Marcia Cripps, known online as Crop Queen Marcia, is an independent potato agronomist for a large Michigan operation and co-founder of the ag marketing agency AgFluence. She talks about funding her agronomy education through pageant scholarships, why she left retail input sales over safety concerns, what day-to-day agronomy work looks like on a potato farm built around processor specifications, and why she thinks agriculture's biggest communication gap is with people who've never farmed at all.
Marcia Cripps funded her agronomy degrees with Miss America pageant scholarships, then spent years as a sales agronomist in California before leaving the role over personal safety concerns. She's since built two careers at once: in-house potato agronomist for a large Michigan operation, and co-founder of an ag marketing agency built to explain agriculture to people who've never set foot on a farm.
The gap she's working on isn't inside agriculture. It's the space between the industry and everyone who isn't in it.
What's Inside
- Why Marcia left retail input sales, and what she'd tell a young woman considering that same path today
- What it actually means to run product trials, manage soil health, and adjust seed spacing for a large Michigan potato operation
- Why chip processors demanding smaller, more circular potatoes changes an agronomist's spacing decisions in the field
- How AgFluence uses platforms like TikTok to reach people who've never farmed, not just people already in the industry
- What her grandfather's 1942 photo, a team of horses instead of a tractor, tells her about how fast agriculture actually changes
- Why she's now teaching herself software development to become a digital agronomist
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