A 1790 census of our fledgling American nation showed that roughly 90 percent of the population of 4 million were farmers. Today, that number is less than 2 percent of a population of around 330 million.

How is that possible? How can so few farmers feed a much larger population?

For a long period, the agriculture manufacturing industry made bigger equipment that went faster and faster, so it could produce more food or textile fiber with fewer people. But eventually, it got to the point where the equipment couldn’t realistically be made any bigger or go any faster.

That means that innovation needs to come from other quarters.

Enter folks like Fargo, North Dakota native Greg Tehven (B.S.B. ’06) and his company Emerging Prairie, an entrepreneur support organization that celebrates, and serves as a connection hub for the entrepreneurial ecosystem of the region.

Emerging Prairie focuses its efforts in three main areas: entrepreneurship, innovation, and technology. The group hosts weekly coffee gatherings and conferences to bring together like-minded people who want to build enterprise in the area.

“We do a wide variety of things that really celebrate entrepreneurs,” Tehven says. “We coordinate events, have a coworking space, facilitate entrepreneur day at the Capitol to inform policymakers about entrepreneurial challenges, and we have the largest TEDx in the region, TEDx Fargo.” (TEDx are locally organized events that mimic larger TED talks, in which an expert presents ideas designed to promote discussion on a topic.)

Tehven has embraced entrepreneurship since his school days. When he was a freshman at the U of M in 2003, he and three of his classmates from the Carlson School of Management created Students Today Leaders Forever, a nonprofit that encouraged servant leadership. In 2008, the organization won the Social Entrepreneur’s Cup, a division of the Minnesota Cup, an annual startup competition held at the Holmes Center for Entrepreneurship at the U of M’s Carlson School of Management.

“We began with an idea to take our friends on a spring break trip called the Pay It Forward Tour, traveling to different cities across the U.S. to do service trips with the idea of revealing leadership through service relationships and action,” Tehven says. (The group would eventually host chapters at more than 30 universities across 10 states.)

But that experience, as successful as it was, was also challenging for someone maintaining a full course load for four years. After graduation, Tehven took a year off to travel and decompress.

“When I got back, I had gotten a full ride to go to the University of Manchester on a Rotary Foundation ambassadorial scholarship,” Tehven says. “But I had to wait a year before I could go to grad school, so I began working for Doug Burgum, who had built Great Plains Software in Fargo, which he eventually sold to Microsoft.”

While working for Burgum, Tehven—who comes from five generations of farmers—became enamored of downtown Fargo and started thinking entrepreneurially again.

“When I was in school in Minneapolis, I’d heard the stories of entrepreneurs. I got my undergrad in entrepreneurship,” Tehven says, “but in Fargo, there wasn’t an entrepreneur support organization. I actually turned down my scholarship and started to build Emerging Prairie.”

A key part of Emerging Prairie’s success is a fellow West Fargo High School classmate of Tehven’s, and another U of M alum, Dave Batcheller (B.A. ’05).

When Tehven was starting Students Today Leaders Forever in 2003, Batcheller’s father, Barry, had retired from his position as director of technology at John Deere. The elder Batcheller then started a business called Appareo, a technology company focused on electronics, mechanical, and software design for the aviation and agriculture industries.

The younger Batcheller joined Appareo in 2005 as a project manager, before eventually taking over for his father as president and CEO in 2013. In 2022, Appareo was sold to global agriculture machinery giant AGCO.

“What was really special about Appareo is that we were a company that was starting and growing and building in the electronics space,” Batcheller says. That was uncommon because the level of investment that is necessary is higher than in the software space, for instance, because there’s a broader spectrum of expertise that’s required to do it.

After acquiring Appareo, AGCO became the anchor tenant in Emerging Prairie’s largest project, Grand Farm: a collaborative network of growers, corporations, startups, educators, researchers, government and investors working together to solve problems in agriculture through technology.

Grand Farm’s main 25,000-square-foot facility, located near Casselton, North Dakota, includes a conference center, classrooms, a 250-person auditorium, and a production shop for fixing tractors and other equipment.

“Grand Farm is going to be an incredibly important endeavor for our country and for the world from the perspective of food security, and maintaining a position of permanency in technology,” Batcheller says.

AGCO has also built a 300-acre state-of-the-art test farm there named the Precision Technology Institute (formerly the Dakota Smart Farm), designed to develop innovative farming practices to create a truly sustainable farm, specifically focusing on precision agriculture technologies and high-value retrofit solutions for existing equipment.

In February 2022, thanks in part to the advocacy of Mike Nathe (B.S. ’86), a fellow U of M alumnus and North Dakota state representative, Grand Farm was awarded a $10 million grant by the North Dakota Legislature and Department of Commerce. A former Gopher baseball player, Nathe has become a strong advocate for innovation in agriculture and technology, Tehven says. Nathe has also led efforts to allocate 10 percent of North Dakota’s $10 billion Legacy Fund toward in-state investments, supporting entrepreneurs and tech companies.

“Mike has been a huge champion of ours,” Tehven says. “He is working on $15 million more [in funding] for Grand Farm, [and has] passed significant legislation to advocate for North Dakota entrepreneurs.”

Steve Neumann is a freelance writer in Mendham, New Jersey.

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