A team of three agriculture students—two from the College of Agricultural Sciences and Natural Resources in Knoxville and one from the College of Agriculture and Applied Sciences at UT Martin—recently won the People’s Choice Award for the American Farm Bureau’s Rural Entrepreneurship Challenge, a national competition for food and agricultural businesses.
Their business, Farm Specific Technology (FarmSpec) was one of four to compete in a “Shark Tank” environment at the AFBF national meeting earlier this month. While a team from Iowa won the overall competition, CASNR graduate students Shawn Butler and Austin Scott, along with UT Martin student Daniel Wiggins, received a total of $25,000 for their patent-pending technology that claims to more effectively terminate cover crops, therefore saving farmers money.