Tag: ag

#92 – Carnation Farms – Brian Pugh – US Marine Corps

Vets In Ag Podcast
Vets In Ag Podcast
#92 – Carnation Farms – Brian Pugh - US Marine Corps
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From Marine Corps logistician to champion of regenerative agriculture — Brian Pugh’s journey is one you don’t want to miss.🌱

In this conversation, Brian shares how family gardens, his time in Okinawa’s Blue Zone, and a growing concern for food as medicine led him to leave the service and dive headfirst into healing our food system from the soil up.

He’s now leading the Service to Soil program at Carnation Farms, a SkillBridge initiative helping transitioning veterans gain hands-on experience in regenerative farming, crops, livestock, and building community in ag.

If you’re a veteran curious about farming, interested in soil health, or just love stories of purpose-driven transitions — this one’s for you.

Listen now to hear:

  • Why regenerative ag is critical for national security & veteran transitions
  • How one farm is creating real pathways for the next generation of veteran farmers
  • Breadcrumbs that led Brian from logistics to leading Soil Stewards

Enjoy!

#carnationfarms #ServiceToSoil #VetsInAg #RegenerativeAgriculture #VeteranFarmers #SkillBridge #FoodAsMedicine #MilitaryToFarm #SoilHealth

#91 – Land At Home Project – Barry Taylor & Emma Cashman

Vets In Ag Podcast
Vets In Ag Podcast
#91 – Land At Home Project – Barry Taylor & Emma Cashman
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Today’s guests are Barry Taylor and Emma Cashman — the co-founders of the Land At Home Project, a nonprofit built on the simple but evidence-backed premise that veterans need a renewed sense of purpose and America needs new farmers and ranchers.

Barry grew up on a small ranch in rural southeastern Arizona — the kind of place where summers meant fence work and cattle, the kind of work you couldn’t wait to leave until you were old enough to realize what it imparted in you. His career took him through emergency medicine, nursing, and eventually hospital administration before landing him in a civilian consulting role with Navy Medicine Western Region.

Emma grew up in Toronto and a very early age, fell in love with horses. She spent much of her early childhood learning horsemanship before moving to Arizona when she was in college. While finishing her undergraduate degree in nursing, she met her husband who was an active duty airman in the Air Force. She went on to get her master’s degree in public health before spending years working across flight medicine and public health at military bases in Italy and San Diego, then ultimately joining Barry at Nav Med West. There, the two of them started connecting the dots between military service and agriculture over coffee while both working as infection prevention and control nurses.

What they landed on is something Emma articulates in a way I’ve never heard described before:

“Agriculture is full of these imperatives — you must get up to feed the animals, there’s just no way around that. Coming from a very structured life in the military, where there are lots of things that you must do, and then going to the free-for-all of civilian life can be very challenging. Having an occupation that’s full of these imperatives is helpful — it gives structure in a non-rigid way.”

In this episode, I want you to listen for a few key themes:

  1. Emma’s expert review of the peer-reviewed, evidence-based case for why agriculture and military service are a documented fit — not just intuition, but data;
  2. How Land At Home’s three-part model of education, internship, and mentorship was built by studying what other programs were missing; and
  3. A conversation about the One Health framework — and why food security, veteran mental health, and rural community revitalization could actually be the same problem wearing three different hats.

Enjoy!

#85 – Arizona State University & Carbon Cowboys – Peter Byck

Vets In Ag Podcast
Vets In Ag Podcast
#85 – Arizona State University & Carbon Cowboys - Peter Byck
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“Agriculture is an act of peace. Well-fed people really don’t feel like fighting, but unfed people will do anything to feed their family.”

Peter Byck is a Professor of Practice at the Schools of Sustainability and Cronkite School of Journalism at Arizona State University, President of Carbon Cowboys, and documentary filmmaker.

Peter’s work sits at the intersection of military readiness, national security, and regenerative agriculture.

His journey involving the military and agriculture started with a simple question: why are we putting our military in harm’s way to protect resources we could be producing differently at home?

