When Dylan first started with Bennett, he worked as an automation technician while finishing up his degree at Fresno State. Upon completion of his degree, he took on the role of automation manager. It was apparent to management that Dylan knew a lot about the agricultural industry and how to develop long-term relationships with growers. He was soon promoted into his current role as Business Development Manager. Dylan’s responsibilities typically vary based on the time of year. He may be meeting about new projects that he will assign to KAMs or take on the accounts himself. You can typically find him meeting about new developments, or out in the field assessing how to handle a project for a grower and what service best fits their needs. Dylan often spends most of his time looking to the future and understanding how we can better our services to ensure we always bring something different to the table.
A native of Fresno, Dylan grew up surrounded by friends and a community involved in agriculture. While attending Clovis West High School, he spent time doing electrical work with PG&E for agricultural projects. From there, Dylan began his college career at Fresno State where he double majored in electrical engineering and agriculture business. During his time at college, Dylan piqued the interest of Mark Yoshimoto, WiseConn’s Director of Sales and Marketing. WiseConn was working with Fresno State to test out agriculture automation, and Mark felt Dylan was the perfect guy to help test these products. Dylan jumped on the opportunity, not realizing many of the projects would be tied to Bennett Water Systems. Dylan began working alongside Bennett’s automation manager at the time, Zack Ross. Zack would design and sell the automation while Dylan would help install and test the product. When Zack decided it was time to leave Bennett, he spoke with Kurtis Douglas about Dylan, expressing that he was the right guy to take on their automation department. Shortly after this conversation, Kurtis sat down with Dylan and they worked out a plan to bring him on board. At this time, automation was still a pretty foreign subject. Dylan knew it was a matter of “sink or swim”, so he dove headfirst into the world of automation, often working 70 to 80-hour weeks while attending college. A life lesson Dylan soon learned about agriculture in the Valley is how time sensitive and delicate farming is. He gained an appreciation for growers and the risks they take to feed the world.
Even though Dylan is often in meetings or in the field, he still finds time to enjoy the outdoors. In his free time, Dylan is typically backpacking and/or hiking in places like Zion National Park, or competing at a skeet shooting event. As someone who has done competitive skeet shooting for the last 10 years, Dylan also enjoys duck hunting. He has traveled to Canada, Idaho and several other destinations that have made for exciting hunts. However, what Dylan enjoys most is spending time doing these things with his girlfriend, Jodi, and new 8-week old black lab, Ace. Jodi raises Angus cattle and sells meat for JD Foods. Ace is currently in training for duck hunting season.
Dylan is excited for the opportunities that we will be able to offer growers because of the merger.
“Many times, growers suffer from companies being divided—nobody sits at the same side of the table to discuss the goal of the customer. With the merge, we now have a lot of crossover and can understand what’s best for the customer to build an ideal system.”
