When Bri Stagge came home after college to help out on the fourth-generation family farm five years ago, she didn’t plan on starting a tech-driven side business or on meeting Dustin Osborne, who is now her husband. But she did both.
She agreed to help her father, Steve, manage the farm in Greensburg, Ind., where they grow corn and soybeans on 1,000 acres while tending a herd of roughly 7,000 pigs. Her top priority was managing her dad’s side hustle, a dragline manure business.
“I was not interested in coming back to the farm,” she explains on the latest episode of the Grow Getters podcast, which features producers who start new businesses to diversify their ag operations. “But the manure business had grown so much he couldn’t keep up with farming and hauling manure. That’s what brought me back.”
She’s now glad it did. Since then, she met and married Dustin, who brought even more ideas about how to create new sources of income. “The goal is to grow the farm operation,” says Dustin. “We’re surrounded by a couple of really big operators, and for us to be able to compete and stay relevant we had to venture out into the side businesses.”
Having worked as a custom applicator for Nutrien Ag Solutions, he knew about applying inputs. Since 2022, both of them became licensed drone pilots and together they started Osborne Ag Services, which provides drone spraying, especially fungicide and insecticide application on wheat, corn and soybeans. They also have a drone spreader for cover crops and a small drone for scouting crops.
“We chewed on it for about a year before we took the jump,” Bri says.
Dustin adds, “When we were thinking about what we wanted to do for our own business, the spray drones made sense. The drone is just the tool. At the end of the day, it’s about knowing what you’re putting on.”
Having taken the leap, they found themselves happily surprised by the response from growers in their area. “We were blown away by our first year,” Bri recalls. “We had more business than we ever could have imagined. We passed our goal by quite a bit in the first year, and in the second year we’ve doubled our business.”
A key to developing their businesses is investing in equipment and technology they can use on their own farm. Then they think about how the investment can create additional revenue. “Everything in our business ties back to the original operation,” Dustin says.
That approach has enabled them to expand Osborne Ag Services beyond drones into light excavation projects, from clearing field edges to fixing driveways. The couple recently invested in robotic technology that helps manage grain bins while increasing farmer safety.
“With our businesses, we knew we were going to benefit the farm,” Bri says. “It wasn’t just a jump off the ledge with no return in sight. That’s always the big question: Will the investment be worth it?”
Read more about the Osbornes in this next gen spotlight.
