Archives: Episode

#14 Jon Jackson (USA) – STAG Vets Inc

Vets In Ag Podcast
Vets In Ag Podcast
#14 Jon Jackson (USA) - STAG Vets Inc
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We only grow in our discomfort

This from our guest this week – Jon Jackson – US Army veteran and Executive Director at STAG Vets Inc – as he described one of their central and differentiated themes. STAG Vets is non-profit organization focusing on acute veterans crisis care using sustainable food production and agriculture as the methodology by which to support veterans struggling with PTSD and other issues. Comfort Farms, named in honor of US Army Ranger Captain Kyle Comfort (KIA May 8th, 2020), is located in central Georgia.

This conversation with Jon solidified for me the manner in which many veterans tell you about their experiences – through story. In the first 15 minutes, we’d been through several stories from his time as a necropsy technician to how seeing research animals dissected on an autopsy table opened his eyes to sacrifice as a sense of service, which is what originally drew him to the military.

What Jon is doing at Comfort Farms is different in the sense that it forces the veteran to look for meaning in their surrounding – in this case agriculture – and to be personally ready to work for themselves through their issues.

Have a listen to find out what Jon is doing and his unique take on behavioral therapy within agriculture

#13 Dawn Breitkreutz (USAF) – Stoney Creek Farms

Vets In Ag Podcast
Vets In Ag Podcast
#13 Dawn Breitkreutz (USAF) - Stoney Creek Farms
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We don’t need to learn new things, we need to learn old things.

This from our guest for this episode – Dawn Breitkreutz with Stoney Creek Farms – as she describes how we should approach the adoption of regenerative practices. These are essential old practices, she describes, that were used by our parents and grandparents to farm. We don’t need to necessarily learn new methodologies or technologies, but rather we need to become familiar again with the practices of our past.

Dawn is a US Air Force Veteran and Co-Founder of Stoney Creek Farms along with her husband Grant. Along Minnesota River near Redwood Falls, Minnesota, Dawn and Grant have converted a conventional crop and cow/calf operation into a multi-enterprise regenerative family business over the last 20 years.
As an analytical person by nature, Dawn began questioning modern-day practices on their own row crops acres – why are we doing things this how, why do we have to add this chemical product, etc. It was this inquiring nature and a degradation in their farm and livestock operations that caused both her and Grant to stop and think about how they were farming.


Dawn’s gradual and self-motivated approach to change sets a path, I think, that can be followed in a very practical way. It doesn’t have to happen over night nor does it need to be a full reversal right away – change begets change and in this case, small victories gave them the confidence to continue and even start to being veterans into their operation.


I’ll bring you into the conversation as Dawn and I discuss a documentary titled Farmer’s Footprint which centered around Dawn and Grant’s farm as an example of how regenerative practices highlight farming as a complete system and how the student, Dawn, eventually became the teacher.

#12 – Steven Valencsin (USN) – Growers

Vets In Ag Podcast
Vets In Ag Podcast
#12 - Steven Valencsin (USN) - Growers
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You don’t make an excuse, you make a way.

This from today’s guest – Steven Valencsin – as he talks about the last 10+ years starting and scaling a new business in a competitive environment today like agtech. Steven is the CEO for Growers – a software data analytics company designed for the farmers trusted advisors – agronomist, ag retailers, and crop consultants. Growers offers an all-in-one dashboard that allows users to organize all their data into one place, quickly adjust variables, and facilitate recommendations directly to their customer’s farms.

Steven shares one of the most articulated and executable examples of how veterans can translate a certain soft skill into an industry where they have no precedent experiences. It doesn’t take any special equipment, circumstance, or software; merely a strong initiative and a drive to improve. 

I want you to listen in this episode to the approach Steven has taken with Growers in partnering with the farmer’s trusted advisor rather than creating a tool that attempts to disintermediate them. There are a lot of companies out there today that have chosen this business model, but Steven has made the intentional decision to chose a model of collaboration instead.

Have a listen to his rational and see if you agree with his arguments. Also, be listening for the skill Steven says all veterans have and how it can be practically translated to any industry, including ag.

Episode 11 – Mark Bishop – ACP Capital Markets

Vets In Ag Podcast
Vets In Ag Podcast
Episode 11 - Mark Bishop - ACP Capital Markets
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It was like a knife fight in the closet.

This from our guest today, Mark Bishop, as he described a complex Brazilian farmland assignment they worked on during the height of the financial crisis, which including hiring armed guards to protect the asset.

