Investing in Agriculture is Investing in Our Future
By: Juli Jessen
Picture yourself in the supermarket produce aisle: you choose a head of lettuce, place it in your cart and move on. Have you ever thought about how much goes into getting that head of lettuce from the farmers’ field to the grocery store? Like everything else in the store, an incredible amount of science, hard work, and dedication goes into growing the lettuce and getting it to the shelf.
With the good fortune to grow up in a farming community and spend my career in agriculture, I get to see all of the work that goes into food production. My father was an entomologist who started a one-man business as a crop consultant. As a child, I would sometimes go along on his motorbike when he made rounds to count the insects in traps and assess if a crop was at risk. He expanded his business services, selling pest control products and providing tractor application services to growers in our community near Yuma, Arizona.
As our company has grown over the years, our foundation in Yuma’s remarkable agriculture scene helps us stay connected with the complexity and beauty of crop production. We get the good feeling of contribution and purpose to see directly how we are part of creating the best crop with the lightest footprint. It’s heartbreaking to see a crop flourish thanks to the hard work and investment of a farmer, then be taken down by an insect infestation. This is rare today thanks to all of the innovative tools at farmers’ disposal, but it’s a daily risk that makes success more precious. The risk that the farmer takes on each crop and the dedicated work by the farmworker is what I think about in the aisle.
We are fortunate that Gowan’s business model of “muddy boots” to solve some of the difficult but less widespread pest problems allowed us to extend our business geographically. This gave us the opportunity to build a global business based long-term development projects from the cradle of the daily cadence of production agriculture. Gowan Group now has sales entities or experimental stations in 17 countries and development partnerships with several global corporations and institutions. My deepest fulfillment as CEO is seeing how our “Gowan Tribe” of mostly Yuma people can work together to solve problems for growers around the world. I worry about the rural/urban divide that is driving apart America: By creating opportunities to grow professional jobs in small towns, we can help the fabric and connectivity of our country. It takes a sense of community and investment in education in hundreds of places like this for the country to flourish.
It's taken since 1962 to build Gowan into what it is today. I came back to the business full time in 1986 and worked in other regions before settling in the home office. I’ve been CEO since 2004. As a family business, we think in generations. One of my goals is curating skills and projects through the company so the next generation can succeed in the business and in contributing to production agriculture. To continue the long-running trend of growing more food on less land, and to provide affordable food for more people, they will need public trust in the technology we use in agriculture. This takes transparency, outreach and confidence in scientifically based regulations. We’re all in this together.
