The pathway for veterans into production agriculture has garnered greater attention in recent years. Emerging science shows that agricultural professions, especially those that touch the dirt, have positive mental health benefits for military veterans wresting with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) or other combat related injuries. It gives us a sense of purpose that we may have lost following active duty service; that we are a part of something bigger than ourselves and helping to support a greater good.
With as much value as the dirt and the community provide to veterans, we believe veterans return just as much to the agricultural industry in terms of unique skill sets, innovation, and entrepreneurship. This article aims to shed light on the ‘soft skills’ military veterans bring to the agricultural sector. Their keen sense of how to operate in uncertain situations without a single-set solution is especially applicable in today’s COVID environment where ag supply chains have been severely disrupted and no one is certain what lies ahead.
Military veterans have a learned ability to triage and solve the most pressing issue first. Agtech start-ups, private equity funds, and agribusinesses are facing a slew of problems right now: labor shortages, plant closures, supply chain disruptions, worker safety, deployment of capital, etc. Through layered and intentionally complicated training scenarios and combat-related experiences like mass casualty situations and complex ambushes, veterans have developed a unique ability to rapidly triage a host of problems, identify the most significant one first, and work to solve it given the resources at hand. They’ve learned to deploy other assets within their command to minimize the impact of the remaining problems long enough until direct focus can be applied. It is never a perfect solution, but in the midst of uncertainty, it doesn’t have to be.
Military leaders often hold high levels of responsibility and authority over resources (personnel, property, and budgets) as junior ranking members. At 26 years old, in combat in Afghanistan, I was second-in-command for a 250-personnel organization, directly accountable for nearly 2,500 individual pieces of serialized gear worth more than US$40MM spread across a battlespace of 350 square kilometers and 15 partnered positions. I had to learn to lead in a way that inspired instead of required in order to instill trust and confidence if I ever hoped of managing this responsibility. I was also evaluated regularly on my performance in this role through a well-defined set of criteria (character, leadership, intellect, effectiveness under stress, etc). This level of responsibility and regular evaluation early in life has cemented in many military veterans key leadership and operational principles that are attractive to many companies within the ag sector.
Veterans of combat theaters, particularly those with a counterinsurgency mission, understand both the challenges and benefits of putting a local/partnered face on a solution. In Afghanistan, we wanted the local security forces to take ownership of their own protection, which is why we often put them in a position to spearhead their own offensive operations. With our tactical support, they understood the regional dynamics better than we ever could, and therefore, intuitively knew how to respond in different cultural situations.
This same practiced nuance of understanding regional dynamics is a skillset veterans can bring to the agricultural sector. For accelerators, venture capital groups, and private equity firms evaluating a company for investment, managers need to ensure targeted portfolio companies understand and have experience with the local nuances of where they plan to operate. Ag is very regional, so just because an operator has experience in that asset class in one region does not mean it transfers to a different region. Along the same vein, agtech start-ups need to understand the “deployment region” potential capital providers have experience operating within. A California-based, historically tech-focused venture capital firm who says they’re interested in agtech may not understand the agronomic considerations and seasonality timelines of ag in the Midwest.
During the due diligence phase of the investment process, evaluating management teams can be incredibly challenging – how do you put measurable, objective parameters around subjective soft skills like integrity, execution ability, unity, and grit? Military veterans, especially those who served in an instructional capacity, are particularly skilled at evaluating leadership abilities and team functionality. During my last two years in the Marine Corps, I served as an instructor at the Infantry Officers Course, one of the more rigorous schools in the service where our primary goal was to train, educate and evaluate new infantry officers. We placed them in stressful, uncertain situations (much like today amidst COVID-19) and evaluated how well they accomplished a series of tasks and led their peers. Individual character and leadership talent are regularly revealed when an individual is stressed, then forced to act. For investment funds and ag accelerators looking for their next portfolio company or investment opportunity, watch how a team and its leader respond in today’s environment; it will tell you volumes about who they are and how likely they are to succeed. For example:
- Do they have a cool, calming presence (video of an emergency recon team extraction under hostile fire in Vietnam)
- What do they do when the situation makes their plan irrelevant and they’re forced to react?
- Do they put their subordinates before themselves?
- Is the leader and the team “coachable”?
- Do they understand small team dynamics – close trust, shared responsibility, pull together during adversity?
In Nassim Taleb’s Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life, he contests that “skin in the game” is necessary for commercial efficiency and risk management, something private equity investors and fund managers know well. A 2019 white paper – Do Veterans Make Better Entrepreneurs? – authored by Veteran Ventures Capital, a Tennessee-based venture capital investment fund and advisory firm servicing veteran-affiliated businesses, notes that vets have experience putting their own “skin” on the line on the battlefield and understand their decisions have impacts beyond the first-order. Most veterans acknowledge the gap between putting their own life on the line and risking financial stability, but the thought process associated with incorporating secondary and tertiary effects into the decision-making cycle doesn’t leave us when we leave the service. It becomes an embedded ethos present in every facet of our lives.
The challenges of operating in agriculture and the “Enemy” share many commonalities – fluid, unpredictable, influenced by a variety of factors, interconnected, etc. Veterans have developed a set of skills, trialed through rigorous training and refined in battle, that are more applicable today than ever before to agribusinesses, start-ups, investors and accelerators as they try to navigate the complex and disrupted theater of ag.