why farmers are the best science
teachers and how kids in the city are
the future of Agriculture I’m the
fourth-generation dairy farmer from
California and the answer to that
question is in my family’s history in
1893 my great grandfather Luigi came
from southern Switzerland travel across
the seas arrived in San Francisco and
came to my hometown of Hanford and
purchased land from the Southern Pacific
Railroad company that was wild unclaimed
land that they sold to pay off the
construction of the railroad during my
great-grandfather’s
time and farming the technology of the
day was characterized by human in horse
power in the next generation my
grandfather’s generation was farming
with the power of diesel to think back
about how different times were when my
grandmother was born who was currently
104 years old and living still on our
farm she was born into a house with no
electricity at the age of 23 she married
my grandfather and moved into a house on
our farm that is my office today at then
at the age of 23 she likes the joke when
she came to this farm she moved into the
house with no indoor plumbing and all
she had was an outhouse with no door my
father’s era was characterized by better
living through chemistry it was an era
of synthetic fertilizer in the
development of pesticides my era of
farming is what I call the Enlightenment
period it’s about maximizing production
with the greatest benefit to human
health and the environment it’s using
science and technology to understand and
work in harmony with the natural
processes of the earth it’s an era of
information and computing unlike my
three previous generations I left the
farm
and returned after 15 years my
experience of living and working on the
farm and off the farm has given me a
unique view of the future of Agriculture
so my story is this when I was a boy
like every farm kid I got up I went out
on the farmer did my chores went to
school came home continued to work my
parents and my neighbors they supported
us and encouraged us to participate in
programs like 4-h where they would teach
us practical skills and leadership as a
nine-year-old I learned things like
welding Electrical and Electronics
woodworking animal husbandry and plant
science I even learned how to cook and
so because my mother in our small
community was the leader that taught all
the girls stuff and having three sisters
I had to do whatever they were doing so
I had to learn to cook and sew and set
the table and things of this nature now
I guess that would be considered a
sexist way of thinking but what was also
interesting is that not saying that I
participated in this but there was a
program at the time where we had to sew
a matching outfit for ourself and our
sheep and then we had to parade them
around in competition talk about
character building opportunity for kids
farm kids were raised to be makers
farmers are the original makers 4-h and
it was and still is a hands-on
opportunity to learn STEM science
technology engineering and mathematics
after college I left the farm I went to
Cal Poly and I got a degree in dairy
science and when I went out into the
world I was concerned because I didn’t
have any marketable skills in the real
world having a degree in dairy science
so the best opportunity for me was to
become a babysitter of rock stars and
for 10 years of my life I managed tours
for rock bands and I traveled all over
the United States in the world bringing
tours from town to town
entertaining people and and delighting
fans all over the place it turned out
that my farmboy skills translated very
well and were actually quite sought out
sought after in that environment I
became known as the guy that could fix
anything if a guitar broke I would take
it apart figure out what was wrong and
fix it when the bus or the van broke
down while everyone else was standing
around wondering who was going to come
and rescue us
I opened the hood figured out what was
wrong and fixed it because in that
environment the show must go on what I
discovered what was that it wasn’t the
information I had learned as a child
that made me useful what mattered was a
way of thinking what my parents 4-h and
the farm had taught me was how to solve
problems a way of thinking that stems
from the belief that failure is not an
option and nobody is coming to help it’s
basically up to you to do it as a
teenager at 4 o’clock in the morning if
the feed wagon broke down I would have
to get up and go fix it because if it
wasn’t fixed the cows wouldn’t get fed
and that’s not an option failure was not
an option when confronted with the
notion that failure is not an option and
no one is coming to help sometimes
strange things happen innovation happens
baling wire and duct tape are oftentimes
the tools of choice right done is better
than not in 1998 I left the music
business and moved to San Francisco to
go to work in web development I came
into the internet industry and worked at
a startup company and we were developing
new tools for the Internet and the
Internet was very young at this time and
very often we would start building a
