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Mike Howell (00:08):
The Dirt with me, Mike Howell, an eKonomics podKast where I present the down-and-dirty agronomic science to help grow crops and bottom lines. Inspired by ekonomics.com, farming’s go-to informational resource, I’m here to break down the latest crop nutrition research, use and issues, helping farmers make better business decisions through actionable insights. Let’s dig in.
(00:38)
Welcome back to The Dirt, everyone. This is Mike Howell. Glad you’re tuning in again this week. We’ve got another exciting episode for you this week. A little bit different than what we usually do, but I’m excited to let you know that eKonomics has partnered with an interesting group here in the Upper Midwest called Grand Farm. Grand Farm is a research initiative that’s designed to inspire collaboration among different businesses, organizations, and researchers to develop the future of farm. We believe that this is going to solve issues critical to farmers worldwide. To join me today and help me talk a little bit about the Grand Farm is Andrew Jason. He’s Grand Farm’s ecosystem director. Andrew, welcome to the show.
Andrew Jason (01:18):
Thanks for having me, Mike.
Mike Howell (01:19):
Andrew, if you would, before we get started, tell our listeners a little bit about yourself and what you do.
Andrew Jason (01:23):
I’m pretty typical story when it comes to agriculture these days: generation removed. So my experience with ag was kind of going to visit my grandparents’ farm and sitting on my great uncle’s knee as he was driving and planting and things like that. Northern Minnesota boy, grew up in a small town, came to the Fargo-Moorhead region for school. And right out of school, I got a lucky break joining a publishing company. So my background is media. I was with this company for about 10 years, kind of working in different ways, telling stories, marketing, things like that. And then when the Grand Farm Initiative was getting started about four years ago, I got so excited about this mission about advancing technology in agriculture, exciting the next generation of agriculturalists, that I had to jump ship and join the team here. Well, I’m sure we’ll get into this, but I’d love the story of ag and want to help tell the story of the future of ag and where we’re going with that, and so that’s kind of how I always approach things, is from a storytelling, marketing media perspective.
Mike Howell (02:21):
Andrew, if you will, tell us a little more about Grand Farm and why it was created.
Andrew Jason (02:25):
Grand Farm was really kind of born out of the thesis that every community needs to declare a major about what are you the best in the world at. So a local entrepreneur by the name of Barry Bacheller, he’s kind of one of those long-standing visionary types, started a company called Phoenix International that got acquired by John Deere, just got started a company called Appareo, that just got acquired by AGCO, kind of one of those guys. At one of our events, he spoke about the Silicon Valley of the story. For anybody that knows that or doesn’t know it, basically it was started by, Fairchild Lab was started in Silicon Valley area in the ’50s, middle of farm fields, nothing going on there. But then, that success begets other success. So there’s a group, they’re called the Traitorous Eight, that spun out of that company. They started to form other companies, and that region and that ecosystem kept growing.
(03:12)
So when he challenged us to think about our region’s major what can be the best in the world at, we looked at the history when it came to the Bonanza farms that were here in the late 1800s, the hundred-thousand acre farms, and that used innovative technology for the day; the story of Bobcat being founded here when a local Turkey farmer was sick and tired of shovelling out the manure, so he invented the skids, or your tractor. That got started here. Taking that kind of history of innovation, we decided to declare, “Well, our advanced technologies in agriculture can be the best in the world,” and that’s kind of where the Grand Farm was born out of, is how do we create this research and demonstration initiative to promote what’s happening and starting to attract and accelerate some of that technology.
Mike Howell (03:51):
We’re all about innovation and we like to do anything we can to promote innovation and come up with new products of our own, and we’ll talk a little bit more about some of the stuff that we’re going to be doing with Grand Farm in the field this year. Grand Farm is focused on innovation, and that’s always been the backbone of farming. As far back as you want to go, somebody has always creating something else to make farming easier. What do you see as the biggest innovations going on in agriculture today?
Andrew Jason (04:16):
When we think about innovation in agriculture, and I like to use metaphors and think about we’re at a table right here, who do you need around these tables to get innovation to happen? We think about key groups that we want to bring to the table. It’s the corporates; large organizations like Nutrien; the startups; the education groups, specifically the researchers at academia; the policymakers; and finally the growers, making sure that those growers’ voices are at the center and being heard. That’s kind of like how philosophical idea of how we can advance technology in agriculture.