Mark Bishop is a Managing Director and Partner with Aldwych Capital Partners, a specialized merchant and investment bank focused on cross-border capital raising, M&A, and advisory assignments within the real asset sector. ACP is heavily concentrated within this sector in large scale agribusiness, water, and energy as well as related components of the value chain including transportation, logistics, storage, and power generation. They also work opportunistically in the defense/security and special situations areas.

In this episode, Mark talks about his original involvement with the veteran community in New York and how impressed he was with their innovation and dedication to helping other veterans. My sense is that this was an uncommon virtue within the everyday world of investment banking that Mark immediately lacked onto this and the sense of servitude it demonstrated.


It also speaks to what originally drew Mark to agribusiness and investment banking within the emerging markets in the first place – the sheer complexity of the asset class and how intellectually interesting it was. There are some people who seek the harder problem simply for the challenge and the rigor required to solve them – Mark is one of these people. The harder the problem, the happier he is.

Have a listen as Mark talks about the fog and friction of war is very much something you have to contend with in the business sector, especially if you’re operating in the emerging markets.

Episode 10 – Chris Rawley (USN) – Harvest Returns

Vets In Ag Podcast
Vets In Ag Podcast
Episode 10 - Chris Rawley (USN) - Harvest Returns
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“The good thing was we didn’t know a lot about this field. The bad thing was we didn’t know a lot about this field.”

This from Chris Rawley, CEO for Harvest Returns, as he describes what it was like to start something as new as an equity crowdfunding company in an industry as disaggregated and specialized as agriculture.

Harvest Returns is an equity crowdfunding investment platform connecting both accredited and non-accredited investors with growers looking to raise capital. To date, they’ve raised over $10M for more than 20 different companies across the world – from livestock, specialty and permanent crops, indoor ag to row crops and artificial intelligence-driven ag technologies.

Chris and I have known each other for a number of years, in fact, we got started about the same time, both AGD Consulting and Harvest Returns, back in 2016. I had just returned from a 6-month, 6-country due diligence trip in Latin America and was keenly interested in what Harvest Returns was pursuing in the specialty crop space in Central America.

As we have supported and watched them grow over the years, I’m continually impressed with Chris’s vision for Harvest Returns – not just what they are doing now, but for the kinds of products they can create. I’ve never seen Chris static; he’s always thinking of new ways to innovate and solve increasingly complex problems within ag finance. The fact that they’ve nearly bootstrapped their entire company’s development, which for me as a veteran entrepreneur who has bootstrapped our own firm, gives me a tremendous sense of pride in what the veteran community is capable of.

Chris has been in the Navy for over 30 years now and in every clime and place he’s served, including the deserts of the Middle East and Afghanistan, he’s managed to see agriculture as an integral part of life, national security, and economic development.

Have a listen as Chris describes the veteran’s unique perspective around risk identification and management, distributed command and control, and remote work and what that means in today’s world.

Episode 9 – Brian Grundthner (USA) – Sentera

Vets In Ag Podcast
Vets In Ag Podcast
Episode 9 - Brian Grundthner (USA) - Sentera
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In this episode, we chat with Brian Grundthner, Enterprise Relationship Director at Sentera – an ag analytics company aggregating in-field data from proprietary and 3rd party hardware to provide decision insights to growers.

Brian talks about his time in the Army as a psychological operations expert, deploying all over the world to influence target audiences to achieve strategic objectives. The way he describes the translation of these skills into ag is insightful – he describes it as an ardent focus on the customer and their experience. Rather than influence the target audience, Brian utilizes his skills to truly listen to the customer and determine the root cause of their agronomic and market challenges.

The way he describes the future of ag analytics platforms like Sentera is to think of the growing season like a book – we have a strong first chapter where we understand seed genetics, pre-plant applications, planting rates, emergence, etc AND we know how the story will end in terms of yield prediction and monitoring. What’s missing right now is the middle chapters that guide us into that successful and predictable conclusion.

Finally, Brian notes that everyone defines purpose differently. Listen to find out how Brian found his purpose, and healing, through helping vets in ag.

Episode 8 – Ben Martin (USMC) – Dauntless Wine Company

Vets In Ag Podcast
Vets In Ag Podcast
Episode 8 - Ben Martin (USMC) - Dauntless Wine Company
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“I was white knuckling it down the highway with a 1,000 gallons of wine in my flatbed…”

What you’ll find in this episode with Ben Martin – Founder and Winemaker at Dauntless Wine Co – is a love of education, history, and a spirit of perseverance that often places him in situations like the one described above.