website with a technology that three
months later while we’re still working
on this project
Marvel still working on the project the
technology would become obsolete so we
had to constantly be thinking toward the
future to figure out which technology is
going to be used in the future trying to
guess trends and trying to understand
what the future is going to hold it as
rapidly changing industry we had to
think about the future or become
irrelevant five years into that I was
called by my family and informed that my
father had come down with non-hodgkins
lymphoma and had cancer and was going to
go through treatments and they asked if
I could come back and watch the farm
because failure for the family farm was
not an option and then being an only son
it was my obligation to come back so I
did when I came home I had to relearn
how to farm because I had been away for
it for so long so I looked at the
environment to see what was going on
like what was new and farming and I was
using the thinking that I had learned
from being in software about what are
the trends in the future and what should
I be doing today to meet those trends
and to be ahead of the change in the
dynamics of this organization of this
industry and I saw some problems when I
came back and some of those problems
were environmental in nature in the San
Joaquin Valley here we have one of the
most polluted air basins because of the
geography of the valley all the
pollution stays in there’s nowhere for
it to go I participated in developing
and new technology for farming that
reduced dust and diesel and greenhouse
gas emissions from the farming process
by 85% a lot of people love this way of
farming the environmentalists loved it
they were giving us all kinds of awards
for sustainable agriculture and for you
know conservation the bank loved it
because it was actually a more
profitable way to farm everyone loved it
but one person my father my father hated
the way I farmed even though he would
tell his friends that you know I was
doing a good job and he was proud that I
came home the last conversation I ever
had with my father
I remember it was on a Sunday night he
called me up and just shooed me out
about how much he hates the way I farmed
and in the conversation what was
uncovered was the fact that what my
father was really upset about was that I
had changed his stuff it wasn’t that my
practices were good or bad but it was
that I was doing it differently than him
and what I learned from that experience
was that not only as thinking
innovatively important but you also in
order to solve problems oftentimes have
to overcome your own personal biases in
order to see opportunities and ways to
solve problems in my great-grandfather’s
time one farmer in America produced
enough agriculture product to feed a
total of four people a family farm was
literally meant to feed a family today
one farmer feeds nearly 300 people and
this number is growing rapidly two
percent of the population of this
country feed the other 98% farmers are
innovating and adopting technologies in
the areas of robotics drones satellite
genetics the Internet of cows which is a
thing and even CRISPR which we heard
about here today we are now at a point
where technology is completely
transforming transforming farm life most
of these technologies have a profound
benefit on the environment since they
allow us to us farmers to do more with
less but they also allow us to produce
more food with less people
as the industry transforms from human
labor to automation the need for
highly-skilled problem solvers is
increasing but for the first time in
human history farmers are finding
themselves with problems they can’t
solve and no one is coming to help we
need help
but solving problems for farmers
requires thinking like farmers but only
2% of the population are farmers so how
do we get kids in the cities the problem
solvers of tomorrow thinking about
agricultural problems today
wheat we do it by teaching them stem
through agricultural examples in 2009 a
group of farmers started farm academy an
interactive live field trip through an
agricultural destination using advanced
video conference technologies our AG
professionals take over elementary
school classrooms and offer an
experience to kids in the city that’s
the next best thing to being on the farm
this program is designed to promote stem
literacy and healthy lifestyles the goal
is to ignite in students at passion for
science and give them examples of how
science impacts areas most essential to
their lives food nutrition and the
environment by creating a relationship
between the Science and Technology of
Agriculture and the science and
technology of everyday life farm academy
aims to ignite a passion for learning
and the attitude of the farmer failure
is not an option
think about the future and work past our
biases because these children’s hold the
key to our future as farmers and our
future as the human race and who knows
maybe one day one of these kids will
even come up with a way to hang a door
on my grandmother’s outhouse thank you
[Applause]
you