(04:47)
Then, specifically to your point of how some of these innovative things right now, autonomy is obviously the sexy thing I would describe it as. But as far as what actual problems that those are going to solve from a grower standpoint, I’m a little hesitant about the autonomous farm is not going to be happening anytime soon here. But I think from a biologic standpoint, the regenerative ag aspect is super interesting to me. The other thing that has big applications, both good and potentially bad, I think, that you’re going to be seeing over the next decade, is artificial intelligence and the machine learning aspect of it. We have our big cultivate conference tomorrow. We’re going to be leading a workshop around what are the applications of artificial intelligence in agriculture.
Mike Howell (05:33):
Yeah, I’m excited to go to that and see what I can learn from that. That’s groundbreaking technology, and I’m just not as up on it as I need to be. Hopefully I can learn something on that tomorrow.
Andrew Jason (05:42):
Yeah. Well, it’s changing so much. I don’t think anybody’s up speed on it.
Mike Howell (05:46):
That’s right. You mentioned that you’re partnering with educational organizations like North Dakota State University and some of the land grant universities. Which land grant universities are you working with?
Andrew Jason (05:56):
We work primarily with North Dakota State University in our bread and butter, right backyard here, but we’re starting to get these other kind of regional collaborations that we do, University of Minnesota, even down south, University of Georgia, closer to your land. The ways that we collaborate is kind of in a couple of ways. One, how can we foster these relationships between the faculty that are doing the research and industry? Two is, how can we do a lot of programming to bring faculty and industry together? How can we provide a actual physical site where faculty can test their demonstration? One of good examples, we work with Dr. Rex Sun at NDSU. He is developing a weeding robot, which autonomous weeding is a hot topic, and if somebody can crack that, that’s a big market. So he is doing a lot of academic research from that. We work with him where we just have weed plots at our farm. A lot of people show up and they’re like, “Why do you have weeds?”
Mike Howell (06:48):
Well, if you need another location for that research, you can come down to my farm. I’ve got plenty of weeds he can work on.
Andrew Jason (06:54):
Great. Well, we’ll be down there with Rex. And then the third one is really kind of around the internship. So how can we get these students placed in a real-world environment with industry? Some of the things that we’ve done is we’ve had actual interns be placed with some of the partners that we’re working with in our actual farm site, things like that.
Mike Howell (07:11):
We’ve mentioned that Grand Farm is headquartered here in Fargo, North Dakota. The Innovation Centre is just a short drive out to the west of town. I actually got to go out there and visit this morning. Looks like there’s quite some big plans going on out there. They told us about some of the infrastructure that they’re going to be building in the next year or two. Can you elaborate on that infrastructure a little bit?
Andrew Jason (07:31):
We always kind of envisioned that we needed a physical environment to bring these partners, these groups together. We have acquired 140 acres that’s just west of Fargo, that we’re turning into an innovation campus. I’ll show you the pictures here and I think they’ll be visible for those watching online, but I’ll try and paint a picture with words for those listening on the podcast. But our first building is going to be innovation shop, so it’s going to be about 24,000 square feet and it’s going to be designed around three use cases. So actually, shop space where our partners can work on their equipment. In the middle, we’ll have boardrooms, classrooms, spaces to bring players together in a private meeting space or education groups. We’re going to be doing a lot more with K through 12 as we build this out. And then the third use case will be for events programming, both in the indoor and an outdoor amphitheater style.
(08:18)
The whole campus is designed around experiences where we can host our partners. They can have their plots, kind of like we’re doing with you all out at the farm. And then there can be takeover days where there’d be the Nutrien day where you could do your customer events or you could host live recordings of the podcast or whatever you might want to do out there. And the other thing that we’re really excited about turning into these plots is, from a experience standpoint is around some of these hot topics in agriculture. As we build this out, we’ll have the weed plot where we’ll just be testing out different autonomous weeding. One of the plots that we have out the farm this year is going to be around data collection and building out this concept of, how do you build out these digital twins in ag?
