About This Episode
Shay Foulk talks with Michael O'Gorman, founder of the Farmer Veteran Coalition, at the 2019 conference in Austin. O'Gorman did not serve. On September 11, 2001, his daughter was crossing the street to an office facing the Twin Towers when the plane hit, and he was running a large organic vegetable operation in Mexico for the U.S. market, unable to cross a closed border for two weeks. When he got back, his son was in uniform.
The second push came from a 2006 Carsey Institute study out of the University of New Hampshire that mapped the zip codes of those killed in action in Afghanistan and Iraq and found the post-9/11 volunteer military drawing disproportionately from the most rural communities. O'Gorman found 40,000 organizations serving veterans in 2007 and none connecting them to careers in agriculture. He started with nine veterans that first year, driving up to 500 miles to meet anyone interested.
Membership now exceeds 17,000, and the Austin conference drew about 500 people with roughly 50 of its 70 speakers being farmer veterans themselves. O'Gorman says the growth shifted from veterans considering farming for the first time to veterans already farming, many returning to family operations after service. He describes the real benefit as renewed purpose rather than therapy, and points to state chapters as the next stage, with a couple hundred attendees staying an extra day to learn how to start one.
“The mission of Farmer Veteran Coalition is mobilizing veterans to feed America.”
— Michael O'Gorman
Key Takeaways
The coalition grew from nine veterans in its first year to more than 17,000 veteran members.
A 2006 Carsey Institute study mapped zip codes of those killed in action and found the post-9/11 volunteer military drew disproportionately from rural communities.
In 2007 there were roughly 40,000 organizations serving veterans and none focused on connecting them to careers in agriculture.
About 500 people attended the Austin conference, and roughly 50 of the 70 speakers were veterans running their own farm operations.
O'Gorman says the benefit is a renewed sense of purpose, not farming as therapy, and that purpose is what carries over from military service.
State chapters are the next phase, with one-day state conferences planned and Austin sessions taped for later webinars.
Full Transcript
Narrator: The Ag View Pitch is created by Ag View Solutions to provide value to its clients and farmers like you. We'd like to welcome our new listeners today and encourage you to check out our other podcast on The Ag View Pitch, which can be found on Apple Podcasts, Anchor, and Podbean. You can also find us on Facebook at Ag View Solutions and online at agviewsolutions.com. Enjoy.
Shay
Foulk: All right, well, we'll just jump into it. Welcome back everyone to the Ag View Pitch. This is Shay Foulk and I'm joined here with special guest Michael O'Gorman. We're here for the Farmer Veteran Conference down in Austin. Beautiful day. Appreciate you joining me here today.
Michael
O'
Gorman: Good morning, Shea. I'm glad to be here and talk to you.
Shay
Foulk: So I was wondering if you could maybe tell the listeners out there a little bit about what the Farmer Veteran Coalition is about and then why this conference is and how it came to be.
Michael
O'
Gorman: Well, the mission of Farmer Veteran Coalition is mobilizing veterans to feed America. And we have one, one mission and one job that we do, and that's to connect returning men and women coming out of the military and some still serving but planning their transition to find either careers and employment in agriculture or help them launch, build, or return to their farm operations.
Shay
Foulk: That's awesome. And this has been going on since about 2007, right?
Michael
O'
Gorman: 2007, I started a kind of a small idea. I left my day job in 2008. I had been in vegetable production for 40 years and grew kind of slowly at first, and last 4 or 5 years has really, really grown, and it just has kind of has a life of its own right now.
Shay
Foulk: So did you serve, and if so, how did it lead to this? You know, why is this the message, and why is this what you wanted to do with your time after being with the business that you were with?
Michael
O'
Gorman: Well, that's a unique part of our story, and one of the One of the reasons why we call it Farmer Veteran Coalition is because I didn't serve. But what happened to me, what got me interested in starting this, on 9/11, the oldest of my 4 children, my daughter, had just got her master's degree from Columbia University and gone to work in the building facing the Twin Towers. So she was there crossing the street to her office when the plane hit, and I was at the time running a large organic vegetable operation in Mexico for the U.S. market. They shut the border down for 2 weeks before I could get back to see my other kids, and when I did, my son was in the uniform, and so that kind of led me to the idea of wanting to do something.
