Meet the Team
Two farm kids who came back with the skills.
Eric
Eric's story starts on a farm in central Illinois, where his father grew corn and beans. Long before he ever picked up a multimeter or wrote a line of code, Eric was learning the grain handling process firsthand, watching and helping with the work that keeps a farm running through harvest.
He studied programming in college back in the '80s, and it stuck immediately, so much so that he'd spend the drive home from class running through code in his head, still chewing on problems long after the lecture ended. But instead of heading straight into a programming career, Eric took a different route: in 1991, he became an electrician and started Lewsader's Electric, specializing in commercial electrical installation and systems. Over the next three decades, he built his reputation on farms and at grain handling sites, becoming the person operations across the region called when something needed to be wired right and hold up under pressure.
Eric has always been a problem solver first, someone who looks at a client's operation and asks how to make it work better, not just how to patch what's broken. Six years ago, that instinct pulled him back to the passion he'd set aside in college. He started developing automation systems for his electrical clients, bringing the programming skills from the '80s together with the grain handling knowledge he'd had since childhood. In the years since, he's designed and installed automation systems across a growing list of farms and grain facilities.
At AgriTech, Eric leads the company's technical vision, bringing together three things most automation providers only claim to have: farm-raised instincts, 35+ years of hands-on electrical experience, and the programming background to make it all work together.
Patrick
Patrick's path to AgriTech started long before he wrote his first line of code. He grew up on a farm in rural central Illinois, so long before he ever touched a PLC or developed apps, he understood what a farm actually needs from technology, not just what technology can do.
He began his career in tech in 2012, with a degree in computer programming, and spent four years as an SAP ABAP consultant, building systems for clients across a range of industries in both the US and Brazil. In 2016, he brought that technical foundation back to agriculture, moving into systems and technology management and eventually leading the sales execution process for a global Oracle implementation. That work took him deep into ag operations across the US, Canada, India, and Brazil, giving him a firsthand view of how farms around the world actually run.
That combination is rare: a farm kid who became an enterprise systems expert, then chose to bring that expertise back to the industry he grew up in. At AgriTech, Patrick leads development of the company's mobile app for remote farm monitoring, building tools shaped by more than two decades of understanding both sides of the equation, the technology and the farm.