I have spent all but one year of my 25+ year professional career starting, financing, developing, or advising energy, agriculture, mining, manufacturing, and technology ventures and projects. I spent the past six years developing energy and agriculture projects in places that the Washington establishment and their allies in the big cities have ignored for decades – places like the seven Virginia coalfield counties, St Lawrence and Montgomery counties in upstate New York, and Oldham County in Texas. Over this period, I met and worked with a large number of local and regional economic development players and gained numerous insights into both the roadblocks that prevent investment and job creation for projects that are technically and financially feasible without subsidies and how to work with local, regional, state, and federal economic development players to successfully implement projects that bring jobs and investment to rural and economically depressed regions.Much of my work during the past three years has focused on agricultural economic development of commercial scale projects that leverage advances in energy technologies, drones, food aggregation/processing/distribution, and restorative agriculture. America’s rural areas and small towns have great untapped potential and can create millions of jobs. I have evaluated, worked on, proposed, and/or developed multiple net zero energy greenhouse, climate controlled mushroom production, rotational grazing, meat processing, food aggregation, agroforestry, and farm revitalization projects. I developed, financed, advised, and/or evaluated over 600 commercial and utility scale solar, wind, energy storage, and energy efficiency projects in Virginia, Tennessee, California, Puerto Rico, New Jersey, Louisiana, Oregon, New York, Hawaii, Massachusetts, and Colombia over the past decade. I have extensive experience completing technical and financial evaluations of projects and can easily determine which projects are feasible without subsidies.