Michael Steien, Black Gold Potato Farms

"A farmer will never care about technology unless it helps him right there in the dirt. Nature doesn't negotiate; the crops tell you if you've succeeded or failed. You can build all the systems you want from an office, but if it doesn't work in the field, it doesn't matter.

I started at Black Gold Farms as a two-week micro intern. Then I became an actual intern, a business analyst, and five years later I manage IT. Over time, my job turned into solving data problems that kept showing up in day-to-day operations: systems that didn't talk to each other, reports that came too late to matter, and valuable information locked away where no one could use it.

Right now, every part of the farm operation has its own software system: The tractor company, the crop and seed suppliers, the farm itself. And the farm-management software is somehow supposed to tie it all together. You end up with messy data in disconnected spreadsheets, duplicated work, and a lot of know-how trapped in people's heads instead of being shared.

That's what drew me to the American Tech Fellowship. My goal was to take the knowledge that actually keeps the lights on, the stuff you can't find in a manual, and turn it into something that helps the actual people doing the work. A farmer knows a field is good because he's lived there for decades, because the soil feels right under his boots. He can tell when the ground's holding too much water just by how it sounds under the tires, or when a field is tired long before the data shows it.

What excites me about AI is that it can finally connect all of that: the people, the data, and the work in a way that reflects how things really get done. We desperately need that in agriculture. Not to replace farmers, but to help them make faster, smarter calls using what they already know.

American farmers are some of the most resilient people on earth. By nature, by biology, and by the industry itself, they've been tested over and over—and keep finding ways to adapt. They've always been innovators. Go to any farm and you'll find something built from scratch—a tool, a fix, a workaround—because there was a problem that needed solving.

That same instinct is what gives me hope about AI. The challenge isn't getting farmers to change; it's keeping up with how quickly they'll adopt what works."