Innovation is Risky
Tim Hammerich
News Reporter
In making decisions on the farm, it often feels easier to stick with what’s always been done. But Zack Smith, farmer and founder of Stock Cropper, says pushing past that pressure to stay in the status quo is what actually creates change. Smith credits much of his success to having the courage to try something different.
Smith… “ It's risky. I mean, I've spent a ton of money trying to develop this stuff and taking a lot of chances. Not everybody, especially—this is more geared probably to young people wanting to do this, and young people don't always have that level of agency. There's a lot of people that are in that place, but they just don't because maybe they're working with other folks. There's the social pressure. Anytime you do something different in farming—it's a pretty closed minded system in a lot of ways. So when you tell people you're gonna put a three ring animal circus in the middle of a cornfield. You're gonna put it on a state highway. You’ve got to worry about people going off the road because they're wondering what the hell is that moron doing again? I get a lot of that and that's fine, but we've also taken the chance to do some of that stuff has also landed some pretty sweet places like precision planning this last year, or the last two years. There's always been kind of a fairly tunnel vision. Stay inside, color inside the lines. Just do what grandpa did, dad did. And the thing I love about farm weird is it gives permission for other people that maybe agree to maybe have the courage to try to get outside of that.”
Once again, that’s Zack Smith of Stock Cropper.
