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As I scrolled through tweets about a panel on agricultural entrepreneurs at the SXSW Eco conference earlier this month, one caught my eye. The sender was Vance Crowe, Monsanto’s director of millennial engagement.

Corporate America is currently caught up in a torrid infatuation with millennials, who befuddle and torment the companies who want their dollars.

For New Boom, NPR’s series on the darling demographic of the day, The Salt called up Crowe to find out a bit more about why and how Monsanto is courting this group of youngsters, who now outnumber boomers. Here’s our conversation, which has been edited for brevity and clarity.

You have an interesting job title. How did the job come about, and when did you start?

It’s been pretty clear for a long time that Monsanto has been really good at talking to and selling seeds to farmers and talking to Wall Street about our progress and growth.

But in between those two poles are consumers, and the company didn’t have a robust strategy for talking to them. It’s clear consumers have some strong feelings about how food should be produced and what sustainability is. And the tenor has gotten kind of loud.

If you are a big company, you can’t take a piece of poster board and say, “We’re open to talking!” You have to have a plan for where the conversation is going on, and how to engage. The company decided it would find somebody to join the conversation in ways it might not naturally think of. I started in June.