Mike Howell (08:56):
Well, one thing that really excited me that you just mentioned there was you’re working with the school groups, kindergarten through 12th grade. I think that’s vital. That’s how we get children interested in agriculture. Everywhere I go, we’re constantly looking for the next agriculture leaders, and it’s getting harder and harder to find people that want to focus in agriculture and go to school and learn about what we’re doing.
Andrew Jason (09:15):
Yeah, exactly. This is not news to you or any of your listeners, but farms are getting bigger, farm families are getting smaller. There’s just less farm kids, so we need a net new migration of people interested in ag that have no experience in ag. How do you from a storytelling, marketing standpoint, get that message about what ag is actually out there? And I half jokingly refer to it as, how do we get these nerds excited about ag from a technology standpoint? I think that’s where we can really tie into that.
Mike Howell (09:42):
We’ve mentioned that this is located just west of Fargo here in the Red River Valley. Why Fargo? Why did you want to put it here in the Red River Valley? What’s that valley offer that other places wouldn’t offer?
Andrew Jason (09:52):
I think it’s going back to that history. The Bonanza farms 130 years ago, Bobcat being founded here, John Deere, AGCO, RDO, Titan, they all have extremely large presences here or our headquartered here. It’s kind of building off of that history. It’s like the success beget success. And then the other big piece of it is we have innovative farms, right? We’re blessed with rich soil. Things grow really well here. We have farmers that are willing to adopt new technology. Sugar beets are big here. That’s a whole another industry that is ripe for innovation and has a lot of success. So it’s kind of building off of what the industry has created, but probably even more importantly, what the farmers themselves have created.
Mike Howell (10:33):
Andrew, we’ve kind of brushed around this topic a little bit, but the world production systems are constantly having to think about sustainability and how to be more sustainable in agriculture and greater food security. Space science is kind of out there these days. People are talking about maybe farming on Mars at some point in the future. I understand that Grand Farm does a space conference every year. Can you tell us a little bit about that and how far is it going to be before we’re actually growing crops on Mars?
Andrew Jason (11:01):
Yeah. Space Ag Conference, even more niche than that. When we launched this idea, it’s like how do you create this mission or this idea around JFK’s moonshot idea, right? Let’s put a man on the moon in 10 years. We’re not doing anything as ambitious as that, but we need to advance and think through this. We launched this conference about four years ago now. Somebody at nasa.gov email reached out to me, just wanting a collaborator about something. I was like, “Oh, this is cool. NASA, great.” So I was like, “Hey, would you ever be interested in doing a farming on Mars just webinar?” This was kind of at the start of COVID. We were trying to figure things out and just doing a bunch of weird things, and we had 60 entrepreneurs that showed up down there. There was two billionaires that were on this call and they’re like, “All right, there’s some interest there.”
(11:41)
We launched this conference about four years ago, and there’s three goals with it that I think tie into your question there. And the first and foremost is, for those that have been following, we have a permanent presence in space with the International Space Station, but we’re going to have a permanent presence on the moon in five years or so, permanent presence on Mars in 10 years. How are we going to feed that population? But then also, even more importantly, how does that technology directly impact earth? So if you can figure out how to farm on the moon or Mars where there’s zero gravity, really awful soil, you can’t bring a bunch of fertilizer, things like that up there, that’s going to have direct impacts to what we’re doing on earth.
(12:21)
The second one is to explore how space technology’s impacting ag. The obvious one is satellites where ag has been a leader when it comes to satellite technology for decades now. But there’s other interesting use cases, hydroponics, like controlled environment ag that was developed by NASA. The other one that I find pretty interesting is, you can do a lot of interesting things with seed breeding research by sending these seeds up to space and does, being in zero gravity, lots of interesting pieces.
(12:47)
And then the third use case and goal of the conference is education, right? It’s how do you excite and delight that next generation of ag. So when we hosted our last one in April, we had 130 students signed up that were going to be doing these workshops where they were going to be planting peas in soil from the moon. University of North Dakota sent seeds, I think they were radish seeds, up to space in a high altitude space balloon. So they were going to get these seeds that actually flew to space. The National Centre for Autonomous Technology was going to do drone flights and pretend simulation that you were on Mars and need to do a resupply mission to supply station. How do you use kind of that space? Because space is cool, right? Everybody love space. How do you use that to excite the next generation of agriculturalist?
