Why did I join an agri-business?
My motivations and observations moving into the agricultural sector
Agribusiness has a growing problem: It is the world’s largest industry with global demand for food and food prices being at the highest levels ever, yet there are not enough people to fill the industry vacancies to meet those future challenges. Less than 1.5% of students entering university in Australian and the USA choose agriculture as a career (me included!).
When you hear agribusiness or agriculture, you probably perceive it as “just farming”; i.e. raising livestock and growing crops. Yet less than 2% of agricultural employment opportunities are on farms. A myriad of agribusiness service industries are directly linked to agriculture; including food manufacturing, financial planning, lending, insurance, commodity trading, and natural resource management. You could say in fact that agribusiness is the most interdisciplinary study field of all.
Now bring in tech. And all of a sudden it gets super exciting. Well for me at least! My background is tech, specifically cyber security, tech strategy and for the better part of the last decade, fintech. When I started to look at opportunities to grow my knowledge and skills, the agri-tech sector intrigued me a lot.
I was looking for a few specific things though…
- A place I could practice my technical and leadership tradecraft as a CTO;
- A place that would help me grow while I helped them grow;
- A place that was scaling in all areas (users, revenues, markets);
- A place where high performance was the norm and mediocrity isn’t accepted;
- A place where long term success could be linked to each individual and their contributions.
- I want a 10x opportunity.
This is where AgriDigital come into the picture. Looking at the company, the team and the opportunity, they met all the criteria for me. Emma (CEO) and the foundation team showed me that AgriDigital is a business that is aiming and proving to show the world how technology can be applied to help one of the oldest industries.
It’s been nine (9) months now since I have joined and I can easily say that AgriDigital still holds true to the criteria I had looked for. AgriDigital is a place where hyper growth (or blitzscaling) concepts are being applied; where all members of the team are growing every single day; where high performance is constantly being pushed higher and maintained; and where all members in the growing company see direct connection between their day to day work to the company vision.
AgriDigital is a billion dollar company and will easily become one of the best companies in Australia, let alone the world. I always look for 10x opportunities and am very confident that AgriDigital is exactly that.
Did I think I would join an agribusiness 20 years ago? No I didn’t. However I’m very glad I have.
Stay tuned to see how the story unfolds!
