenges today, it’s just kind of that opportunity. If I’m going to look at scale from how we kind of built it, I would first maybe point out the marketing efforts that we tried originally. We did some targeted Facebook work early on, late 2016, early 2017, but that was at the point where we were still trying to reach two audiences, basically – groups that needed advisory services and people that wanted to take diligence trips. And so we were using Facebook to target retail and high net worth investors who were going to potentially do these kinds of trips, but it wasn’t the right audience. We should have been targeting the advisory side of things, and we should have been doing it on LinkedIn and not Facebook, it just wasn’t the right method of outreach for our group.

I’ve then just started writing to whomever would listen or read. It first started with me in the Marine Corps, I wrote an article on the way out about values and the underpinning of those values as a service, it’s a topic for a different conversation, but it really opened a door for me.

When we were in Latin America, my wife and I both wrote about our travels for Huffington Post, they had a travel section. So we knew that it was a cost-effective way to get your name and brand out there. So after I started AGD, I focused exclusively on writing industry-specific pieces for as many recognizable publications as I could, Global AgInvesting, both their News feed and their print publication that they give it their conferences, New Ag International, who is one of the larger publication and event organizations in the world on high-tech ag, AgriInvestor – geared more towards PE groups behind a paid firewall, but still a very applicable source, AgFunder who you guys know well, AgTech Nexus. We just tried to get as much information out there about what was going on from our perspective as we could. To date, I think we’ve put out close to 20 different pieces across those platforms, ranging on anything from equity crowdfunding platforms within ag for AgFunder to variable make technology and a contributing author role in an eight-part series for Global Ag News with the investment group out of Canada – Bonnefield.

We’ve got another article that’s going live with a New Ag International later this month on cotton’s reputation as a high consumer of resources, we think making it an ideal candidate for sustainability practices and tech.

We recently started a digital marketing relationship with a group called AgSocial where we’ve addressed a number of SEO issues, we’ve looked at both on and off page link building, focused keyword targeting, and then we began to create our own original, evergreen content for our own News section. We learned that most people were searching for us by our name, so we knew that was something we wanted to capture and maintain, but we also recognized that we needed to do something to capture other parts of that market to begin to grow beyond that. I think that really led us to our two most recent pieces on small-scale farming, amidst COVID, and the veterans in ag piece that we just published.

Tim: Those are all really good insights, and I love the approach of just creating valuable content for ultimately, you’re in clients and getting you in front of more opportunities to continue to grow and scale the business case. Mike as we switch gears here to a section, we call quick takes – What’s your favorite business book and why?

Mike: Oh, let’s see. Tim Ferriss’s Tribe of Mentors is a pretty good. It’s a collection of over 100 different, mini interviews where people to share ideas and habits. There’s a particular lesson there about failure holding chances or having chances in it that if you look for; I think resonated with me a lot. You can control all of the outcomes for people’s response, so set high standards, maintain those and press on.

Tyler: What are you spending too much money on right now?

Mike: Yeah, we are actually in the process of building a house, but we are doing it somewhat unconventional in the sense that my father-in-law and I are doing much of it ourselves- framing electrical, plumbing, interior cabinets, etc. So I’m spending too much money right now on things like wrought iron spiral staircase spindles and pocket doors.

Tim: Yeah. That can definitely add up. I had a landscape architect out last week to give me some pricing on the backyard and it came up pretty high, so I think I’m gonna have to turn into a do-it-yourselfer as well, so I might reach out for some tips and pointers.

Mike: Absolutely.

Tim: What are you not spending enough on?

Mike: date night. Yeah, they are – date night with my wife. They’re piling up at this point, and so I think by the time that everything re-opens, we’re gonna have to go to go to Paris or something. I’m not sure, but not enough at this point on day night.

Tyler: That’s awesome. As we finish this section, what app or tech tool can you not live without?

Mike: Yeah, DeWalt actually makes a Mobile Pro calculator right now that’s been invaluable for me so far in adding and subtracting mixed numbers for length, area conversion, slopes, those kinds of things. I would be two weeks behind with pen and pencil math, or paper and pencil math, if it wasn’t for that calculator app.

