After more than a decade in ag retail, Kyle Stull took an opportunity to strike out on his own as an agronomic consultant with Stull Agronomy. Today, Stull is a Pioneer seed dealer as well as an agronomic and precision ag consultant.
Click below to listen to the full episode. And here’s an overview.
What’s been the most surprising thing as you launched your consulting business?
Time management has been different.
I used to drive to an office every day, and I don’t do that anymore. I literally just get up in the morning and walk across the hall and I’m in my office.
The biggest thing has been trying to manage my time a little bit, and it’s been different to train to manage myself, instead of, you know, showing up at a specific time.
Other than that, it’s been nice to be my own boss and kind of make my own schedules, and work through some other different things and it’s a totally different world.
Why do you call yourself The Rogue Agronomist?
It is a play on the fact that I left the retail system so I’ve kind of “gone rogue.”
Also, I used to work in seed production as my first job in agronomy. Any plant in the field that’s not supposed to be there that’s not a weed and it’s a corn plant that’s not supposed to be there, it’s a rogue corn plant.
And then we started kind of joking around that we were going to start calling our trucks Rogue One and Rogue Two. It just turned into a thing.
How did you get started on social media, and how do you find value in those interactions?
I think my Twitter profile started in 2012. But once I got into it, I got to know a lot of people and got on a first name basis with a lot of them. I spent a lot of time recently trying to reach out and that’s been really good for me as I’ve learned about some things that I didn’t know about. When a customer asks me about products instead of trying to read through articles online half the time I know the person who is either the rep for that chemical or whatever they want to try. It’s been fairly good thing for me professionally.
Why did you start a podcast?
I just started with this microphone in front of me and just started talking. And over the last couple of years I might get 30 plays or 30 downloads per posting or per episode to now over 300 or 400 per episode.
We talk about the pandemic being such a bad thing. But sometimes it’s a good thing as we have so many people that are more willing to do Zoom conference calls, now, which for me, has made having guests on the podcast a lot easier.
Margy Eckelkamp was on The Rogue Agronomist podcast, and you can listen here.
