Good day, and welcome to the inaugural Ant Consult blog post. Incidentally, it's also the first blog post I've ever written.
My name is Jon Kirkman, and I'm the founder of Ant Consult.
The idea itself goes back much further than the business. I can trace it back to my university days. Even then, I had this vague feeling that one day I'd start a business that broke new ground. I couldn't have told you what it looked like, only that I wanted to build something different and unique.
Since then I've completed a degree in Agricultural Engineering, become a Professional Engineer, and spent years working in the agricultural and water engineering industries. I still enjoy the work as much as I did when I started. Nothing lights my fire quite like finding what I like to call a sexy solution to a complex, non-standard problem.
Somewhere along the way, I noticed a pattern that kept repeating.
The firms I worked with were full of very capable people doing good engineering. They delivered major infrastructure projects and solved difficult technical problems every day. That was never the issue.
The issue was who those firms were built to serve.
Most consulting engineering businesses make perfect sense if your client is a municipality, a government department, or a large corporate. Their processes, timelines and commercial models were built around those kinds of projects.
Agricultural businesses don't always fit neatly into that mould.
The operations I wanted to work with weren't hobby farms. They were serious businesses making significant investments in water infrastructure, irrigation and expansion. Every engineering decision carried financial consequences, sometimes for decades. Yet they often found themselves caught between doing everything themselves or engaging consulting firms whose services weren't designed with their operations in mind.
The more I saw it, the harder it became to ignore.
For many agricultural businesses, hiring a consulting engineer feels like paying a toll.
It's something you do because a bank requires a sign-off, because legislation demands it, or because a project can't move forward without a stamped drawing.
Very few people pick up the phone because they expect the consulting engineer to make their business materially better.
That struck me as odd.
Agriculture is full of messy engineering problems. Every farm is different. Even water sources behave differently. Infrastructure has to adapt to changing crops, changing markets and changing seasons. If there was ever an industry where engineering should create lasting value, surely this was it.
It was at that point that the idea behind Ant Consult started to become clearer.
I wasn't interested in building a smaller version of a large consulting firm. I wanted to build an engineering practice around the people I enjoyed working with most.
That means staying close to the project instead of disappearing once the drawings are issued. It means working hand-in-hand with farm owners, operations managers and project teams to design infrastructure that improves profitability and keeps performing long after construction is complete.
My hope is that over time, Ant Consult becomes the kind of engineering partner agricultural businesses involve early in a project, not because someone insists on it, but because they've seen the difference thoughtful engineering can make.
If we manage that, then I think we'll have built something worth being proud of.