Tim: I have not heard that one before, hahah. Mike it’s been an absolute pleasure having you on as we wrap up here, how can listeners get in touch and connect with you?

Mike: Our website is www.desaconsultingllc.com or you can shoot me an email at michael@desaconsultingllc.com.

Tyler: Awesome, this has been a ton of fun, Mike, really appreciate the time. Thanks for being with us.

Mike: My pleasure, guys. Anytime.

—————–

Tyler: So, Time, what did you think?

Tim: It was a really fun episode with Mike. He’s got such an amazing background, I really loved hearing him talk about his military experience and how that translates into his day job with agriculture, and I think really looking at the trends around COVID, whether it’s the emergence of smaller farms and self-sustaining victory farms, and also how ag tech and must find a new niche with these smaller scale operations to go to market.

Tyler: Yeah, I think he’s just super smart guy. I loved his thoughts on that, and I also… I don’t know if you guys caught it, but he talked a lot about marketing and getting the word out, and I think he’s thinking about that really, really well in terms of doing guest posting, to link back to his website and just find these creative solutions to increase the awareness of what they’re doing with AGD Consulting. So hope you guys got a lot out of it. I know, I sure did. Really appreciate you guys listening.

Tim: So if that will wrap things up here and talk next week

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World Agri-Tech South America Summit

  • Event Dates: July 29-30th, 2020
  • Time: 11am – 4pm Brasilia Time (BRT) (9am to 2pm CDT)
  • Price:    
    Early Bird (expires June 30): USD $195
    After Early Bird: USD $295

AGD Consulting is pleased to be a marketing partner for the virtual WorldAgriTech South America Summit, previously scheduled to be held in São Paulo, Brazil.

Join us live online on July 29-30, 2020 for 1-1 meetings, interactive group discussions, start-up pitches and critical intelligence from industry leaders on how our industry will emerge from the current crisis.

Our expert speaking faculty will present live, before hosting virtual roundtables on new technologies and strategies to achieve a more secure, resilient and sustainable agri-food supply chain:

Key Themes include:

  • Precision Ag: Accelerating adoption of sensors, satellites, drones and imagery
  • Farm Management: New digital platforms driving profitability for farmers
  • AI & Automation: Creating integrated solutions for smarter field systems
  • Soil Health: Innovation in biological crop protection and plant nutrition
  • Animal Health: Optimising animal health and welfare through smart livestock management
  • Animal Feed Innovation: Building sustainability and quality through alternative feeds
  • Agtech and Fintech: Changing our perspective from yield to profits
  • Investment and Incubation: Opportunities for growth in South America’s agtech ecosystem

VIEW THE FULL AGENDA

Over two days of online content and networking, you will have the chance to hear from the leading farm operators, livestock producers, agribusinesses, equipment manufacturers, start-ups and investors in South America – and to meet with them individually in online video 1-1 calls.

With a regional focus while attracting an international delegation, this is a platform where valuable business connections will be made to accelerate the transition of technology from the laboratory to the field.

PLUS: Discover South America’s Most Exciting AgTech Start-ups in our: Technology Showcase

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Small Scale Farming Amidst COVID

An Opportunity for Tech to Reshape the Supply Chain

A silver lining for agriculture amidst the COVID chaos may be closer than you think – in your own backyard.

With traditional ag supply chains disrupted and consumer concerns about empty grocery store shelves on the rise, we wanted to examine this potential opportunity for tech and localized production to reshape the supply chain.

Over the last several weeks, we interviewed six experts from across the value chain, crop, and livestock sectors to gather insight into the impacts of COVID-19 on subsistence, hobby, and small holder farmers across North America. What we found was both anecdotal and concrete evidence of an increasing number of consumers beginning to grow/raise their own food and for those who cannot, an increased interest in producers with shorter supply chains and locally-grown products.

