Members Drive our Success. What’s your AgGateway Success Story?

From the President

Members Drive our Success. What’s your AgGateway Success Story?

By Brent Kemp, President and CEO

Across the farming regions in both hemispheres, this is a time of hope and optimism. Up north, fertilizer applicators and planters cross carefully prepared fields to initiate the growing season, while farmers in the south look out over hectares of mature crops, anticipating a bountiful harvest.

From a distance, it’s easy to romanticize these snapshots of crop production – the pastoral beauty belies the hours of planning, preparation, and anxiety inherent in the practice of farming. From planning to planting to scouting and application to that last pass through the field for harvest, it takes many hands to go from decision to plant to crop in the barn. It takes effort, energy, and care to transform a planted seed into food or fuel or fiber.

Similarly, the connections, standards, and messages we deliver through the work of AgGateway bely the individual and collective efforts expended by you, our volunteer members. There is much more to it than meets the eye.

It starts with an individual who has identified a need and brought an idea to staff or requested a meeting via the website to see if others share that problem. Like Cornell University’s Dr. Kristan Foster Reed who needed a place to identify available and needed data for evaluating impacts of dairy feed on ruminant byproducts. It continues through ideation and networking among members – for example, veteran volunteers like Andres Ferreyra and Victoria Peoples introducing their professional contacts to the organization. Proactive actions like these ultimately lead to awareness and implementation of the tools, standards, and guidelines that members like you have worked hard to develop.

The analogy can be extended, but the point is that AgGateway’s success is uniquely member driven – it is your organization. We are at our best when we’re talking about the business problems you face and how industry and other partners can address them together. We are at our best when you are contributing ideas and bringing new people to the table. We are at our best when we share success stories of the value – monetary, human resource, productivity, and efficiency gains – your organization has achieved as a result of implementing work.

The industry at large recognizes the awesome things that are happening at AgGateway. As Ben Craker and I walked the show floor at the International Production and Processing Expo and Commodity Classic, we had a number of people say things like “we’ve been meaning to talk to you,” or, “we hear good things; how can we get involved?” And we enjoy nothing more than being able to share the bountiful harvest of value that members have derived from our collective efforts.

Throughout the year, staff will continue to carry the message to places like Ag on the Mall, the American Dairy Science Association, Agrishow, Tech Hub Live, and more. Let us know what your successes are so we can celebrate them. They are the yield that brings more participation and helps the industry thrive.