teachers and how kids in the city are
the future of Agriculture I’m the
fourth-generation dairy farmer from
California and the answer to that
question is in my family’s history in
1893 my great grandfather Luigi came
from southern Switzerland travel across
the seas arrived in San Francisco and
came to my hometown of Hanford and
purchased land from the Southern Pacific
Railroad company that was wild unclaimed
land that they sold to pay off the
construction of the railroad during my
great-grandfather’s
time and farming the technology of the
day was characterized by human in horse
power in the next generation my
grandfather’s generation was farming
with the power of diesel to think back
about how different times were when my
grandmother was born who was currently
104 years old and living still on our
farm she was born into a house with no
electricity at the age of 23 she married
my grandfather and moved into a house on
our farm that is my office today at then
at the age of 23 she likes the joke when
she came to this farm she moved into the
house with no indoor plumbing and all
she had was an outhouse with no door my
father’s era was characterized by better
living through chemistry it was an era
of synthetic fertilizer in the
development of pesticides my era of
farming is what I call the Enlightenment
period it’s about maximizing production
with the greatest benefit to human
health and the environment it’s using
science and technology to understand and
work in harmony with the natural
processes of the earth it’s an era of
information and computing unlike my
three previous generations I left the
farm
and returned after 15 years my
experience of living and working on the
farm and off the farm has given me a
unique view of the future of Agriculture
so my story is this when I was a boy
like every farm kid I got up I went out
on the farmer did my chores went to
school came home continued to work my
parents and my neighbors they supported
us and encouraged us to participate in
programs like 4-h where they would teach
us practical skills and leadership as a
nine-year-old I learned things like
welding Electrical and Electronics
woodworking animal husbandry and plant
science I even learned how to cook and
so because my mother in our small
community was the leader that taught all
the girls stuff and having three sisters
I had to do whatever they were doing so
I had to learn to cook and sew and set
the table and things of this nature now
I guess that would be considered a
sexist way of thinking but what was also
interesting is that not saying that I
participated in this but there was a
program at the time where we had to sew
a matching outfit for ourself and our
sheep and then we had to parade them
around in competition talk about
character building opportunity for kids
farm kids were raised to be makers
farmers are the original makers 4-h and
it was and still is a hands-on
opportunity to learn STEM science
technology engineering and mathematics
after college I left the farm I went to
Cal Poly and I got a degree in dairy
science and when I went out into the
world I was concerned because I didn’t
have any marketable skills in the real
world having a degree in dairy science
so the best opportunity for me was to
become a babysitter of rock stars and
for 10 years of my life I managed tours
for rock bands and I traveled all over
the United States in the world bringing
tours from town to town
entertaining people and and delighting
fans all over the place it turned out
that my farmboy skills translated very
well and were actually quite sought out
sought after in that environment I
became known as the guy that could fix
anything if a guitar broke I would take
it apart figure out what was wrong and
fix it when the bus or the van broke
down while everyone else was standing
around wondering who was going to come
and rescue us
I opened the hood figured out what was
wrong and fixed it because in that
environment the show must go on what I
discovered what was that it wasn’t the
information I had learned as a child
that made me useful what mattered was a
way of thinking what my parents 4-h and
the farm had taught me was how to solve
problems a way of thinking that stems
from the belief that failure is not an
option and nobody is coming to help it’s
basically up to you to do it as a
teenager at 4 o’clock in the morning if
the feed wagon broke down I would have
to get up and go fix it because if it
wasn’t fixed the cows wouldn’t get fed
and that’s not an option failure was not
an option when confronted with the
notion that failure is not an option and
no one is coming to help sometimes
strange things happen innovation happens
baling wire and duct tape are oftentimes
the tools of choice right done is better
than not in 1998 I left the music
business and moved to San Francisco to
go to work in web development I came
into the internet industry and worked at
a startup company and we were developing
new tools for the Internet and the
Internet was very young at this time and
very often we would start building a
website with a technology that three