And then in 2006, a study came out that showed— by the Carsey Institute out of University of New Hampshire— and it was based on the zip codes of the Killed in Action in Afghanistan and Iraq, and it showed the— those that were in our post-9/11 all-voluntary military were now very much disproportionately coming from our most rural communities. And so being a lifelong farmer and wanting to do something for veterans, that's what gave me the idea to start this.
Shay
Foulk: And can you talk a little bit about how this has grown in the last decade or so? Because I think we, you know, mentioned here earlier, almost— well, right at 5— we'll call it 500. 500 people are going to be down for this conference here in Austin. That, that's amazing. So how has this grown over the years?
Michael
O'
Gorman: Uh, it's grown a lot. You know, it took me the first year of starting this to find 9 veterans. If I heard of a veteran that was interested in agriculture, I gave myself like a 500-mile radius. I would drive out to meet them. And, uh, now we get more veterans sign up every single day than we got in that first year or two. And So we now have over 17,000 veteran members. What's really been exciting about our growth the last few years is early on we were attracting veterans who were mostly interested in starting to farm and looking at farms, at farming as their— for the first time. And a lot of our growth the last few years have been veterans who are already farming, who many of them started post-9/11, but a lot of them A lot of men and women leave family farm operations and take a few years to go serve for their country, come back to those family operations.
So the, uh, this conference is not only growing in that we have 500 people here, but the amount of farming that's going on with these 500 farmer veterans is what we call them is really amazing.
Shay
Foulk: Right, and it really speaks to the purpose and the mission of bringing these people together.
Michael
O'
Gorman: Early on, Shay, everybody would say to me, "Oh, farming, that must be so healing." And those of us that have been lifelong farmers, we'd look at each other and roll our eyes and go, "Holy smokes, yeah, just wait." But the real secret sauce to FVC is the real healing part, if there is a healing, is that sense, it really gives the veterans a sense of renewed sense of purpose. And I think a lot of what even gets mixed up sometimes with PTSD, and that's— there's a lot of trauma from war that is a part of coming home, but a lot— it's a very purpose-driven military, and people went in with a deep sense of purpose, a willingness to risk it all for that purpose, and to find something else that feels like a new mission, a new purpose, and agriculture feels like that. And So that's, that's very, uh, that's a lot of what makes this work.
Shay
Foulk: That's great. So a question that comes to my mind after, you know, talking with you here for a few minutes is, do you think the growth has been as a result of more farmer and farmer entrepreneurs coming from the Global War on Terrorism that have served in the last 20 years? Do you think that's where the growth has come from, or do you think it's just been getting these people to the right resources and getting them in touch and building this network? Maybe a little of both?
Michael
O'
Gorman: I think it's a lot of both. You know, I think that, you know, in some— you know, also, when we started, when I started this project, we actually— I got some help and we researched and found that in 2007 there were 40,000 groups in the United States organized to help veterans. You know, it's a big difference and a big change since Vietnam. Where the country is really mobilized to help them. But there were none, zero, um, with an effort to connect them to careers in agriculture. And then even more surprising, there were none with a focus on that 45% of our military that is returning to our most rural communities. And those communities are— people live farther apart. There's more isolation. There's geographic isolation. There's distance from veteran services. And in many cases these veterans were not being served by other veteran groups.
So we found that niche and we've grown it and we found— we got the USDA to help support it, we've got foundations to help support it, and now we're real happy to see that there's a couple hundred smaller groups around the country, mostly with the regional food banks blueprint or a specific project, now working with that connection with Veterans in Agriculture. Part of what we do at our conferences, they come to our conference because we see ourselves as the leader of the whole effort, the whole movement really. And so this is a real coming together and collaboration with a lot of groups, but FEC has really been the leader and the only national group and the one that really has done a lot to kind of light the that fire of interest around the country.
Shay
Foulk: That's great. And as the saying goes, sometimes a farmer's work is never done. So where do you see the Farmer Veteran Coalition going from here? I know there's some state chapters that are starting. What other growth do you see here in the future and where do you see it going as the founder?
