Q. What is the highlight of your career?
A. The highlight of my career is traveling to many areas of north America and learning about multiple crops such as blueberries, sugarcane, potatoes, peas, as well as common ones like corn, wheat and forage crops. Then finding ways to automate and improve the farming methods with technology.

Q. What are challenges you encounter in your career?
A. Some of the challenges I have encountered in my career are being in a cutting edge technology that was very new and expensive for many farmers to adopt. At times we were making solutions and methods as we are learning what they could do. Some of these include steering tractors and implements, controlling sprayers, improving accuracy as well, and now autonomy (no operators in the cab). Another realized challenge was being a very male driven industry when I began in the late 90’s and in order to overcome the challenge, I had to have the knowledge, skills and ability to communicate with farmers to gain their trust and willingness to work with me. Being educated in agronomy, but working in mechanical, electrical, and software engineering means being self taught to overcome the educational gap and to always be learning more diverse skillset. In my role at Bayer, there are no industry solutions for research, so my team has to engineer new solutions.

Q. How did you get to this career?
A. I got into this career by doing an crop scouting internship for a couple of years in college that gave me the interest in crop sciences when I transferred to Colorado State University and I applied for a part-time job at a farming software company that grew into more technology.

Q. What is something unique about your career most people might not know or understand about what you do?
A. Something unique about my career most people might not know – the adoption of precision agriculture was done mostly by row crop farmers, not high priced commodities like fruits and vegetable farmers where margins are better for being early innovators. So cost of technology had to show return on investment in a shorter timeline in order for them to want to utilize the technology. Today, not many row-crop farms exist that don’t use automated guidance or product control systems. 

Q. Are there scholarship or internship opportunities available with your career? If so, where can more information about those be found?
A. Yes, there are many scholarship and educational programs specifically for technology in agriculture. 

• https://www.fund.bayer.us/grant/2016/11/15/americas-farmers-grow-ag-leaders
• https://www.bayer.com/en/us/career/studentsandgraduates
• https://www.trimble.com/en/careers/internships
• https://www.njc.edu/program/precision-agriculture
• https://www.nwktc.edu/programs/precision-agriculture-technolo