Tag: army

#32 Ben Minden (US Army) – Bear Hug Cattle Company

Vets In Ag Podcast
Vets In Ag Podcast
#32 Ben Minden (US Army) - Bear Hug Cattle Company
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I’ll support you in whatever decision you make; just know that you will get fired for it. This was one of the coolest 10 seconds…

Our guest this week is Ben Minden, former US Army Ranger and Founder of Bear Hug Cattle Company – a non-profit providing veterans with the resources, technical knowledge and network support for those interested in a career in the ranching industry. Through their 10-week immersive course, transitioning service members gain confidence in horsemanship, ranch tasks, basic ranch economics, and field training at historical operational ranches across the western US.

Despite growing up in the suburbs of New Jersey, Ben became an avid fisherman and hunter, although he admits he never ate the fish out of the New Jersey river. It’s not often a guest on this show has no connection to the military prior to joining, but in the few instances this has been the case, there is usually a common event that many cite as their catalyst for their joining the uniformed service – 9/11. At West Point, Ben fell in love with this idea of an being a part of a high-functioning team and deployed with those teams to both Iraq and Afghanistan. He shares a story from those experiences he cites as one of the coolest 10 seconds of his military career.

Have a listen to find what happened and also learn how Ben is transitioning these skills into other high-performing teams at Harvard Business School and with Bear Hug Cattle Company across much of the western US.

#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”.

#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.

#21 Jose Sanchez (US Army) – Ecogistix

Vets In Ag Podcast
Vets In Ag Podcast
#21 Jose Sanchez (US Army) - Ecogistix
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I’ve been bootstrapping it so far, but it’s tough. You still have to keep the lights on at home

Our guest this week is Jose Sanchez, Founder of Ecogistix, a manufacturing execution systems platform that will allows growers to more efficiently track and manage their fresh produce as it moves from farm to market.

Jose’s familial ties to the farming community trace back to his grandfather’s ranching operations in Mexico. But it was his father’s memories of the difficulty of selling their product at the local markets that brought Jose back into ag after spending a number of years gaining an education in computer science and in supply chain management.

The intentionally and care with which Jose has approached the creation of Ecogistix is impressive. It’s taken them over three years to develop a production ready model, a process that started with the farmer’s challenges, then leveraged their team’s industry experience and partnerships to finally reach a stage where they’re ready to start on-boarding growers.

Jose is honest with this process of bootstrapping about it not being all sunshine and roses. It takes grit, struggle and financial preparation. Have a listen to hear Jose’s story and some of lessons learned from this agri-preneur.  

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!