That led him from documenting renewable energy at forward operating bases to his latest work: a four-part docu series called Roots So Deep You Can See the Devil Down There, which documents a multi-million-dollar research project comparing conventional and regenerative grazing.

But Peter’s story doesn’t stop at the farm gate. In his newest film,  camp AMP, he follows US Army Major Eric Czaja and wife Angela, as they show how regenerative grazing inside a military installation can improve mission readiness while simultaneously creating pathways for veterans transitioning back to civilian life.

In this conversation, we talk about how regenerative agriculture connects to military preparedness, why well-fed populations create more stable societies, and how scaling these practices across the military isn’t just good for farming – it’s good national security strategy.

Enjoy!

#84 – Arizona State University – Alicia Ellis (US Air Force)

Vets In Ag Podcast
Vets In Ag Podcast
#84 – Arizona State University – Alicia Ellis (US Air Force)
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Today’s guest is Alicia Ellis—a US Air Force veteran whose work goes well beyond farming as a lifestyle choice. Alicia has spent her career thinking about systems: how food is produced, how it moves, who controls it, and what happens when those systems fail. And for her, agriculture isn’t separate from national defense—it’s foundational to it.

As Alicia puts it,

“Food security is national security.”

In this episode, we talk about why resilient food systems matter for military readiness, how agriculture fits into broader national security conversations, and why veterans are uniquely positioned to see those connections.

Alicia shares how her experience in uniform shaped the way she approaches agriculture—not just as production, but as infrastructure that supports communities, installations, and the nation as a whole.

This is a conversation about preparedness, risk, and responsibility—about why food deserves a seat at the national security table, and why veterans belong in that conversation.

Enjoy!

#82 – Nate Hankes (US Army) – Apogee Instruments

Vets In Ag Podcast
Vets In Ag Podcast
#82 – Nate Hankes (US Army) – Apogee Instruments
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Today’s guest is Nate Hankes – US Army drone operator turned soil scientist then sales engineer at a cutting-edge agricultural sensor manufacturer.

Nate spent 14 months in Baghdad during the 2007 troop surge, watching chaos unfold from a screen thousands of feet above, feeling both omniscient, at times, and impotent. He came home carrying a weight of the war he didn’t know he had, spent nine years writing a book to process it, and took five months to hike the Appalachian Trail to figure out who he was after the uniform came off.

As Nate says,

“I called it the Bagdad hangover. I lost a decade of my life to it.”

His path into agriculture wasn’t some romantic calling—it was practical advice from his dad during the Great Recession and a college program that didn’t require calculus.

But somewhere between a Monsanto internship at an Idaho phosphate mine, graduate research on a selenium-accumulating plant that killed livestock, and learning hydroponics in a Bob Marley-playing, barefoot California office, Nate found something he didn’t expect:

Purpose through Science.

Now he’s at Apogee Instruments in Utah, working with researchers and growers who are trying to do everything from grow plants in space to monitor the distribution of light in their greenhouses. The company was founded by his former graduate advisor, Dr. Bruce Bugbee, who’s been manufacturing high-fidelity environmental sensors for nearly 30 years.

In this conversation, we get into:

  • The moral weight of remote warfare
  • Leadership failures that push good people out, and
  • Why the precision of measuring photons matters when you’re trying to feed people

Nate doesn’t sugarcoat the hard parts, and he’s not interested in wrapping his military service in nostalgia. He’s just trying to do work that matters.

Enjoy!

#73-Kara Rutter (US Army) – Project Victory Gardens – Part 2

Vets In Ag Podcast
Vets In Ag Podcast
#73-Kara Rutter (US Army) – Project Victory Gardens – Part 2
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“We understood that when you start looking at food miles—how far your food has traveled and who’s producing it—and when you realize that there are four companies that control 85% of the animal protein sold in the United States, that’s really concerning to me from a national security standpoint, especially when those companies are not all American-owned”

Today’s episode is Part 2 of our conversation with retired Army Sergeant Major Kara Rutter.

In Part 1, Kara shared her unexpected journey through military service—from insisting on becoming a cook, to cooking for Secretary Rumsfeld, to representing the U.S. military overseas in some of the most strategically important regions of the world. We left off as Kara and her husband Matt had just found their 20-acre farm in Aiken, South Carolina and were beginning to turn their post-military life into something new.