Dauntless is a veteran-owned and operated winery in the Willamette Valley of Oregon whose ultimate mission is to give back to warriors in need by offering them a place to learn about agriculture and an opportunity to heal.

Ben’s story of transition to agriculture is filled with some colorful detours along the way – from driving a truck load of AK-47s and 1,000 gallons of wine down the interstate to a recognition that a first-time job in retail sales following three deployment in a combat arms profession, including the invasion of Iraq in 2003, is probably not a glove fit.

But what always seemed to make sense to Ben was the desire to make his community more resilient through agriculture. This mentality launched Ben into a dauntless journey of problem solving, hand-on education, and the need to continue the veteran’s historical pursuit of agriculture and all the benefits it provides.

I hope you enjoy this episode as Ben describes “wine as bottled history”.

Episode 7 – Craig Ganssle – FARMWAVE

Vets In Ag Podcast
Vets In Ag Podcast
Episode 7 - Craig Ganssle - FARMWAVE
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“I wanted to be a lifer in the Marines…but I was medically discharged with a heart problem…automatic disqualifier…what the hell am I going to do now given these skillsets?”

This was an emotional episode for me as Craig Ganssle – Co-Founder and CEO for FARMWAVE – and I talked about his time in the Marine Corps coming to an expected end, his search for purpose in the private sector, and how his faith guided him throughout. Along that journey, Google Glass makes it’s first appearance within ag and starts Craig down the creation path for FARMWAVE – an artificial intelligence company using proprietary and curated data sets to train algorithms to provide predictive analysis around key agricultural considerations, including harvest loss, pest/disease pressure, and application coverage.

The way he describes his early interaction with producers and how he approached solving their problems is, I believe, the ideal way agtech companies should begin to identify and solve problems with tech in agriculture.

It’s a story which truly highlights the transferability of skill sets from the military to agriculture and in depth review of the incredible advances we’ve made within artificial intelligence and agriculture.

Episode 6: Keith Alaniz (USA)

Vets In Ag Podcast
Vets In Ag Podcast
Episode 6: Keith Alaniz (USA)
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Keith Alaniz is the Co-Founder for Rumi Spice, a producer of high-quality, sustainably farmed saffron from Afghanistan. After graduating from Texas A&M, Keith was deployed twice to Iraq in 2007-2008 as a combat engineer– focused on finding and neutralizing IEDs. Keith talks about how his time at A&M helped shaped his leadership style in a theater of war, but also how he began to recognize that he didn’t fully understand the people or the culture he was trying to protect. So, he made the intentional decision to leave the traditional career path for an Army officer and participate in a specialized Afghan training program where he was equipped with economic, language, and cultural skills focused on rural Afghanistan.

It was directly because of these skills and the trust they built within the community that a local farmer approached Keith with the idea of growing and exporting saffron from Afghanistan to the international market. And the idea for Rumi Spice was born.

Listen as Keith describes a story of persistence, trial and error, and ultimately success as three former US Army officers built Rumi Spice into now the world’s largest exporter of saffron from Afghanistan. It involves knocking on countless doors, the creation of an e-commerce platform, an appearance on Shark Tank, and legitimizing a crop like saffron as an economic and sustainable alternative to poppy cultivation for Afghan farmers.

I hope you enjoy this episode as much as I did!

Episode 5: Bill Ashton (USN)

Vets In Ag Podcast
Vets In Ag Podcast
Episode 5: Bill Ashton (USN)
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My guest today is Bill Ashton, the USDA’s Military and Veterans Agricultural Liaison Program Manager. Bill was born and raised in New York City where he joined the Navy right after high school and spent the next 10 years as an enlisted sailor. Most of his career was spent either onboard or supporting the submarine community.  Following active duty service, Bill continued to service the Navy, this time as a civil servant where he was the Program Manager for the Navy’s Pay and Personnel Program.  After 14 years in this capacity, he then became the Director of Security for Naval Sea Systems Command in Washington DC before joining the USDA in January 2018.  This position was established by Congress in the 2014 Farm Bill with Mr. Ashton serving as the first full-time government employee to hold this job.

We covered a lot of ground in this interview, from how skills Bill learned in the submarine community were brought forward into the ag sector to an overview of the impressive amount of veteran and career-focused initiatives at USDA. This episode is filled with stories of how Bill was plucked from different professions to turnaround and lead groups in completely different fields; a skill set he attributes to his time in the service.

Be sure to listen through to the end of the interview where Bill describes his thoughts on hydroponics aboard submarines; it’s really fascinating.