I’m in the people and productivity business—and it’s got to be both. If it’s all about people you might get too fluffy and not get anything done, and if it’s all about productivity you might forget about the people and not bless the world.
AgrAbility helps people working in agriculture who have had an injury or an illness that has caused a disability. So if there’s a task on the farm somebody needs to do and they can’t—because they’ve got Parkinson’s Disease, or they’re a veteran who came home from overseas with bad knees and back from jumping out of trucks with heavy packs, or somebody who got in a crash in their truck and had their hands burned off—we go to the farm and we learn about what tasks they need to do, we learn about their medical condition, and then we start thinking, “What could we do to help them get the job done?”
Sometimes we use high-tech stuff like an exoskeleton that supports a person’s arms and puts the weight at their waist. A fruit grower who needs to be reaching up with a pruner, working in their orchard, but has a shoulder injury could use an exoskeleton. If I’m holding a pruner in the orchard, it balances the weight and takes the stress off my shoulders. It costs about $2,100 now but with so many of them being built, and competition, the price is coming down.
Sometimes that high-tech stuff can come for free if a farmer only needed it temporarily and donates it back to AgrAbility. That’s what Michigan Farm Bureau District 4 Director Jeff Sandborn did. We helped him with a lift to get into his combine after back surgery. When he no longer needed it, he donated it back to the organization, and that lift is now on its third farmer.
High-tech solutions do the job, but they can cost a lot. I tend to fit in the hillbilly-solution category better. Sometimes we’re just putting things together to make something that works.
One farmer, if he dropped a bolt, would go to the bolt bin to get another one because it hurt too bad to get something off the floor. So we took an old lawnmower seat and a motorcycle jack and modified them so a person with bad hips and knees can sit, lower themselves down, and roll around and work at ground level instead of crawling or hunkering down like a young person can. When they need to get back up, they pump the jack to bring themselves back up to a sitting position, and stand. He was someone who thought he couldn’t farm anymore, but now he’s got a way he can get up and down and keep working.
That’s what we do at AgrAbility. I work all across the state of Michigan, from the Upper Peninsula to Benton Harbor to Monroe County. We get to know the people, get to know their needs. Sometimes the solution is high-tech, and sometimes it’s hillbilly. But when we can give people the hope of productivity again when they thought maybe they couldn’t do their work anymore, that’s our goal.
AgrAbility is a private-public partnership between MSU Extension and EasterSeals Michigan. In addition, the USDA funds my time to go out and do the consulting work, meeting with farmers and determining their needs. We receive donations to help farmers who are not able to get the funding they need from other sources. I am grateful that Michigan Farm Bureau has had a policy for 15 years supporting AgrAbility’s work.
As farmers we don’t like to talk about not being able to do something—we want to talk about our productivity. But life doesn’t work that way some of the time. I’d be happy to support and encourage you any way I can.
This is a transcript of a speech and demonstration by Ned Stoller of AgrAbility at the Kent County Farm Bureau County Annual Meeting on September 2, 2025.