Tag: agtech

#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!

#80 – Angela Czaja (US Army Reserves) – Regenerative Grazing Open-Air Lab (R-GOAL)

Vets In Ag Podcast
Vets In Ag Podcast
#80 – Angela Czaja (US Army Reserves) – Regenerative Grazing Open-Air Lab (R-GOAL)
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Today’s episode brings you a story that sits right at the intersection of grit, service, and the regenerative future of our military installations. And it starts with a spark—one that Angela Czaja noticed long before the Department of War ever cared about cattle, soil health, or regenerative grazing.

As Angela puts it:
“I saw, even in North Carolina, just this passion that Eric [her husband] had for livestock… this spark about him whenever he was around the livestock… That was just a really special place for him.”

That spark eventually became one of the most unconventional, disruptive, and frankly needed ideas to hit the national security space in decades: using regenerative livestock management as a tool to harden military installations, restore degraded training lands, and create meaningful pathways for transitioning service members.

Angela joins us today to give the inside view—not the thesis version, not the policy deck, but the family-level, marriage-level, move-across-the-country-three-times-with-kids-in-tow version—of what it really took to build what is now the Regenerative Grazing Open-Air Lab at Camp San Luis Obispo.

In this conversation, you’ll hear how a dairy-farm kid from Wisconsin ends up shaping one of the most interesting ag-meets-national-security projects in the country… why livestock became a lifeline of purpose during her husband’s transition from the Army Special Forces… and how their family’s faith, resilience, and service-driven mindset turned a wild idea into a model the Pentagon is now watching closely.

You can also watch the short documentary produced by Peter Byck on YouTube here.

Enjoy!

#29 Kenny Johnson (US Army) – TopYield Ag

Vets In Ag Podcast
Vets In Ag Podcast
#29 Kenny Johnson (US Army) - TopYield Ag
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We built a platform that allows people to sift through the noise and see what the signal is

Kenny Johnson is a combat veteran, certified crop advisory, and co-founder of TopYield Ag, an online community for growers and ag professionals to learn, share ag knowledge, and build an online presence. They offer agribusiness clients moderated online community panels supported by natural language processing and machine learning enabling clients to extract objective insights from anecdotal comments.

Being born at West Point then spending most of the childhood near Fort Benjamin Harrison outside Indianapolis almost guaranteed Kenny’s future in the US Army. He spent 15 months in Afghanistan in 2007 as an artillery officer at a small outpost named Camp Keating, the location for the recent documentary “The Outpost” – which detailed the battle of Kamdesh where the outpost was ultimately overrun in 2009. We talk about his experiences being wounded in Afghanistan and his perspective on recent events. One editorial note – we recorded this interview on August 20th while the Taliban were still seizing control over most of the country, but before the major evacuation efforts began and the 13 service members were killed.

These experiences ultimately led him to recognize food security as a national security issue and guided his post-military service career into agriculture and ultimately to start TopYield. The approach they’re taking on the integration of natural language processing and machine learning to extract data from simple conversations could be a disruptive force to traditional market intelligence gathering.

Have a listen to find out how all of these pieces are connected, what TopYield is all about, and why Kenny thinks we all need to “find our bassoons”.

#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.

#27 Ben Alfi (Israeli Air Force) – Blue White Robotics

Vets In Ag Podcast
Vets In Ag Podcast
#27 Ben Alfi (Israeli Air Force) - Blue White Robotics
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I understood that I needed to create a company that is dealing with how to be part of the revolution of unmanned systems in the ag industry.

Ben Alfi is a veteran of the Israel Air Force and Managing Founder for Blue White Robotics -an Israeli-based agtech company providing what they call Robots-as-a-Service. Blue White’s software platform plans and operates multiple tasks for autonomous air and ground fleets, integrating aftermarket autonomous capabilities into a variety of OEM ag equipment.

Over the course of his military career, Ben spent 25 years in the Israeli Air Force, flying a variety of F16s and unmanned systems. The last 10 years of his service were spent developing and managing the Israel Air Force’s unmanned systems, anything from two pounds to six tons. You’ll hear throughout this episode how influential this time was to the founding of Blue White Robotics and their decision to tackle the agricultural space first. This conversation comes at a great time as much of the talk today in autonomous vehicle operations is around John Deere’s recent acquisition of Bear Flag Robotics and what it means for the industry. We get into Ben thoughts on this as well and how they’re differentiated.