months later while we’re still working
on this project
Marvel still working on the project the
technology would become obsolete so we
had to constantly be thinking toward the
future to figure out which technology is
going to be used in the future trying to
guess trends and trying to understand
what the future is going to hold it as
rapidly changing industry we had to
think about the future or become
irrelevant five years into that I was
called by my family and informed that my
father had come down with non-hodgkins
lymphoma and had cancer and was going to
go through treatments and they asked if
I could come back and watch the farm
because failure for the family farm was
not an option and then being an only son
it was my obligation to come back so I
did when I came home I had to relearn
how to farm because I had been away for
it for so long so I looked at the
environment to see what was going on
like what was new and farming and I was
using the thinking that I had learned
from being in software about what are
the trends in the future and what should
I be doing today to meet those trends
and to be ahead of the change in the
dynamics of this organization of this
industry and I saw some problems when I
came back and some of those problems
were environmental in nature in the San
Joaquin Valley here we have one of the
most polluted air basins because of the
geography of the valley all the
pollution stays in there’s nowhere for
it to go I participated in developing
and new technology for farming that
reduced dust and diesel and greenhouse
gas emissions from the farming process
by 85% a lot of people love this way of
farming the environmentalists loved it
they were giving us all kinds of awards
for sustainable agriculture and for you
know conservation the bank loved it
because it was actually a more
profitable way to farm everyone loved it
but one person my father my father hated
the way I farmed even though he would
tell his friends that you know I was
doing a good job and he was proud that I
came home the last conversation I ever
had with my father
I remember it was on a Sunday night he
called me up and just shooed me out
about how much he hates the way I farmed
and in the conversation what was
uncovered was the fact that what my
father was really upset about was that I
had changed his stuff it wasn’t that my
practices were good or bad but it was
that I was doing it differently than him
and what I learned from that experience
was that not only as thinking
innovatively important but you also in
order to solve problems oftentimes have
to overcome your own personal biases in
order to see opportunities and ways to
solve problems in my great-grandfather’s
time one farmer in America produced
enough agriculture product to feed a
total of four people a family farm was
literally meant to feed a family today
one farmer feeds nearly 300 people and
this number is growing rapidly two
percent of the population of this
country feed the other 98% farmers are
innovating and adopting technologies in
the areas of robotics drones satellite
genetics the Internet of cows which is a
thing and even CRISPR which we heard
about here today we are now at a point
where technology is completely
transforming transforming farm life most
of these technologies have a profound
benefit on the environment since they
allow us to us farmers to do more with
less but they also allow us to produce
more food with less people
as the industry transforms from human
labor to automation the need for
highly-skilled problem solvers is
increasing but for the first time in
human history farmers are finding
themselves with problems they can’t
solve and no one is coming to help we
need help
but solving problems for farmers
requires thinking like farmers but only
2% of the population are farmers so how
do we get kids in the cities the problem
solvers of tomorrow thinking about
agricultural problems today
wheat we do it by teaching them stem
through agricultural examples in 2009 a
group of farmers started farm academy an
interactive live field trip through an
agricultural destination using advanced
video conference technologies our AG
professionals take over elementary
school classrooms and offer an
experience to kids in the city that’s
the next best thing to being on the farm
this program is designed to promote stem
literacy and healthy lifestyles the goal
is to ignite in students at passion for
science and give them examples of how
science impacts areas most essential to
their lives food nutrition and the
environment by creating a relationship
between the Science and Technology of
Agriculture and the science and
technology of everyday life farm academy
aims to ignite a passion for learning
and the attitude of the farmer failure
is not an option
think about the future and work past our
biases because these children’s hold the
key to our future as farmers and our
future as the human race and who knows
maybe one day one of these kids will
even come up with a way to hang a door
on my grandmother’s outhouse thank you
[Applause]
you
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