About

What do I say here?

I’m not sure how active this blog will be. It’s meant as nothing more than a place to share personal observations from time to time. I’m not even sure what I’ll be posting about. I have a wide variety of interests:

In agriculture social media circles, I”m known as the data guy, and I am very interested in data/numbers, and what we can learn from them. Before becoming involved in social media, and the AgChat Foundation, I spent many years working with precision ag data trying to understand relationships between soil fertility, planting data, and yield. And my interest involves more than just a bunch of stats as output. What I’m REALLY passionate about is how we can use data/numbers to accomplish specific business or organizational goals.

In my heart, I’m a farmer. I might not drive tractors that much, and if you followed me around many days, I wouldn’t fit the classic definition of “farmer” very well at all but my heart’s in agriculture, it’s how I was born and raised, and I want to give that opportunity to my children, my current partners in the farm, and others.

I’m very much an introvert by nature, I don’t share a lot of my personal life, dealing with people wears me out, and I need quite solitude to recharge. And yet “people” are a real passion. The diversity and raw talent that exists amoung people is incredible, harnessing that talent into an effective team to accomplish something more than any one individual could alone is something that fascinates me. I have only recently come to realize this as one of my passions, and yet can see that over time it may be an increasingly important focus

In some ways my last set of passions are certainly the most important. I’m marrried to a wonderful woman, and we have three girls and a young boy. Education has always been of interest, maybe more so with it being a big part of our families life nowdays. Our children attend a private church-affiliated school, I have a lot of high regard for many of the teachers in my public-education experience, and home schooling is a topic that has interested me from time to time. I’m a member of the Apostolic Christian Church of America, and certainly consider my faith in a risen Savior the most important thing in my life. But like most of my personal life, I havn’t shared much of it online. There’s days I wonder if my focus is wrong there.

I really enjoy thinking about larger issues questions like how we feed a growing world population with increasingly limited resources, and always enjoy a serious discussion around buzzwords such as “market economy” or “sustainability”. As I said at the start, this blog is pretty open-ended. First objective is to actually post on random occasions, don’t know that I have a specific topic plan.