I spent last week in Guadalajara, Mexico, presenting to 70 livestock genetics professionals at the annual meeting of the U.S. Livestock Genetics Export association. Record attendance. Twenty percent first-timers. A room full of people who breed cattle, horses, sheep, and pigs for a living, and who collectively move close to a billion dollars in genetic material across 120 countries every year.
I was there as the “nerd in residence.”
That’s not my term. It’s theirs. And I love it.
How I ended up in Guadalajara
I run 6 Seeds, a consultancy that helps agricultural organizations figure out what to do with all this change. Somewhere in the process, the people at this trade association started calling me their nerd in residence. I showed up to a cooperators’ conference with 400 people in the room, talked about how technology could support their work without replacing them, and within five minutes people stopped looking at their phones and leaned in.
So they invited me back. Then another group, USLGE, invited me to their annual members meeting in Guadalajara, Mexico.
The actual work
I can’t share specifics about the organization’s internal operations. That’s their business. But I can share what struck me about the experience, because the patterns are universal.
The meeting brought together an unusual mix: government officials from the USDA’s Foreign Agricultural Service, state agriculture departments from Montana to Texas to Wisconsin, breed association executives, field consultants, and a handful of people like me who sit at the intersection of agriculture and technology.
What I presented was straightforward. A vision for how scattered information (trip reports in email threads, market data in disconnected spreadsheets, member activities tracked in someone’s head) could be brought together into something coherent. Something where you ask a question and get an answer, rather than sending 50 emails and hoping someone remembers.
The response surprised me. Not because they were polite about it, livestock people are always polite, but because of what happened after.
What happened after
The group broke into discussion sessions. When they came back together, the feedback wasn’t about the technology I’d described. It was: We need to collaborate better. We need to share what we’re learning across species, across markets, across states. And we need systems that make that possible without adding more work to already overstretched teams.
One member put it simply: “I don’t think this has to be complicated. Maybe five or six fields of information. Who, when, where. That’s the touch point.”
Another volunteered on the spot to share his group’s activity list with every other member in the room.
The CEO of the organization, who’d been cautious about sharing too much information (for good historical reasons), turned to me in front of the room and said: Can you help us figure this out?
I wasn’t expecting to be called back on stage. That’s the moment I live for in this work. When the conversation about technology turns into a conversation about what people actually need, you know something landed.
What stuck with me
The people closest to the work always know what’s broken. The government speakers were articulate about what they needed from cooperator organizations: quantifiable results, success stories with real numbers, evidence that programs actually move the needle on exports. The field people knew exactly where the gaps were. Nobody needed a consultant to tell them what was wrong. What they needed was someone to connect the dots and build something that worked within the constraints they actually face. Too few staff, too many programs, scattered data, a reporting cycle that creates a mad scramble every June.
I’ve now presented to several hundred agricultural professionals across multiple events. What resonates isn’t the technology demo. It’s the message that human judgment matters more than ever. When I tell a room of people who’ve spent 40 years evaluating cattle by eye that their expertise is more valuable now, not less, and that the technology exists to amplify what they know rather than replace it, the room opens up. You can feel it.
One person I met has spent four decades visually identifying genetic traits in livestock. He’s now working with AI researchers to train camera systems using his lifetime of pattern recognition. The machine can process thousands of images. But the knowledge of what to look for? That came from a human standing in a field for 40 years.
And honestly, the best conversations happened over tequila. I’m only partly joking. The formal presentations were useful, but the real intelligence came out at dinner, at a ranch visit, over drinks. The political dynamics, the trade barriers nobody puts in a report, the projects that are actually working. The informal spaces are where trust gets built, and trust comes before any technology adoption.
Why this work matters to me
Agricultural trade associations are not the most obvious candidates for technology work. They’re small organizations, often five to 10 staff, managing programs across dozens of countries with government oversight and compliance requirements that would make a Silicon Valley startup weep.
But that’s why I find the work so satisfying. When you’re that stretched, an hour saved on reporting is an hour you can spend on relationships. Market intelligence that arrives automatically instead of manually means a better decision made faster. A trip report that gets shared across the organization instead of sitting in one person’s inbox is institutional knowledge that doesn’t walk out the door when someone retires.
The technology is just there to help a small team punch above its weight in a global market.
A note on Mexico
Guadalajara is gorgeous. I walked for hours through the city the day before the meeting. Markets, murals, saddle shops next to electronics stalls, custom leather goods beside yellow rubber ducks.
I flew home to Toronto and minus 20 degrees Celsius. I am already looking for reasons to go back.