I'm Pat Walther, and I've spent 20 years in agriculture, with an MSc in agronomy, working across the value chain.

It started with a goose-meat venture that reached Switzerland's top supermarkets. Then AGvisorPRO, a social network of 11,000+ farmers and experts. And, separately, a venture training an LLM on equipment manuals, making 3,000-page documents answerable in seconds.

In 2023 I went all in on AI, and now I commercialize it across the ag value chain: voice assistants you talk to from the truck, and chat that answers questions about your own data and handbooks in seconds.

I teach because the leaders who learn to direct AI now, while the stakes are low, will shape the next decade. I want that to be you.

I'm Shane Thomas. Agribusiness is changing at lightning speed, and I treat that as the opportunity of a career, not a threat.

I've worked across ag retail, technical agronomy, sales, marketing, supply chain, and digital and agtech strategy, and led diverse teams through change. In aggregate, those experiences give me a dynamic read on where agriculture is headed and how to shape it.

I write Upstream Ag Insights, the weekly newsletter read by agribusiness leaders across North America, where I dig into the real shifts in the industry and what to do about them.

I operate by a few rules: relentless pursuit of improvement, market obsession, strong opinions loosely held, and outcome over ego.

I'm teaching this with Pat because I've used the system myself, and it changed how I run my own work.