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!

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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!

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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!

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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!

The post #80 – Angela Czaja (US Army Reserves) – Regenerative Grazing Open-Air Lab (R-GOAL) appeared first on AGD Consulting.

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!

The post #73-Kara Rutter (US Army) – Project Victory Gardens – Part 2 appeared first on AGD Consulting.

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”.

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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.

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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.

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Our guest this week is Art De Groat, Founder and Director for Kansas State’s Military Affairs and Innovation Center as well as a retired US Army Armor Officer of over 20 years. In his current role at the Innovation Center, Art and his team are conducting applied research and outreach focused on adult developmental aspects of military transition and social reintegration.

Art describes how is military service was a defining pillar in his life – from experiences in the Gulf War where he had to make calculated decisions about how to deal with an out-matched enemy in order to preserve the mental health of his soldiers to dealing with a traumatic life event and having to strike a balance between service to country and family. The strength of character and resilience Art displayed and many veterans, I think, is exactly what should make military veterans attractive hirees to agribusinesses.

His post-military career has allowed him to continue to support the service member, this time during their transition into the private sector, where he’s gathered decades of experiential data and academic research that makes him uniquely qualified to discuss the issues facing veteran transition today and how ag can be a natural fit.

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My guest today is Ben Gordon, US Army National Guard veteran and Corteva’s Carbon and Ecosystem Services Global Portfolio Leader. This program seeks to quantify sustainability outcomes for farmers and economically reward them for stewardship outcomes, supported by Corteva’s partnerships, digital tools, and leading agronomic science.

Throughout the conversation, Ben weaves together the lessons he’s learned from military service around humility, regionality, and the dynamics of local leadership into the work he’s doing with agriculture in a way, to me at least, that is beyond his years. He describes the role of the leader, in both the military and within ag, as someone who recognizes the experience of their team, his own shortcomings, and how sometimes, your role as the leader is simply to provide them the latitude to exercise that expertise.

The platform Corteva has created within the carbon space seems to be one borne with the farmer in mind – optionality, premium payment terms, short-term contract, separation of incentives, etc.

Be sure to listen all the way through as Ben alludes to which markets Corteva may be scaling into next.

He asked that we include his email in the show notes for any veteran interested in Corveta or in need of some guidance during transition to please reach out – benjamingordon@granular.ag –

Enjoy!

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