Aggrad Live Podcast

Ethan Smith grew up with production agriculture in his blood and, through involvement with groups like 4-H, FFA, scholarship applications and internships in college, he discovered an interest in farm and ranch management. Ethan now fulfills this role in a diverse and broad ranging “territory” from the southern tip of Texas up through New Mexico and over to the panhandle of Oklahoma. A native Nebraskan, he gets to be the liaison between landowners and tenants on a variety of farm and ranch lands as a Farm and Ranch Manager with Farmers National Company.

Some careers have slow downs - times where an employee can be on autopilot and work without much cognitive thinking. This is not the case for Lucas Fuess, the Director of Market Intelligence for HighGround Dairy of Chicago, Illinois. Lucas’ day-to-day job includes crunching numbers, reading reports, analyzing data, and synthesizing all of that information into a direct market opinion on the dairy industry that is, in turn, shared with customers in an articulated report. Whether or not you aspire to be in an analyst career of sorts, these skills are pertinent in any business and Lucas discusses tips on how you can improve. Read the full article at aggrad.com.

It may come as a surprise that as a Senior Business Analyst for The Context Network, Seth Pratt isn’t found in an office building crunching numbers day in and day out; he will be found working in his home office in the beautiful ranch lands of southeastern Idaho. When he’s not working on advanced agriculture analysis, Seth is hard at work as a fifth-generation cattle rancher. His knowledge and skills of sustainability and economics, while also being able to stay connected to his work virtually, has helped build him into an educated, informed, and socio-economically aware rancher and consultant. Read the full article on how Seth manages environmental and social concerns in regards to agriculture, as well as how he manages work at a remote office while also ranching with his family at www.aggrad.com

“I love everything that has to do with words,” says Meg Becker and she most definitely does! As the Marketing Specialist at Cargill Animal Nutrition, Meg wears multiple hats that all focus on working with their team on marketing initiatives. This can include anything from internal newsletters, assisting the sales team with marketing material, and communication through the rest of the company. More than manage all of these responsibilities and team members, Meg also works in two offices; her business office and her home office. She’s not the only one, so does her boss! Learning how to manage the two locations has been both rewarding and efficiency increasing, but took some time.

Karoline Rose took the bold leap of entrepreneurship straight from college graduation in the spring of 2015. Within six months she had made the daring venture to hire her first employee and, since that time, she has used her gut to help her make decisions in hiring five more employees and six contract workers. KRose shares tips for buying, selling and marketing cattle with KRose Cattle Company as well as marketing courses for small businesses with KRose Marketing! Read the full article at aggrad.com.

Expectations Study hard. Get good grades. Get a good job. Work nine-to-five for the rest of your life. Coming from a conservative, middle-class family in India, Bharath Sudharsan never considered a career world outside of the standard that he grew up in. Then he came to North America and all of that changed. “There were so many entrepreneurial activities!” Bharath exclaims, still almost in disbelief. “Mental barriers are harder to surmount than any physical barrier… [there was an expectation that] you needed to be someone of a specific caliber or to have an MBA. North America taught me better.” The Creation of SomaDetect What does SomaDetect do? On the most basic level, https://somadetect.com/ (SomaDetect) was co-founded two and a half years ago by Bharath and his two other co-founders, Nicholas and Bethany, to create a better life for cows and for dairy farmers to manage their herds easier. However, there is nothing “basic” about SomaDetect. An Artificial Intelligence developed to monitor dairy cows 2

    Never Eat Lunch Alone Andrew Lauver’s grandfather always said, “never eat lunch alone.” A captivating thought that Andrew saw epitomized in a John F. Kennedy story of a tour of NASA, where he asked the janitor, “What do you do?” The janitor’s response? “Send rocket ships to space.” https://youtube.com/aggrad ( ) It’s the age old statement that is sometimes forgotten in the modern activities of today; every person, from the janitor to the CEO, matters in the mission of the company. An Iowan farmer, Andrew has been raised with the morals and values of small rural communities, but has capitalized on networking relationships to continue to chase his dreams of being a leader in agriculture and named to the AgGrad 30 Under 30 list. https://youtube.com/aggrad ( ) Current Professional Role: Manager of Industry Relations at Syngenta North America Focused on commodity associations and working with the grower leaders of these associations is how Andrew spends his professional career. It involves agriculture