How Land O’Lakes is sowing the future of agriculture

For many grocery buyers, the identify Land O’Lakes is synonymous with dairy. However behind the scenes, the 102-year-old cooperative—which counts almost 3,000 agricultural retailers and producers amongst its owner-members—provides a slew of services and products aimed toward serving to farmers enhance their crop yields, plant well being, and soil high quality. This mission is very essential as local weather change forces farmers to adapt to decrease rainfall and better temperatures, along with merely bettering the vitamin of their feedstock. “Not each acre is created equal,” says Land O’Lakes COO Brett Bruggeman. The corporate is concentrated on answering the query “How will we assist stretch that acre to get probably the most out of it?”

By means of its animal feed enterprise, sustainable farming division Truterra, and the WinField United “crop inputs” arm, Land O’Lakes is engaged on advancing agricultural science in methods which can be high-tech and hands-on.

Crop inputs—which incorporates seeds, plant vitamins, and such safety options as pesticides and herbicides—doubled its earnings between 2020 and 2022, from $150 million to $308 million. As Land O’Lakes posted losses in dairy in 2022, WinField United helped buoy the corporate.

Land O’Lakes has fertilized this development by pouring $10 million a yr since 2017 into WinField United’s Innovation Heart, primarily based in River Falls, Wisconsin, the place researchers search for new methods to guard crops and improve their yields. In close by Wanamingo, Minnesota, at one of many roughly 100 farm plots the corporate maintains to ship localized insights to farmers, workers consider these improvements in quite a lot of circumstances.

Quick Firm visited the websites to see what agriculture’s current and future seem like.