Mike Howell (13:29):
Yeah. The first thing I think about when we started talking about space, we have trouble transporting materials across the country. How in the world are we going to economically get fertilizer to Mars?
Andrew Jason (13:38):
Yeah, exactly, right? Yeah.
Mike Howell (13:40):
Got quite a few details to work out in that. Andrew, another thing that I kind of want to talk about a little bit is what we have going on with Grand Farm this year. We didn’t really know a whole lot about it and we decided to just put in some demonstration plots this year and try to get some customers out and showcase what we’re working on. A couple of the trials that we have out there this year, or looking at ESN, our environmentally smart nitrogen, we’ve got that compared with conventional fertilizer programs on corn, wheat, and soybeans. We were hoping to get sugar beets in there as well, but ran into some issues getting that done. But those same crops, we’re also looking at our new MAP+MST, the micronized sulphur technology, and trying to let growers get a look at that. What other kind of innovation trials and research is going on out there? Anything you can talk about?
Andrew Jason (14:27):
There’s quite a few. I think we have eight partners that are out there ranging from different seed companies to NDSU doing some of their research like Dr. Sun that I was talking about with the autonomous weeder. One of the ones that I think is kind of interesting is a Canadian ag tech startup called Susterre, and they basically developed a product that uses high-pressure water jets for planting, for no-till purposes. They are doing some trials and validation of their technology. You probably saw the equipment on at the farm if you’re out there this morning. But it’s kind of like that idea, is how can you use these to showcase technology? Or whether it’s either validation, like Susterre’s doing. They got new product, they need to prove it works. Demonstration plots like you all are doing, or some of the other ones that we work with partners on, is they’re interested in deploying technology on there, either to see if it works for their standpoint, like different sensors, things like that, or for demonstration purposes in collaboration with these startups.
Mike Howell (15:22):
Andrew, we sure appreciate you taking time to come visit with us today and let everybody know about Grand Farm and what’s going on out there. Did we miss anything? Any take-home message that you want to leave our listeners with?
Andrew Jason (15:33):
All we do is in partnership and collaboration with our partners. You all are one of them. We have about 70 partners from around the world that we work with. We got to always thank them in the work they’re doing. I invite people, we’ll be hosting events, field days, large conferences, small meetups throughout the summer, so follow us on social media or grandfarm.com, and we’d love to host you.
Mike Howell (15:54):
Thanks a lot, Andrew. Listeners, well, we appreciate you tuning in and as you know, it’s time for our second segment today where we talk about somebody famous in the world of agriculture.
(16:06)
We’ve been talking a lot about innovation today, and the person that we’re going to talk about today has definitely done some great innovation during his lifetime. Today we want to focus on Henry Wallace. He was an American politician, a journalist, a farmer, and a businessman that was born in Orient, Iowa. He was particularly interested in corn as a youngster because that was one of Iowa’s key crops. And at the age of 18, he developed an experiment that disproved agronomist theories that the most aesthetically pleasing corn was also going to produce the highest yields. He specialized in animal husbandry when he got to college and still liked to study corn in his free time. But about the time that he was going through college, the world was looking to increase corn yields. In 1923, he reached the first ever contract for hybrid seed production, agreeing to let the Iowa Seed Company have the sole rights to grow a hybrid corn that he had developed called Copper Cross Corn.
(17:05)
Now, the Iowa Seed Company started selling this corn seed, and later a group of businessmen and Wallace got together and founded Hi-Bred Corn Company, which later turned into Pioneer Hi-Bred International. Wallace had been experimenting with the hybridization of corn and became convinced that hybrid corn seed was going to be important. I don’t think he even had an idea how important hybrid corn was going to be. He also did a lot of work in politics over his career. He was also a part of his family newspaper that was called the Wallace Farmer. He served as a writer on that newspaper until his uncle lost the paper in 1933 during the Great Depression. But the paper is still around today and it goes by a different name. It’s called Farm Progress today, something that a lot of people still take a look at every day.
(17:53)
Listeners, we really appreciate you tuning in today. For more information on any of the topics that we talk about here on The Dirt, you can visit our website at nutrien-ekonomics.com. Until next time, this has been Mike Howell with The Dirt.
