Colin Raby

Thank you for the opportunity to submit this statement. I will keep it as brief as the record allows, and I ask that the full record be entered alongside it.

¶1I have family in Ohio and in Louisiana. I spent my early years in Cleveland, Ohio, and moved to Louisiana before starting high school at University Laboratory School, U-High, in Baton Rouge. Most of what I know about building things I learned there. I grew up in Scouting, where as Senior Patrol Leader I led Troop 50 to Most Outstanding Troop at the district camporee,Winning a record number of individual events for a single troop. CR-2018-001. and in 2019 I was named the state's Eagle Scout of the Year.Awarded by the American Legion, Department of Louisiana, and commended by the Louisiana House in House Resolution No. 264. CR-2019-001. The Military Order of the World Wars had presented its Bronze Patrick Henry Medallion the fall before. CR-2019-003. As a freshman at LSU I marched 323 miles under a ruck to honor veterans.CR-2020-001. While none of this early experience taught me anything about artificial intelligence, it laid the foundation, teaching me that the biggest of goals can be achieved one step at a time, and that a team with proper planning can beat any individual effort.

¶2I trained as a mechanical engineer in the LSU Ogden Honors College, with minors in aerospace engineering and economics.CR-2019-002, CR-2024-005. I spent a summer at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center supporting the International Space Station program and the build-out of the Artemis III command and control room,CR-2022-001. and another at Enercon on digital instrumentation and control upgrades for nuclear power plants.CR-2023-001. Systems engineering is the discipline of making complicated things work together, and it turns out to be the right training for building with AI: decompose the problem, define the interfaces, test everything.

¶3I also learned that institutions change when someone is willing to do the unglamorous work. I served four years in the LSU Student Senate for the College of Engineering and two as chair of its Budget and Appropriations Committee, where I steered a $127,694 budget through the Senate, 40 to 2,CR-2020-003, CR-2022-005, CR-2022-008. and built a public dashboard showing where every dollar of student fees went.CR-2023-007. I wrote the bill that planted fifty fruit trees across campus, and co-wrote the one that funded bike repair stations, which took two and a half years and more than a hundred emails to see installed.CR-2022-006, CR-2023-019. As a Louisiana Governor's Fellow, I presented a proposal to the Governor and his cabinet on solar farming as an engine of rural economic development.CR-2021-001, CR-2021-005. In 2024, LSU named me to its Tiger Twelve. CR-2024-013.

¶4In the fall of 2023 I enrolled in LSU's first course on large language models.CR-2023-014. The idea for my class project came from an LSU AgCenter weed scientist who told us that young farmers taking over family operations kept asking him how to manage their crops, and he kept pointing them to a thick annual guide. We built an AI agricultural consultant that could identify a weed from a photo and answer an agronomy question with citations to the research behind the answer.The project was called FarmSmart, then FarmSmarter. It is now FarmMind. CR-2023-005, CR-2024-010. I did not expect it to outlive the semester. That spring I was the course's teaching assistant, and our team won LSU's flagship startup competition.CR-2024-004, CR-2024-003. It became a company.

¶5In 2024 I went to Washington as one of the first AI specialists to serve in the U.S. House of Representatives, working on artificial intelligence for Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi and supporting the House Select Committee on the CCP.CR-2024-002, CR-2024-008. I built tools as well as memos. One of them, a press clips generator that turned hours of staff work into minutes, I presented at the bipartisan Congressional Hackathon, and the House featured it in its official report on the event.CR-2024-009, CR-2025-016. I learned that policy moves slower than technology, and that the gap between them is filled by people who can speak both languages. There was plenty of work left to do in Washington, and a couple of opportunities to stay. But by mid-2025, the idea that started as a class project two years earlier, the one we had kept building in the background, was gaining visible traction.

¶6So I came home to lead FarmMind full time.CR-2025-009. Along the way it won the Pelican Cup and the Nexus Technology Cup and became LSU's first finalist at the Rice Business Plan Competition,CR-2025-005, CR-2025-008, CR-2025-006. and in January 2026 it won first place and $100,000 in the American Farm Bureau Federation's Ag Innovation Challenge.CR-2026-001. Today it supports farmers across more than a million acres. Its first five users became its first investors. We built it without traditional venture capital, and we built it in Louisiana, on purpose.CR-2026-008.

¶7I have not left the policy conversation; I have joined it from the other side of the table. I have argued in the Washington Examiner that America's food security depends on building its own agricultural AI,CR-2026-004. urged Congress to hold that AI to the Farm Bill's trusted-provider standard,CR-2026-007, CR-2026-010. and taken the questions on panels and stages from LSU Alexandria to Florida International University.Speaking. The work is the same in every room: make the technology useful to those furthest from its frontier, mitigate the harms that come with technological progress, and use it to maximize human flourishing.

¶8I am always glad to talk with founders building in real-world industries, with farmers and the people who serve them, with policymakers working on AI, and with investors who believe the next great companies can be built anywhere.

I look forward to your questions and to our future collaborations as we work together to build the future we want to live in.