Working in the professional space of agronomy for 14 years now, Christie’s foundational crop experience had been in traditional row crop. These past several years, however, she’s added specialty crops such as tree fruit and vegetable crops, consulting for vineyards, hops, and orchards. Christie also maintains an agronomy leadership role within Timac Agro USA, a global crop nutrient and bio-stimulant manufacturing company. At Timac Agro USA she is responsible for the on-going field education and mentoring of a team of technical field reps and she also handles new business development within the wholesale distribution chain for the Great Lakes Region.
Building relationships with farmers and coaching fellow agronomists in the soil health realm since 2010, she’s recognized the need to elevate water quality and soil health priorities above all else. The working tools and knowledge of how to assess soil health baselines, context, and progress have been previously locked within the halls of academia and mostly inaccessible to the farmers. Seeing this gap, she’s stepped into action to help collect data, document and shape the agronomic strategies to support farmer success with a keen eye on water and soil quality. With the lens of soil health as a systems-approach, she has found herself becoming a strong conduit for connecting growers to all layers of production, not just soil health and soil fertility.
CropScout Christie, as she is known on social media, will be bringing to us some practical coaching on how to understand the relationships between biological products and our soil health endeavors on the farm. She will help us define what biologicals are and how to strategically integrate them into our farming operations but more importantly, she will help us create a framework to understand our farms’ needs by applying basic soil health principles. Leaning on her years of field experience, she will be breaking down critical problems growers are grappling with by applying a soil-health-first systems-approach to production.