We begin our conversation with Ben at a diner in California as Blue White is currently seeking to build out a footprint in the US. We’ll go anywhere to get our listeners a great story, including a restaurant with some background noise. Our apologies for that, but I think you’ll find this conversation so fascinating that it won’t be an issue.

#26 Willie Hines (USN) – Farmer Veteran Coalition

Vets In Ag Podcast
Vets In Ag Podcast
#26 Willie Hines (USN) - Farmer Veteran Coalition
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Farmer Veteran Coalition is at an intersection – farmers and veterans – where mental health is extremely important.

Willie Hines is a US Navy veteran and Director of Operations for Farmer Veteran Coalition (FVC), a nationally recognized non-profit focused on mobilizing veterans to feed America and transition support for military service members to a career in agriculture. This is our third interview with FVC’s leadership as we seek the highlight their work with vets in ag.

Willie’s early life growing up in a small town in the Midwest resolved him to want to get out and experience the world, so he joined the Navy and become a SEAL, specializing in communications. To hear his description of how far radio communications have come since the early 80s and what we’re able to do both in the military and ag today was fascinating, especially how they used to transmit voice message from places like Kenya back to Virginia.

This episode is filled with stories about submarine lock-outs, public sentiment for service members from Vietnam and today, challenges surrounding the future of plant genetics, and so much more; all from a man who has truly experienced a life’s worth of events in a short period of time.  

The work Willie continues to do with the veteran and ag communities at FVC is truly admirable. I hope you enjoy this episode as much as I did.

#25 Scott Jackman (US Army) – Deveron

Vets In Ag Podcast
Vets In Ag Podcast
#25 Scott Jackman (US Army) - Deveron
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I spent 23 years [as an Army aviator] doing remote sensing where my role was to figure out how to convey information in the best way possible for the decision maker.

Scott Jackman is a US Army veteran and President for the US Division of Deveron, a Toronto-based agtech company using proprietary algorithms, third-party data collection platforms, and teams of agronomists and data scientists to help growers understand and monetize their field variability. We had one of their US sales reps on the show a few weeks ago, Andrew Patrick, another military veteran.

Scott had a unique opportunity with the National Guard at the beginning of his career to experience real-world military service through supporting relief efforts around the ‘93 flood of the Mississippi River. This isn’t something many service members get to do before their formal career begins and it really solidified for Scott a true calling towards service. This then become the next 23 years of his life.

The perspectives he gained over the course of that career as an Army helicopter pilot, his entrepreneurial endeavors following military service, which ultimately led to his current role at Deveron, equipped him with a unique set of skills and appreciation for servant leadership.

Have a listen to find out how all these pieces fit together and to get a better idea of the services offered by Deveron and their goal of turning the physical world into digits.

#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.

#22 Andrew Patrick (USMC) – Deveron

Vets In Ag Podcast
Vets In Ag Podcast
#22 Andrew Patrick (USMC) - Deveron
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I wouldn’t say it’s a distrust, but rather potential customers not understanding who we are and what we do

Our guest this week is Andrew Patrick, Marine Corps veteran and Sales Development Representative at Deveron, a Toronto-based agtech company using proprietary algorithms, third-party data collection platforms, and teams of agronomists and data scientists to provide insights to growers and ag enterprises.

Throughout this interview, you’ll hear Andrew describe the intention with which he made some early decisions in his life – from joining the Marine Corps, to forgoing deployments to continue to pursue his education, to finding a passion early in agriculture through FFA. The thought with which he made some of these difficult decisions early in life has to have some relation to his time in the Marine Corps.

His understanding of the current challenges agtech companies face around trust and education within the farmer community is an important one to recognize and appreciate for client-facing representative like Andrew. While he is new to his career in ag, I hope the freshness of his transition from military service and the decisions he’s made around his chosen career path can be an inspiration to other vets who might currently find themselves in the same place.