It was World War II that permanently took my parents out of the agricultural (or maybe the vice) industry in rural eastern Kentucky where they grew up in families that were tobacco farmers and "distillers" (really): my dad joined the Navy, deployed on the U.S.S. Yorktown in the Pacific theatre, and my mom was literally a riveter at a defense plant in Columbus Ohio. Maybe it was the old family businesses that left me with a latent interest in the "ag" industry. Last week I attended another of the Colorado Technology Association's Insights Series: "Innovations in AgTech: How Technology is Shaping Colorado Agriculture". It was a terrific learning experience.
There were two keynote speakers, one from CoBank and the other from American AgCredit. These are cooperative banks that are part of the member-owned - like a credit union - Farm Credit System, a government-sponsored enterprise established by Congress in 1916 to insure farmers had access to loans. Why are these guys talking to an org like the CTA? Because by law they can only lend money to farmers; they can't lend money to agricultural technology startups trying to develop new technology for farmers, who are often running US$10Ms+ businesses with huge capital investments managed only using spreadsheets.
So the banks find themselves trying to put venture capitalists together with AgTech startups to solve the problems their members have. Technology is a big deal in agriculture because labor is a huge cost. (Remarkably, land is another big cost, and many of the efficiency drivers provided by technology only scale with more land; a modern tractor can mow 175 acres of hay in four hours, and costs as much as a house.)
The event included a panel discussion with the two bankers (one of whom was formerly a rancher himself - he showed a photograph of him wrestling a steer to the ground), three former founders of successful AgTech startups, and a really interesting faculty member at Colorado State University - a land-grant university that was formerly Colorado Agricultural College - who is the Director of Ag Innovation at CSU. (I learned that agriculture in Colorado, where I call home, is pretty unique in that the state has many different biomes, so that it lends itself to growing different crops and livestock, unlike, say, states in the Midwest.)
My work with Differential GNSS and Inertial Measurement Units, which I've written about here previously, was inspired by my interest in precision agriculture, used in applications like auto-steer for tractors, a technology which has led to a huge cost savings for farmers.
It's events like this that keep me renewing my membership in the CTA, a professional society I've been a member of since 2018. I'm not there to hire, to find work, to buy, or to sell; mostly just there to learn and to get ideas for my own projects. Although I routinely attend networking events like their upcoming C-Level at Mile High that are relatively expensive to attend, I do so mostly to support the organization, and because, in the case of C-Level, its fun to wander around on the party floor of Empower Field, a part of the Bronco's football stadium fans rarely if ever see. Also, the food is not bad. But when people choose to chat with me, I feel kind of guilty that I'm probably wasting their time. (I admit left the AgTech event as soon as it transitioned to the networking stage.)