Michael
O'
Gorman: I think the state chapters is real critical because when I first started traveling and talking about FVC, I had this idea that I'd be, give a talk and afterwards all the veterans would line up and say, "Can you help me do this? Can you do this? Can you, you know, how can you help me do that?" And the reality is they all lined up and said, "Wow, you know, farming and the military, farmer and veteran, this is me, this is my life, how can I help?" And I thought, "Wow, if I could ever figure out how to channel that kind of enthusiasm into an organization and that kind of a desire to be part of it and to connect with other veterans that are also farmers and that might not live close to them but are maybe raising the same crops or the same animals. And so the chapters are really a way to kind of channel a lot of that ground-up grassroots enthusiasm to be part of our organization.
So we're hoping the last day of our conference is a meeting just about chapters, and we have a couple hundred people staying on an extra day to learn about how to start chapters, and we're expecting to see a lot of growth in our chapters after that.
Shay
Foulk: Yeah, I know I'll be there. I'm looking forward to that with the Illinois chapter, as you and I were talking about earlier. Now let's talk a little bit about the conference, and I'll pick on you a little bit here. What are you maybe most excited for this year, and what do you think is different this year that those who are attending can look forward to from what maybe they've seen in the past?
Michael
O'
Gorman: I think the thing I'm most excited about is the amount of actual farming that's going on amongst them. And so we have probably 50 out of our 70 speakers are panelists in our breakout sessions who— and it's, you know, every one of those, the panel on bees, the panel on row crops, the panel on cattle, we have poultry, vegetables, every one of them, Every participant in those panels, with maybe one or two exceptions, are veterans themselves who have gone into farming, are doing well, want to share their knowledge with other veterans. And so I think that shows real growth in the project and a kind of a level of success. And I think that's the thing I'm most excited about.
Shay
Foulk: Well, and with the number of speakers there, I almost wish it was about an 8-day-long conference so I could go and listen to everybody. But it's going to be hard to choose for those that already have when you're looking at all these awesome things going on.
Michael
O'
Gorman: We're going to tape the sessions and turn them into webinars. We're going to have a conference next year in Atlanta. And we're also going to encourage the state chapters to hold one-day conferences in their state to bring together people where there will be a little less travel involved and people can meet people that they might be relatively close to and get involved. Learn from each other there too.
Shay
Foulk: I think that's phenomenal. Anything else here that you want to kick out to the people listening to this that maybe haven't attended Farmer Veteran Conference, or even for those who are going to be here tonight for the Ranger Cattle kickoff dinner? Anything else you'd like to share?
Michael
O'
Gorman: Well, we're real excited about this dinner and Ranger Cattle. You know, Josh is a success story of an Army Ranger. He's one of 5 Army Rangers. They're going to have a panel called Rangers on the Range on all first-generation farmers in 5 different states, so we're really excited about that. But check us out, go to our website www.farmvetco.org, for www.farmvetco.org. Check us out, see the— it's easy to become a member. You could be involved in any aspect of agriculture. You could be a USDA employee, an academic, a seed salesman, a tractor supply company, become a member and become involved.
Shay
Foulk: Oh, that's great. And for anybody that's listening out there from our traditional listener group, I'll be doing a few more podcasts hopefully with other operations here over the next couple of days and do a follow-up to the conference. I'm really looking forward to this. I'm glad we made this work here today and I really appreciate your time, Michael.
Michael
O'
Gorman: Oh, thank you, Shay.
Shay
Foulk: All right. And thank you everyone for listening. We will catch you next time on the Ag View Pitch.
Narrator: Thanks again for listening, everyone. If you would like to hear more content from Ag View Solutions, listen to our other podcasts such as Dad's Wisdom or our Current Harvest series. Ag View Solutions works as an integral part of operations like yours, side by side for farm profit management, business collaboration and structuring, facilitating industry-leading peer groups, and coaching and consulting tailored to your farm's unique needs. We know that no two farms are the same, and we are here to help make your farm be the best it can be. You can learn more at AgViewSolutions.com, email us at AgViewPitch@gmail.com, or call Chris Barron at 319-533-5703.
Shay
Foulk: We really look forward to talking with you.