Grow Further kicked off its information and networking series on March 28 at Impact Hub Seattle.

We were thrilled to have such a diverse and engaged group of attendees, 30 people from a variety of professions and generations and with recent family ties to at least 8 countries.

Former state representative and founding member Brady Walkinshaw began the evening with a brief speech emphasizing that Grow Further will be blazing new territory by building awareness of the wide development impact and “bang for the buck” of agricultural research, and by empowering individuals to better understand and help shape the future direction of agricultural innovation.

Next, agricultural economist and Grow Further founder Peter Kelly shared his vision for the organization, organized around three main points: 

1) Agriculture matters and there’s a long history of great innovations. 

2) Small-scale farmers aren’t getting the innovations they need just to keep up with climate change and population growth out of bureaucratic institutions. 

3) By engaging members of all different professions in a way that’s never been done before in agriculture, Grow Further will create value for both members and society.

Then we broke into small groups to do an activity to simulate how our members will make decisions to fund agricultural innovation projects, looking at several sample proposals from a group of researchers passionate about food security, from a graduate student, and from a farmer. This spurred a lively and interesting discussion about the impact we can have.