2026 Top Producer Next Gen Award Winner: Tim Nuss

Wed, 04 Feb 2026 14:13:14 GMT

Nestled on the very northern edge of California’s Central Valley, Nuss Farms grows a variety of specialty crops every year. But returning to the farm in Lodi, Calif., wasn’t always part of Tim Nuss’ plan.

“I was always out here as a kid. Our dad would bring me and my brothers out here, and we’d always do odd jobs on the farm. But once I got into high school, I kind of wanted to run away from the farm and made my way back. I joined and kind of came full circle back to the farm three years ago,” he says.

Today, Nuss is the farm’s fifth generation, along with his brothers, Tyler and Derek. Together with their dad, Dave, the family is focused on rejuvenating their farm through regenerative agriculture. But Nuss admits the toil he focuses on today isn’t in the San Joaquin Valley soil.

From Business to Agriculture

“I studied business in college and got a degree there and then went to work in the fresh produce industry. I spent about a decade working in fresh produce focused on international exports. So not quite farming, but it was farm adjacent working with grower-packer-shippers that export products overseas,” he says.

Nuss says he spent a lot of time in Asia, exporting table grapes, cherries and citrus. He worked with many farmers and laid a groundwork of knowledge he taps into today.

“I got really interested in ag tech and what was happening with venture capital flowing into agriculture. I worked for a few venture-backed startups in the ag space before coming back to the family farm in late 2022,” he adds.

A Pull Back to His Roots

That outside experience, combined with conversations with his younger brother, eventually sparked something new.

“It was probably eight or so years ago when me and my younger brother started talking more. We’re very entrepreneurial and started feeling the pull back to the family farm. It was my dad and my older brother who were managing the farm. We started talking to them more about how they were thinking about growing the business and how they’re thinking about scaling and just felt that pull back having grown up out here. I think it’s in your blood and you want to come back to it,” Nuss says.

Nuss didn’t come back to farm the same way his dad and older brother, Derek, do. With both still on the farm today, Nuss and Tyler knew they had to carve out something new while complementing what their dad and Derek were already doing.

“I gained experience in the business side of things where I could come on, take over the business side of the operation, handling our budgets, forecast sales, business development, all that kind of stuff. So, everybody can kind of stay in their lane, and it was a complimentary skill set. I think my dad was happy to pass that off to me, where he could focus on the farming side, which he enjoys more than running the paperwork and business side things,” he says.

The Nuss family grows everything from garlic and tomatoes to peppers, melons and herbs — a diversified operation that helps them weather the cycles of the fresh produce world.

The Modern Acre Podcast

But beyond the farm, Nuss and Tyler run The Modern Acre podcast , connecting farmers, startups and investors.

“On the podcast, it’s really talking about how people are building their businesses within ag. We talked to a lot of ag tech companies that are building technology businesses that are new and novel and kind of getting their stories out there. And we talked to a lot of legacy, agribusiness-type companies and how they’re thinking about using technology to build their businesses and a lot of innovative farmers that are adopting new technologies. So just trying to tell those stories from different perspectives,” he says.

The podcast has even opened doors to new markets, including one that took nearly a year to land.

“A new opportunity that developed this year was with Chipotle, where we had built a relationship with the CEO of a company called Local Line that we had had on the podcast. They have investment from Chipotle and manage Chipotle’s local grower program. Through that connection, we just started talking about our capabilities, what crops are grown on the farm. They’re actually really big on local sourcing, and Chipotle has a distribution center in Stockton, which is 20 miles from where we’re standing right now. So it’s a really good local story to tell. We’ve been working on getting set up as a vendor for close to a year. It’s a big hurdle to hit,” Nuss says.

Nuss says the steps to become a vendor, combined with seasonal crop production, made this market months in the making. Nuss Farms now supplies red bell peppers and jalapenos to Chipotle.

“It was a real big success,” he says. “It’s a little bit outside the normal of what we do, but could be something we can scale with next year. Just because we’ve never done it before, let’s be open-minded and see what the opportunity could be.”

Cutting Through the Noise of Biologicals

Innovation doesn’t stop there. A farmer-first mindset and hunger to innovate led to another idea: AgList , a platform designed to cut through the noise around biologicals while clearing up confusion.

“When I came back to the farm and joined full time, I was just hit up by every biological company trying to pitch their product. And it was overwhelming to navigate. Like biologicals, there’s a lot of tailwinds with the industry moving away from synthetics, but it’s still very fragmented where there’s hundreds and hundreds of companies, and there’s not really an independent place where a grower can sit down and look at companies and products that are applicable for them,” he says.

AgList creates a directory of all products and companies in the biological space, indexing them for growers, researchers and agronomists.

“It’s kind of an internet-based business that’s really cool. And having the podcast, we have this built-in audience that we can promote it to and build it out. We have 200-plus products on the platform and 30-plus companies on the platforms,” Nuss says.

They achieved 14,000 impressions on the website in just a month, another example of how the Nuss family diversifies beyond traditional farming while mitigating risk.

“A lot of farms vertically integrate, or they’ll have trucking businesses. We were coming at it from a little bit of a different angle, having the media side with the podcast and leading to white space that we see building companies in the ag space,” he says.

Innovation as a Strategy

For Nuss, innovation isn’t about chasing trends — it’s about creating new opportunities for a fifth-generation California farm.

“I think it’s, you know, a continuation of what we’ve been doing, trying to find better and better opportunities for the farm. How do we level up the operation, invest in infrastructure to do non-traditional programs like Chipotle, and how do we see an opportunity? With the podcast, we talk to a lot of companies and see where there might be an opportunity to build in the space, like what we did with AgList,” he says. “So it’s kind of a combination approach of growing the farm and seeing if there’s other complimentary business units that we can kind of put in parallel to the farm,” Nuss adds.

Entrepreneurial from the Start

Nuss isn’t your traditional farmer today. But he says he and his brother have been unconventional from the start.

“I’ve always been kind of like wired and hungry. Me and my younger brother are always going back and forth with ideas and just very entrepreneurial to make an endeavor successful. When we were little kids, we didn’t do the lemonade stand. We sold produce from the farm in our driveway. We have a picture of that where we’re selling bell peppers and stuff. So it’s funny to be here 38 years later doing the same thing,” he says.

By blending tradition with entrepreneurship, Nuss proves returning to the family farm doesn’t mean doing things the old way. It means finding new ways to move agriculture forward. That innovative spirit is why he is the 2026 Top Producer Next Gen Award Winner, sponsored by Pioneer and Fendt.