According to Judith Redmond, founding partner for a 450-acre organic farm, Full Belly Farm, in California’s Capay Valley, “Interest in locally-grown, fresh produce has skyrocketed during the crisis.” In a May 10th article by Eric Westervelt from NPR, Redmond commented that “We’ve doubled our Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) box numbers and quadrupled our add-ons like wheat flour, oils like olive, nuts, fruit juices, even yarn.” In the CSA model, members buy a share of a farm’s harvest that gets delivered to them on a regular basis. Sarah Voiland, operator of an organic CSA, Red Fire Farm, in Massachusetts noted that people “don’t want that many hands on their food right now” as supply chains for CSA models generally only include harvest and boxing/packaging before the consumer picks up on site. “In all the time we’ve worked with CSAs, which is several decades, we’ve never seen a surge as quickly as we have of the last few weeks,” said Evan Wiig with Community Alliance with Family Farmers.

This rise in interest in locally-grown food with shorter supply chains has propagated into the sector with the shortest supply chain and closest proximity – our own backyards. 

It’s important to note that what follows is not an effort to paint a comprehensive picture as we are clearly in the early stages of conflict with COVID and the “fog of war” has settled in thick and heavy.

Consumer Growers

We started by asking several experts if they’d seen an increase in the number of consumers beginning to grow/raise their own food and trying to be less resilient on a shuttering supply chain?

Jeremy Stroud
Investment Management Associate
Bonnefield

I have noticed several friends with agricultural degrees or backgrounds spark a newfound interest in fruit and vegetable gardening and small-scale greenhouse operations for local sale. These are mostly [younger individuals in their twenties to forties] who already possess the technical skills to execute on this effectively, and have decided that they now possess the time, land, equipment, and interest to put it into action.


Allison (Grainger) Nepveux
U.S. Grains Council

I do think urban areas are seeing an increase in victory farms [author comment – also called war gardens, the US government encouraged residents to plant victory gardens of vegetables, fruits, and herbs in their private residence and public parks during World War II to not only supplement their own rations, but boost morale]. But, more generally, I think there will be an even more accelerated shift towards resiliency and sustainability in our supply chains, with technology playing a hug role in enabling this progress. I hope that we are able to see more investment in tech that cuts down on labor, helps ensure worker health and safety, and contributes to the progress for more resilient supply chains. I would assume that a rise in impact investing would occur on the backside of this.


Preston Ingram
Relationship Manager
Texas Farm Credit

The best data I have is for backyard chickens. I recently had a neighbor buy chickens who told me the guy he bought them from had sold 2,000 laying chickens in one day while another [vendor]  who sells chickens sold about that many as well [recently].  I think COVID (and the resulting lack of eggs in the store) has made people who have always been interested in chickens realize the benefit of having them in their backyard. It was basically the push they needed towards action.


James Morin
Owner and Founder
Kipling Ridge Farms

We have had as much interest in our meats as we have from folks looking to buy piglets, calves, and laying hens to raise themselves. We have also seen an increase in those looking to garden for the first time, in addition to fruit trees. There is a balance between concern over supply chains and wanting to support more local businesses.


A More Resilient Supply Chain

As Allison alluded to, this move towards resilient and shorter supply chain as well as a rise, at least anecdotally, in backyard gardens could present an opportunity for broader agtech and regenerative farming adoption. We asked the experts their thoughts:

Jeff Caldwell
Content Marketing Manager
Lessing Flynn

I have seen a rise in the interest in regenerative practices across the board. The challenge is connecting those practices at the farm level to consumer demand for general sustainability. I think one thing that the COVID-19 situation has done is expose some vulnerabilities in our food system and supply chain. It’s an amazing system, but some of the efficiencies and “just in time” supply chains for products like pork have led many to look to smaller, less centralized food processing facilities around the country as a way to enable subsistence or smallholder farmers to do more for themselves and their neighbors. A hog farmer told me [a couple weeks ago] that he’s had phone calls from consumers in 15 states asking about securing pork supply, but he doesn’t have the processing capability himself, and small processors and community meat lockers/butchers are in such high demand that many have waiting lists months long. So, a general decentralization with smaller processors around the country could help better sustain smallholder producers to create strong supply chains.


