Future of Agriculture FOA 180: The Journey of an AgTech Entrepreneur with Colin Hurd of Smart Ag
Colin Hurd is an entrepreneur and the Business Development Manager at Raven Industries, a highly diversified technology company that provides innovative products and solutions to help feed, connect, and protect the world. Raven Industries recently acquired Smart Ag, a company founded by Colin. Smart Ag is a tech company that develops autonomous farming solutions, selling products that allow farming equipment and machinery to be operated remotely, similar to drones. Colin founded Smart Ag to address the growing labor crisis in production agriculture.
Colin joins me today to discuss why he formed Smart Ag and the kind of technology and solutions they offer to farmers. He describes how he was driven to start Smart Ag, the problems he wants to address, and the people who helped him put the company in the market. He explains the need for Smart Ag to be acquired by Raven Industries and the benefits it has received. Colin also discusses some of the challenges their company faced as a startup, and how he and his team solved them.
“What’s different about a startup versus a large company is everything is just hyper-compressed; things happen at light speed.” - Colin Hurd
This Week on The Future of Agriculture Podcast:
- The journey that led him to start Smart Ag.
- Labor scarcity and how it became a large problem in the industry.
- The people who inspired him to focus on autonomous ag technology.
- Determining whether someone can be a co-founder or the first employee.
- The challenges of starting a company that promotes autonomous tech.
- The technical problems they focused on and solved for their company to become successful.
- Differences between pre and post-acquisition of Smart Ag.
- Comparing and contrasting a startup and a large corporation.
- What it means to have an entrepreneurial spirit at a young age.
Connect with Colin Hurd
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