Agave is a monocarpic plant [1] which means it flowers once and then dies. These plants essentially store energy for years (decades in the case of agave) in their leaves until they decide to spend all of it on a single bloom and that stalk/trunk means it's at the end of its life cycle. Once its done growing, you should see yellow (IIRC) flowers all the way at the top.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monocarpic

last year one bloomed on Old Middlefield cross Rengstorff (where the old burrito place was) in MV, about 2 stories high. Majestic.

Wrt. corpse flower. 25 years ago i come one morning to work, a bit late as usual - i'm the IT - and the smell in my office is beyond description and it is emanated by that large phallic looking flower. The combination of look and smell is stunning, and my officemate (a very polite mid-age school teacher kind of woman) has an extremely strange expression on her face - on one side it is of a great proud - after all her "child", that flower she tended to for so long has finally bloomed in such a grandiose spectacular manner - on the other side she has already spent some time in the office and the tears in her eyes weren't just the tears of proud - it was just very hard to breath. I took the flower out into the hallway - we had that long hallway with offices' doors opening into it - and placed it toward one end of the hallway. 5 minutes later i hear the noise of tremendous excitement mixed with disgust - the people from the office closest to the flower got bothered by smell and walked out to check it out. Once they took their emotions under control they moved the flower to another end of the hallway. In few minutes people from the offices there got bothered by the smell ... That chess play with flower went for some time until finally somebody moved the flower into the stairway where during the day some people from the other floor also came to check out the source of the smell.

Search for: Agave plant asparagus

https://www.coastkeeper.org/super-bloom-lifetime-agave-watch...

It's their death bloom.

Looks like it's flowering and will likely die shortly after. They're also known as century plants due to the length of time to flower.

Yes is the last part of its life, flowering time. Will flower for a lot of time and then the mother plant will seed and die but not before growing tens of new small plants around. You will not lose the plant.

Anecdata. Your plant is also a close relative from Agave tequilana, the main ingredient of Tequila. The genus is easy to culture and lots of species are heavily used in dry gardens.

It's a century plant, and it's flowering. That's the stalk.

Have you contacted any universities?

That’s insane