Connie Bowen
Founder and Executive Director
The Yield Lab Institute

Well, could be, but I tend to disagree. Subsistence farmers tend not to have large discretionary spending options, so it’s difficult to buy new tools. Regenerative practices might be adopted slightly more (rotational grazing, etc), but not in a way that can be efficiently monitored/measured for actual environmental benefits (ie: carbon sequestration, soil health, water use, run-off implications, fertilizer applications, and pesticide applications.)


Ingram – Texas Farm Credit

The right person will latch on to the idea of learning what technology has to offer as well as the intricacies of raising a crop. One underlying goal for any small farmer would be freedom. They need a system in place that allows them to work on their crops or livestock when they are able to, but also gives them the freedom to leave on vacation, [for example] and now worry if there is death or damage. This system is certainly more possible today than ever.


Ingram himself is currently researching available livestock tech to outfit on cattle to provide him both freedom of maneuver while maintaining insight into his animal’s health.

As a subsistence farmer myself in northeast Texas with a variety of vegetable and brassica crops, livestock, and greenhouse produce, I agree with the sentiment that an attractive component of agtech adoption is the freedom to continue a more subsistence-based way of life without it consuming all of our time and resources.

Morin – Kipling Ridge Farm

There is a huge learning curve so there will be a ready market for things to make that easier from the agtech perspective. For the regenerative side, as people begin to have a closer connection to their food again (doesn’t get any closer than growing it yourself), they will want to be sure they are growing in the healthiest way possible. Wide open door for regenerative to take a foot hold.


Smallholder Farms as a Market for AgTech

We believe that despite the opportunities for adoption, smallholder farmers have historically not been the target customer market for agtech companies as this market is too disaggregated, lacking in scale, and generally not commercially-oriented. We asked our experts about the possibility of aggregating this class of growers in a meaningful way to increase adoption.

Ingram – Texas Farm Credit

There are three main factors here. First are the two mentioned above. This is a hobby, and technology could bring an appealing facet to that hobby. Next, technology could help the grower have the freedom they need to raise a healthy crop and still go on vacation. Last, one concept I can see working to slightly commercialize subsistence farming is similar to a CSA in neighborhoods.

Certainly not everyone in the neighborhood would enjoy the hobby of growing a garden, but those that did could raise and sell to their neighbors. The CSA model will never be a huge revenue generator, but it could potentially pay for a hobby farm. If you could create a system around this that met the above goals and was structured in such a way that it had a relatively low barrier to entry, I could see much wider adaptation of this in the next few years.


Caldwell – Lessing Flynn

I think the smallholder farmer right now doesn’t have the revenue potential or scalability to justify spending on ag tech. The necessity of financial viability makes it difficult to target the development and marketing of products to such a market.

It’s a call for some kind of efforts to create cooperatives or business entities that provide smallholder farmers more purchasing power when it comes to technology that can bolster production and output. I think something like a smallholder farmer cooperative encompassing enough members to create some purchasing power can directly connect with ag tech companies to create a value chain that can be financially beneficial to both parties. It’s a strategy that’s historically enabled farmers to access things like crop inputs at costs that wouldn’t be possible if they were doing it alone.

And I think it can work for ag technology today; there’s a mutual hunger in agriculture right now — farmers want technology to be more productive, and tech companies want customers. The money required to make that connection remains the main hindrance.


Morin – Kipling Ridge Farms

I understand the sentiment – but I think tech in general is becoming more accessible, so I don’t see it as a barrier. That being said, we don’t employ much of it ourselves and we certainly aren’t a subsistence farm – we just haven’t seen the need for it as of yet.


Nepveux – U.S. Grains Council

I do think there is a distinction between digital ag technologies and ag breeding technologies. Things like biotech are often adopted by smallholder farmers (when governments are open to these innovations) because they are size and scale neutral. [This] hasn’t always been the case for digital ag tech, like robotics, machineries, tracing technologies, etc. The front-end investment has been too high.


Bowen – The Yield Lab Institute

That’s part of the reason.  The bigger reason (and this is the same driver, probably, of the fact that VCs tend to invent further downstream) is that money follows opportunities to make more money.

