Tag: veteran

#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!

#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!

#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!

#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”.

#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.

#20 – Rachel Petitt – Farmer Veteran Coalition

Vets In Ag Podcast
Vets In Ag Podcast
#20 - Rachel Petitt - Farmer Veteran Coalition
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“It’s not the bird songs or the warm soil. It’s the early days, constant problem solving, grit…”

This from our guest this week, Rachel Petitt, as she describes the types of things veterans look for as they seek to ease the burden of transition by trying to match their new professional lives with their former lives.

Rachel is Farmer Veteran Coalition’s Fellowship Program Manager, which administers grants for tools, equipment, infrastructure and even livestock that support veteran farmers in their new careers. After earning a degree in Food and Ag from UC Santa Cruz, Rachel worked in small-scale farming for several years, including flower, vegetables and egg production in central California before joining FVC in 2015.

The passion for agriculture is evident as Rachel describes the formidable nature of these experiences and how they conditioned in her a sense of purpose that can be found in agriculture. Through her college network and word-of-mouth, the opportunity to work for FVC’s former founder, Michael O’Gorman, came across her radar and she jumped at it. As FVC’s longest standing employee to date, Rachel talks about FVC’s growth over the last 14 years, her experiences working with veterans for the first time, and their herculean efforts support the veteran farmer community with a wide variety of services that extends beyond simply funding opportunities.

If you’re a veteran or active-duty service member who will soon transition and are considering production agriculture, this is a must listen episode.