Send a text

What do snowboarding, nano-fertilizer, and geopolitics have to do with modern agriculture?

In this episode of the Patio Pondering Podcast, Jim talks with Clark Bell, CEO of NanoYield and former TEDx speaker, about his journey from working on his family’s sod farm to leading one of ag’s most intriguing nanotechnology companies.

Clark explains how nano-fertilizer and nanoparticle delivery systems help farmers improve nutrient uptake, optimize crop inputs, and rethink fertilizer strategies under mounting economic and environmental pressures.

The conversation explores:

• How nanotechnology works in crop production
• Fertilizer use, nutrient uptake, and ROI in corn & soybeans
• Specialty crops vs. commodity agriculture
• Input cost pressures, global supply chains & geopolitics
• Risk, resilience, and lessons from snowboarding
• The importance of advisory teams for modern producers
• Local innovation’s role in a global ag economy

This wide-ranging episode connects science, strategy, and real-world decision making — offering practical insight into technologies scaling across millions of acres.

Connect with Clark Bell:
🔗 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/clarktbell/

🔗 NanoYield site: https://www.nano-yield.com/

🔗 NanoYield LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/nanoyield/

Send a text

Porcine Reproductive and Respiratory Syndrome (PRRS) remains one of the most costly and frustrating diseases in modern swine production. Despite decades of research, new technologies, and substantial industry investment, PRRS continues to disrupt herds and challenge producers.

In this reflective solo episode, Jim Smith explores the tension between producer frustration, the adaptive nature of the PRRS virus, and the scale of research funding dedicated to combating it. This thought piece examines difficult questions about expectations, investment levels, systemic consequences, and whether the pork industry is asking the right questions about PRRS.

This episode does not argue against PRRS control or pig health initiatives. Instead, it invites listeners to think more deeply about progress, economics, incentives, and the uncomfortable realities surrounding one of the swine industry’s most persistent challenges.

Send a text

In this solo episode of the Patio Pondering Podcast, Jim Smith explores an uncomfortable but necessary question facing the U.S. pork industry: are we actually prepared for success if PRRS were eliminated?

Drawing on decades of experience in swine nutrition and production, Jim reflects on the long arc of PRRS—from its early emergence in the Midwest to today’s massive investments in disease control and eradication. While improving pig health and reducing mortality is unquestionably the right goal at the farm level, this episode examines what happens when those gains occur across the entire system at once.

Using the 1998 hog market collapse as a cautionary parallel, Jim walks through the physical and economic constraints that still exist today: packing capacity, labor availability, market absorption, and demand response. What happens if millions more pigs survive to market weight—but the infrastructure and markets aren’t ready?

This episode is not an argument against animal health, veterinary innovation, or disease research. It is a systems-level conversation about unintended consequences, second-order effects, and why solving one constraint without planning for what comes next can shift pressure elsewhere.

If you’re involved in pork production, animal agriculture, agribusiness, or agricultural economics—and especially if you lived through 1998—this episode invites you to slow down and think about a question the industry rarely asks out loud:

What happens after we catch the car?