I also think that measurability is a big factor here – digital tech is useful and valuable largely as an aggregator of data, and biological/mechanical tech is difficult to get to market without having the pre and post implementation measurements provided by digital tech (chicken & egg problem.) It’s difficult enough to measure impact of various technologies on large scale farms where everyone speaks one language and has access to WiFi.

I think that the oft-cited “fact” that subsistence farmers aren’t commercially oriented reflects societal bias against poverty more than it reflects reality. Mindsets can shift when space is given for said mindsets to shift. There are ways to aggregate smallholder farmers, but none of them are easy.


Stroud – Bonnefield

Generally ag-tech firms will aim to achieve a specific economy of scale that caters towards large and medium sized farm operations. This is particularly the case for ag-tech companies with a hardware installation component, because the initial CapEx may be amortized over a greater base of acres.

Against this backdrop, I believe that some of the winners in the ag-tech space over the next year will offer SaaS platforms for farm management, labor reduction and perhaps localized digital marketplaces.

On the other hand, large-scale commodity farmers I’ve spoken to are more hesitant to invest in significant, non-essential CapEx projects currently as the continuation of the coronavirus and social isolation create uncertainty for soft commodity markets and therefore future farm incomes.


The Impact of COVID

Many believe COVID-19 will have both positive and negative impacts on the smaller farmer in the coming months.

Ingram – Texas Farm Credit

In the coming months, actually, I would assume people will start moving back towards their old life. There has never been a better time than now to market agtech at a subsistence level than right now. Until the next crisis, subsistence farming will decrease in popularity over the coming year assuming we work our way out of these supply chain issues.


Caldwell – Lessing Flynn

I think the COVID-19 pandemic will cause increased interest in consumers raising their own food where they can if concerns remain about our country’s food supply chain. We’re a nation that’s become accustomed to having easy access to an incredible diversity and quantity of food, and meeting those diverse, specific needs may increasingly become a matter of consumers producing exactly what they want and need. On a broad scale, adopting that sort of trend will require changes in how food is raised, distributed, processed and sold in this country. And that will be no small effort. I suspect the pandemic will cause continued panic-buying as a knee-jerk reaction to occasional disruptions in food availability. Empty grocery store shelves will continue to fuel angst, and smallholder farmers and local food systems could see increased opportunity in connecting directly to consumers if that angst continues.


Morin – Kipling Ridge Farms

That’s a big question, but it’s pertinent as we are just starting to see some of the effects on the food supply chain. This will have long lasting impact on pricing and availability of inputs (seeds/starter plants/livestock/tools etc). A lot of people will be looking for not only knowledge, but practical items that may be in short supply – all the while dealing with a food supply chain that may be breaking down. In certain areas (such as ours), we are seeing a surge in demand for laying hens, without any forethought as to what will happen to these birds come winter (we are four hours north of Toronto…winter is a serious issue for livestock farmers, subsistence or otherwise.)


Stroud – Bonnefield

The average commute for a North American is about twenty-seven minutes each way, which equates to an additional four and a half hours each week based on five days of work. Most small-scale farmers I converse with are currently working remotely, and many now have additional capacity to spend on their farms or in their communities.

Creativity and innovation have a tendency to spark during times of excess capacity, particularly for platform-based technology, minor efficiency improvements and paradigm-shifting software. This comes in contrast with the immense, slow-moving, and often academic R&D mammoth that has been steadily progressing agricultural productivity since the turn of the nineteenth century.


Conclusion

This trend is still in its infancy and will continue to evolve as consumer preferences adapt to the downstream impacts of COVID on their store shelves. The longevity of interest in hobby farming today remains to be seem as traditional supply chains settle in to a new COVID “normal”. What is clear today is that opportunities are present to adopt both technology solutions and sustainable farming practices for the right grower with a bias for change and innovation.

If you found this article interesting, please consider sharing with your audience or subscribing to our newsletter to be informed of future blog posts.

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New Ag International: Future Ag Sustainable Goals

We’re pleased to announce that our Founder/Managing Director, Michael DeSa, will be participating as a panelist at the New Ag International conference September 15th-16th 2020 at the Hilton San Diego Mission Valley, San Diego, California.

