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Sixth-generation farmer Ryan Raguse begged to operate equipment when he was 8 years old on his family’s farm in Wheaton, Minnesota, near the western border of the state. By 13, he was driving fully loaded 18-wheelers on gravel roads, while his father set the pace in a tractor ahead.
But when Raguse headed off to college, he majored in accounting. He started at St. Cloud Technical & Community College before transferring to North Dakota State University, graduating in 2011. As a student, he cofounded a mobile app development company.
“At that time, everybody had ideas for apps, and there wasn’t a lot of development horsepower,” Raguse says. “We custom-created applications for many different businesses, ranging from higher education to manufacturing and everything in between.”
Ryan Raguse shares 3 tips for those who plan to build a business:
- Maximize opportunities early on. If you have an eye on business, start one in college. And if an idea fails, you still have a degree and can pivot to doing something else.
- Never stop innovating. Raguse still feels that his work isn’t finished. “If you don’t keep innovating, your business gets stale or your competitors out-innovate you,” he adds.
- Be creative at fixing things. On a farm, you can’t always run into town every time you need to fix something. Learn how to fix problems with limited resources, because everything you do in life has some level of limitation.
Building Tech for Farmers
Conversing with sugarbeet co-op members through the app development company united his entrepreneurial passion with his agricultural roots. His initial idea? Digitize scale tickets.
“We didn’t appreciate the level of impact of real-time scale tickets,” he says. “Farmers told us they were using data from the platform to evaluate everything from safety to ensuring they didn’t overload a truck, to internal logistics, like moisture content.”
Raguse launched Bushel Inc. in 2017 as an app with scale tickets, contracts, and cash bids features. Today, the Fargo, North Dakota-based company provides an integrated platform that includes customer relationship management, customer and commercial portals, and digital payments, plus offer and hedge management, as well as farm management and advisement software.
Full Circle
Raguse knew farmers needed solutions to overcome inefficiencies and reduce costs, but he didn’t anticipate that one day he would be using Bushel Inc. to run his family farm. When his father passed away in 2023 after a battle with cancer, Raguse stepped in.
“I was coming back to the farm during college in the summertime, and my parents were supportive of chasing these passions, but I always stay connected to the farm,” he says.
“Most farmers are better at agronomy than marketing. I was the exact opposite. I love the learning curve and spending hours researching the things that go into all the little decisions made on the farm every day.”
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