In Part 2, we pick up with a powerful discussion on food systems, national security, and what it could take to localize protein sourcing for military bases. Kara shares her thoughts on decentralizing food supply chains, the vulnerabilities exposed during COVID, and why she sees food as a matter of strategic defense.

We also dive into the creation of Project Victory Gardens, their nonprofit focused on helping veterans become farmers, the success of their “farmer boot camp,” and a deeper look at their new agritourism incubator program.

If you’re interested in how veterans are reshaping agriculture—not just for themselves but for their communities—this episode is for you.

Enjoy!

#28 Kurt Krumm (ARNG) – John Deere

Vets In Ag Podcast
Vets In Ag Podcast
#28 Kurt Krumm (ARNG) - John Deere
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We had to do a lot of things at the lower level, if we wanted to be fast and make a bigger impact

Kurt Krumm is an active-duty Army National Guardsman and the Aftermarket Product Manager for Precision Ag at John Deere.

Kurt’s early life led to a career like many others within ag and the military. He grew up on a farm, surrounded by heavy equipment and veteran family members, instilling in him this need to serve. In this episode, Kurt shares how his experiences as a Battalion Logistics Officer offer him a unique perspective on precision ag adoption and logistics management at John Deere. His time in Kabul, Afghanistan from 2016 to 2017 also instilled in him a sense of what can be accomplished at the lowest levels of leadership, if you empower and trust them.  It’s such a timely perspective given what’s happening there today.

Kurt also shares his perspective on just how far precision ag has come in the last 20 years since he joined the industry, Deere’s acquisition of Bear Flag Robotics, and stepping stones necessary as we move to fully autonomous and AI-enabled equipment operation.

#23 Richard Brion (USN) – Revolution Agriculture

Vets In Ag Podcast
Vets In Ag Podcast
#23 Richard Brion (USN) - Revolution Agriculture
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The core of my ethos became the need to have a constitution to take anything as far as necessary

Our guest this week is Richard Brion, US Navy veteran and CEO for Revolution Agriculture – an ag start-up seeking to reduce the logistics chain of fresh crops through shipping container-sized installations directly on land owners’ farms. Their unique business model aims to capitalize on the growing and decentralized population of small holder farmers and delivery services without adding cost, time, or labor requirements to the land owner.

The ethos Richard developed from his time in the service and defense contracting were originally shaped by some of his military leaders. This ability of these senior leaders to take trying circumstances and use them as opportunities to educate is a unique skill they develop over the years. It certainly stuck with Richard and has become a driving factor in the creation of Revolution Agriculture.

At the very least, you’ll enjoy these wild stories Richard shares from his overseas experiences. As the head of Revolution Agriculture, the technology they’re creating around the re-introduction of soil and pollinators into controlled environments is fascinating and something we’ll for sure continue to follow.

#19 Jed Dunham – Kansas State U.

Vets In Ag Podcast
Vets In Ag Podcast
#19 Jed Dunham - Kansas State U.
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It’s impossible to hide poor work on a farm

Our guest this week is Jed Dunham, a consultant with Kansas State’s Office of Military and Veterans Affairs. After graduating from Kansas State in 1996, Jed spent the next several years working in a variety of industries; from building playgrounds across the Midwest, heavy construction in Montana, coaching lacrosse in Virginia, working to bring veterans into agricultural educational opportunities, and riding a bicycle 4,600+ miles across North America. Once back in Kansas, his background as a historical researcher uncovered an incredible set of stories involving WWI soldiers. This work did more than just bring their lives to light again, it showed how their individual stories told the narrative of an important developmental time in American history.

This collection of stories, which Jed has called 48 Fallen 48 Found, led to the formal dedication of a World War I Memorial Stadium on the campus of Kansas State University in 2017. Jed continues to honor the sacrifices of our past through his work with Kansas State’s State Military Affairs Innovation Center.

Have a listen and weight-in how you think these soldier’s stories can best to told.

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.