Tennessee Leadership Summit

Jason is from Portland, Oregon and grew up on a 14-acre farm in the middle of the city. He was the only “farm-kid” in a high school of over 2500 students and attributes the lessons he’s learned in life to his agricultural upbringing.

After graduating from Oklahoma State University, he has been an Uber driver, trivia jockey, pig farmer, blueberry slinger, farmers marketeer, substitute teacher, and cattle pharmaceutical salesman… but his favorite job is the one he has now: being a professional speaker and trainer. 

Everywhere he goes and with everything he does, Jason has one goal: To make the lives of other people better. Jason is an up-and-coming name in the world of leadership development. Having worked with individuals in over 40 states, China and Japan, he has built a reputation as a successful facilitator, speaker, and leadership expert.  

He is a self-proclaimed nerd, larger-than-life storyteller, and his Grandma Dorothy’s biggest fan. When he’s not working, he loves doing CrossFit, traveling internationally, taking Lucy and Finn to the dog park, and creating something new with his friends and family. 

Learn more about Jason at jasonwetzler.com

Follow him:
Instagram – Twitter – Facebook: @jasonwetzler

Tracey is the Director, USDA-ARS-Office of Outreach, Diversity, and Equal Opportunity. She is a results oriented, creative, and transformational leader with a passion for public service dedicated to positive organizational and cultural changes through human capital management best practices including mentorship, employee engagement, and performance accountability.

Hi, I'm Michelle! I grew up involved in 4-H, horse riding, and doing chores on my friends’ grandparents farms in Wisconsin, but when my high school aptitude tests told me to go into farming, I headed west for college and a career in fashion.

After working for Gucci On Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills and spending a number of years in downtown Chicago, I bought into organic, grass-fed, “Monsanto is the devil” food idealism.

After finishing my goal of traveling the world and visiting all seven continents by age 30, (67 countries) I became fascinated with culture and learning where our food comes from.  I ended up living with and dating a commercial scale farmer in Iowa for nearly eight years and it was there where my social media advocacy platform  "The Farm Babe" was born in 2014.  After learning the real truths of modern agriculture firsthand, I began Debunking the myths I once believed in as a former city girl.

Farmers, ranchers, and the story of our food origins have an amazing, uplifting story to tell and my mission is to give them a bigger voice in the food space.  Consumers today are bombarded with misinformation, misleading marketing tactics, food labels, and activist agendas.  So I work to bring real, unbiased education and facts from real farmers and leading industry experts.

Today, I reside on 17 acres of farmland near Gainesville, Florida where I'm connected to leading industry agricultural experts and continue to learn from and advocate for them, all around the world.  I'm happier than I've ever been to get back to my "roots" of being involved with animals and farming and have gone from being skeptical about food to sharing my passion of modern agriculture!  I've literally gone from Rodeo to the Rodeo, and wouldn't have it any other way.

Assoc. Prof. Dr. Rainer Haas is a graduate of the Institute of Agricultural Economics at the Universität für Bodenkultur Wien (www.boku.ac.at). Doctorate 1998 for his research about customer satisfaction with an online food shopping mall. He got several awards such as the Austrian Agricultural Marketing Award 1998 and the Austrian Agrana Research Award in 2001 and 2006. Habilitation (venia docendi) in Marketing in 2004.

He is Assoc. Prof. at the Institute of Marketing & Innovation at the Department of Economic and Social Sciences. He currently supervises 2 PhD students and 10 master students. Besides basic and specialized Marketing courses he teaches Communication and Media Planning, Knowledge Management, E-Business in the Food & Value Chain and Cross-Cultural Communication. He is reviewer for Appetite, Journal of Applied Economics, Journal of Market-Focused Management, Die Bodenkultur and the Austrian Society of Agricultural Economics.

He published as author or editor several books and since 2007 he is member of the Scientific Advisory Board, International European Forum on System Dynamics and Innovation. Bonn, Germany. Since he started teaching at the BOKU he supervised 1313 exams.