Building the intelligence layer
American agriculture is missing.

I'm a soil microbiologist turned builder. After a decade studying what happens below the surface — in the lab, in the field, and in the data — I became convinced that the biggest bottleneck in regenerative agriculture isn't knowledge. It's that the knowledge never reaches the people who need it. This is my attempt to fix that.

The problem I couldn't ignore.

The U.S. spends billions annually on agricultural research. Land-grant universities, commodity boards, federal conservation programs — all producing peer-reviewed science about soil health, nitrogen efficiency, cover crops, water quality. Rigorous work. Important work. Almost none of it reaches the farmer making decisions in the field this week.

Extension services are stretched thin — one agent covering hundreds of farms across multiple counties. Consultants are expensive and often tied to input sales. Online forums are unmoderated and inconsistent. The result is a vast, growing body of agronomic knowledge that sits in journals and project reports, functionally invisible to the people it was designed to help.

That quote came from a state commodity board director, not a researcher. It captures something I've seen throughout my work: the problem isn't that farmers don't want to improve. It's that the infrastructure connecting science to practice simply doesn't exist. I decided to build it.

Four platforms. One system.

Each platform addresses a distinct bottleneck in the farmer's decision journey — from finding the right research, to getting field-specific advice, to procuring the right inputs, to measuring what practice change actually creates. Built separately, each has value. Connected, they form a complete evidence-to-outcome loop that no single tool in the market provides.

Why this work matters now.

Three converging forces make this moment particularly important — and particularly tractable.

What this builds toward.

The near-term goal is building a trusted farmer audience and proving the evidence-to-outcome loop works. But the longer-term implications are larger — and worth naming.

Why me — and how each platform was born.

These platforms didn't come from a whiteboard session or a market research report. Each one came from hitting a specific wall — repeatedly — and deciding to build through it.

Origin 1 — The workshop that ended with nothing.

While working in extension at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, I helped organize dozens of soil health workshops. The format was always the same: scientists presented their research, farmers listened politely, and then everyone went home. No feedback loop. No follow-up. No way for the farmer's actual challenge to shape the next season's research agenda.

What struck me wasn't that farmers were disengaged — it was that the entire system was designed as a one-way broadcast. Researchers solved problems they assumed farmers had. Farmers dealt with problems researchers hadn't studied. The gap between those two realities was enormous, and the workshop format made it invisible.

I wanted to invert that. To build something circular — where the farmer's challenge shapes the research question, the research question gets answered with evidence, and the answer feeds back to the field. That became Soil Health Exchange, first hosted through UNL's CropWatch in 2023, now live as a standalone platform.

Origin 2 — The soil health equation has no local answer.

My research focused on something I came to call the Soil Health Gap — the distance between what a soil could be, ecologically, and what it currently is under management. To measure that gap meaningfully, you need reference points: what does a healthy soil look like in this specific landscape, this specific climate, this specific cropping history? I developed frameworks for this — Cropland Reference Ecological Units, Reference Site Selection methodology — precisely because generalizing soil health across geographies produces answers that are technically correct and practically useless.

That same problem showed up in the research literature. A study on cover crop nitrogen dynamics in Maryland tells you almost nothing about what to do in western Nebraska. But there was no way — none — to find peer-reviewed research filtered by location, soil type, or cropping system. Every search tool treated geography as irrelevant metadata. For a field practitioner, geography is everything. That's why I built OpenAgData — a geo-indexed research discovery layer that treats location not as a filter but as the primary organizing principle.

Origin 3 — Carbon isn't the only thing a farm produces for the world.

The carbon credit market has done something important — it's created a financial signal for ecosystem stewardship. But it's also created a kind of tunnel vision. A farm that reduces nutrient leaching improves downstream water quality. A farm that plants prairie strips increases local biodiversity. A farm that diversifies its cropping system sequesters carbon, yes, but also reduces erosion, supports pollinators, and buffers flood risk. None of these outcomes are priced. None of them are measured systematically. None of them are paid for.

We've replaced the yield monoculture with a carbon monoculture, and we're headed for the same loophole — farmers optimizing for one metric while the full value of what they produce for the world goes unrecognized and uncompensated. TerraValue is my attempt to build the measurement layer that makes the full picture visible — across carbon, water quality, biodiversity, soil health, flood mitigation, and air quality simultaneously.

Origin 4 — I couldn't find the inputs I needed for my own farm.

Over the past two years, I've spent an embarrassing amount of time trying to find research-backed equipment, rental options, and seed varieties that are actually appropriate for my location and soil type. Not generic recommendations — specific ones. What cover crop seed mixes work in my county at my soil texture? What's the right seeding rate? Where do I rent the equipment to do it? FarmDeck came directly from that frustration — the recognition that even a soil scientist with a PhD in this field couldn't easily navigate the input procurement landscape. A farmer trying to make a practice change shouldn't have to either.

These four platforms aren't a portfolio. They're the same problem encountered from four different directions — and the same conviction that building the connective infrastructure is more valuable than solving any one piece of it in isolation.