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!