The conference will offer dual tracks: biological and precision ag while keeping an eye on the bigger picture of sustainable agriculture. Rarely do you get such a diverse group of ag experts together to discuss everything from integrated pest management to agricultural investing within precision ag and agtech.

At a time when collective minds are needed to solve some of the most pressing issues within the ag supply chain, New Ag International aims to bring together some of the brightest and most innovative minds to begin to tackle these unprecedented challenges.

Michael will be a panelist on Day 2, Wednesday September 16th at 15:10 titled: Strengthening Communication and Sense of Community between Farmers and Growers. He will be joined by Brad Fruth – Director of Innovation for Becks Hybrid, Jeff Caldwell – Content Marketing Manager for Agriculture for Lessing-Flynn, and Mariana Vasconcelos – Founder of Agrosmart, Brazil.

The discussion will center around addressing farmer concerns in adopting new technologies and minimizing the gap between technology providers and producers.

We hope you can join us!

Visit the conference website for more information or download the agenda by clicking the link below.

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Veterans in Agriculture | Tools to a Different Trade

The pathway for veterans into production agriculture has garnered greater attention in recent years. Emerging science shows that agricultural professions, especially those that touch the dirt, have positive mental health benefits for military veterans wresting with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) or other combat related injuries. It gives us a sense of purpose that we may have lost following active duty service; that we are a part of something bigger than ourselves and helping to support a greater good.

With as much value as the dirt and the community provide to veterans, we believe veterans return just as much to the agricultural industry in terms of unique skill sets, innovation, and entrepreneurship. This article aims to shed light on the ‘soft skills’ military veterans bring to the agricultural sector. Their keen sense of how to operate in uncertain situations without a single-set solution is especially applicable in today’s COVID environment where ag supply chains have been severely disrupted and no one is certain what lies ahead.

Military veterans have a learned ability to triage and solve the most pressing issue first. Agtech start-ups, private equity funds, and agribusinesses are facing a slew of problems right now: labor shortages, plant closures, supply chain disruptions, worker safety, deployment of capital, etc. Through layered and intentionally complicated training scenarios and combat-related experiences like mass casualty situations and complex ambushes, veterans have developed a unique ability to rapidly triage a host of problems, identify the most significant one first, and work to solve it given the resources at hand. They’ve learned to deploy other assets within their command to minimize the impact of the remaining problems long enough until direct focus can be applied. It is never a perfect solution, but in the midst of uncertainty, it doesn’t have to be.

Military leaders often hold high levels of responsibility and authority over resources (personnel, property, and budgets) as junior ranking members. At 26 years old, in combat in Afghanistan, I was second-in-command for a 250-personnel organization, directly accountable for nearly 2,500 individual pieces of serialized gear worth more than US$40MM spread across a battlespace of 350 square kilometers and 15 partnered positions. I had to learn to lead in a way that inspired instead of required in order to instill trust and confidence if I ever hoped of managing this responsibility. I was also evaluated regularly on my performance in this role through a well-defined set of criteria (character, leadership, intellect, effectiveness under stress, etc). This level of responsibility and regular evaluation early in life has cemented in many military veterans key leadership and operational principles that are attractive to many companies within the ag sector.

Veterans of combat theaters, particularly those with a counterinsurgency mission, understand both the challenges and benefits of putting a local/partnered face on a solution. In Afghanistan, we wanted the local security forces to take ownership of their own protection, which is why we often put them in a position to spearhead their own offensive operations. With our tactical support, they understood the regional dynamics better than we ever could, and therefore, intuitively knew how to respond in different cultural situations.

This same practiced nuance of understanding regional dynamics is a skillset veterans can bring to the agricultural sector. For accelerators, venture capital groups, and private equity firms evaluating a company for investment, managers need to ensure targeted portfolio companies understand and have experience with the local nuances of where they plan to operate. Ag is very regional, so just because an operator has experience in that asset class in one region does not mean it transfers to a different region. Along the same vein, agtech start-ups need to understand the “deployment region” potential capital providers have experience operating within. A California-based, historically tech-focused venture capital firm who says they’re interested in agtech may not understand the agronomic considerations and seasonality timelines of ag in the Midwest.

