A Fresh Take on Agriculture A dairy farmer and rancher are on a mission to change the way the world views agriculture, one podcast episode at a time. BY KRYSTA PAFFRATH
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iscover Ag is a podcast where hosts, Natalie Kovarik and Tara Vander Dussen share relevant and captivating conversations about Agriculture so you can better understand the food system, and connect with the hands that feed us. Every Thursday they highlight Agriculture in a modern and fun way, giving their professional farming opinions on a mix of entertainment, facts, and trending news articles. Discover Ag has been described as a mix between Mike Rowe’s “The Way I Heard It” podcast and the OShry sister’s “The Toast” podcast. I am excited to sit down with both of them to hear their story and learn more about their mission of discovering and elevating agriculture.
KRYSTA: BEFORE WE GET INTO THE REALLY GOOD STUFF, I’M DYING TO KNOW, HOW DID THIS PARTNERSHIP COME ABOUT? Tara: Natalie and I were both sharing online individually for years and when we started, there weren’t a ton of women in ag sharing online. We connected about five years ago in a DM where we would just talk and support each other pretty regularly. Then in March of 2021, we met in person for the first time when I ended up attending Natalie’s Rural Rooted Retreat. At the time, I was working on some things for my New Mexico Milkmaid platform that ended up falling through and in that struggle was the birth of Elevate Ag when we realized that we could come together and accomplish so much more than individually. Together, we shared some really cool goals of being able to give farmers, ranchers, and producers the tools to help them with their own online sharing journey. November 2021 is when we founded Elevate Ag and shortly after that, we started writing out the content for our first online course. Then by January 2022, we were filming the course, and we launched the podcast in April 2022. Natalie: From my standpoint, I had been doing my Rural Rooted Retreats, and while I love them, and I’m a huge proponent for in-person learning, I also recognize that there was a large part of my audience that still had questions and needed help but couldn’t afford or attend those in-person events. So when Tara asked me what I thought about an online course, I was very drawn to the idea of creating something that was more accessible for everyone in our industry. KRYSTA: DID EITHER OF YOU EVER EXPECT THAT YOU’D BE PRODUCING A PODCAST, SHARING ABOUT AGRICULTURE? Tara: We founded Elevate Ag in November of 2021 but we actually signed up for a six-month mastermind individually in January and went as completely separate entities. Very early on, we realized we should probably just do our calls and everything together because a lot of our goals aligned, and even in the midst of that we still had our own individual things going on but that changed pretty quickly when we realized just how aligned our goals were. Natalie: As far as the podcast goes, Tara and I both found that surprising when it came up. It was not something we had built into our quarterly goals or even yearly goals. I had actually been asked to start a podcast before and even though I love the podcast platform, I just didn’t see what I would talk about or how that fit into what I was doing. But the further Tara and I got into developing Elevate Ag, the more it became apparent that the podcast made sense for us. It wasn’t too long after the idea was planted, that we were boots on the ground running, so it was pretty quick from start to finish.
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