In this episode, Joe Sampson sits down with Colin Hurd, a serial entrepreneur and the founder of multiple agtech companies, including Mach, to explore the intersection of innovation, labor challenges, and automation in agriculture.
Colin shares his entrepreneurial journey, from building his first tillage product in college to scaling and selling Smart Ag to Raven Industries, and now building Mach—a company focused on providing factory-integrated autonomy solutions for off-highway OEMs. The conversation unpacks the true bottlenecks facing modern agriculture, particularly labor shortages and the slow pace of tech adoption in the shortline manufacturing space.
They also dig deep into why most autonomy solutions in agriculture haven’t yet scaled, how Mach is tackling this through modular tech stacks, and why shortliners should move fast before the majors dominate this space. Colin offers candid insights about quality, user experience, product-market fit, and how to actually build technology that solves real-world problems for farmers.
A must-listen for anyone in the ag equipment industry, startups, OEMs, and anyone curious about how real automation is evolving behind the scenes.