During the due diligence phase of the investment process, evaluating management teams can be incredibly challenging – how do you put measurable, objective parameters around subjective soft skills like integrity, execution ability, unity, and grit? Military veterans, especially those who served in an instructional capacity, are particularly skilled at evaluating leadership abilities and team functionality. During my last two years in the Marine Corps, I served as an instructor at the Infantry Officers Course, one of the more rigorous schools in the service where our primary goal was to train, educate and evaluate new infantry officers. We placed them in stressful, uncertain situations (much like today amidst COVID-19) and evaluated how well they accomplished a series of tasks and led their peers. Individual character and leadership talent are regularly revealed when an individual is stressed, then forced to act. For investment funds and ag accelerators looking for their next portfolio company or investment opportunity, watch how a team and its leader respond in today’s environment; it will tell you volumes about who they are and how likely they are to succeed. For example:

  • Do they have a cool, calming presence (video of an emergency recon team extraction under hostile fire in Vietnam)
  • What do they do when the situation makes their plan irrelevant and they’re forced to react?
  • Do they put their subordinates before themselves?
  • Is the leader and the team “coachable”?
  • Do they understand small team dynamics – close trust, shared responsibility, pull together during adversity?


In Nassim Taleb’s Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life, he contests that “skin in the game” is necessary for commercial efficiency and risk management, something private equity investors and fund managers know well. A 2019 white paper – Do Veterans Make Better Entrepreneurs?authored by Veteran Ventures Capital, a Tennessee-based venture capital investment fund and advisory firm servicing veteran-affiliated businesses, notes that vets have experience putting their own “skin” on the line on the battlefield and understand their decisions have impacts beyond the first-order. Most veterans acknowledge the gap between putting their own life on the line and risking financial stability, but the thought process associated with incorporating secondary and tertiary effects into the decision-making cycle doesn’t leave us when we leave the service. It becomes an embedded ethos present in every facet of our lives.

The challenges of operating in agriculture and the “Enemy” share many commonalities – fluid, unpredictable, influenced by a variety of factors, interconnected, etc. Veterans have developed a set of skills, trialed through rigorous training and refined in battle, that are more applicable today than ever before to agribusinesses, start-ups, investors and accelerators as they try to navigate the complex and disrupted theater of ag.

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AGD Consulting Adds Agricultural and Socio-Economic Expert in Africa

Texas, USA – AGD Consulting, a US-based, strategic advisory and business development firm servicing the agricultural and resource sectors in emerging and OECD markets, announces the addition of a Senior Associate to provide agricultural and socio-economic support for the African continent.

Solomon Tiruneh Abebe joins AGD Consulting to lead and support new business development, agricultural economic evaluations and policy and social strategic advisement.

Senior Associate – Solomon Tiruneh

“AGD Consulting recognizes the opportunity and need for agricultural and social development support within Africa,” says Michael DeSa, AGD Consulting’s Founder/Managing Director. “Solomon brings a unique and proven set of skills necessary to support social development initiatives within the continent. His agricultural economics background ideally equip him to advise companies and investors as to the feasibility and potential of agricultural opportunities throughout the region.”

As a Senior Associate and Project Manager, Solomon will lead business and social development projects. His strong country-specific expertise and socio-economic experience with large NGOs and multi-nationals including USAID, FAO and the World Bank will be invaluable to clients seeking to navigate the African agricultural and business landscape. Solomon has spent more than 12 years working in research and consultancy in agriculture, natural resource management, social studies and other cross-cutting issues as a lead researcher, M&E expert, and development practitioner internationally.

Prior to joining AGD Consulting, Solomon served in a variety of associative and consultative capacities within Zambia, Ethiopia, Kenya, Jordan, and Switzerland specifically. Solomon has worked on behalf of organizations like the Department for International Development, Swiss Development Cooperative, University of Oxford and the International Centre for Agricultural Research in Dry Land Areas. Solomon is fluent in English and Amharic, married with two young children, and currently resides in Ethiopia.

Solomon can be reached at solomon@desaconsultingllc.com.