
Dan Custis, CEO and Co-Founder, ABM 1st
It all started with a church mission trip. I wanted to make a difference, and I wanted to give back — still do. In the past six years, I’ve spent time in 10 developing countries and worked with smallholder farmers from Panama, Peru and parts of Mexico to Vietnam, Thailand and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).
What strikes me is that what we consider “common practice” or “basic knowledge” here in the United States can make a tremendous impact in other parts of the world; the difference is scale and staple crops. They are farming two- to four-acre plots of potatoes, sweet potatoes, cassava, rice, maize and peanuts.