There’s a cooperative in Iowa blazing a new path and pursuing a transformative vision of tomorrow’s ag retailer.
Many of the moving pieces and final details remain to be sorted out still, but the bottom line is this: Landus is viewing everything it does through the perspective of its farmer-owners.
Founded in 2016 when Farmers Cooperative Co. of Ames, Iowa, and West Central Cooperative of Ralston, Iowa, merged, Landus has 55 retail outlets today that touch 34 states and 16 countries, and it employs more than 600 full-time workers. The co-op generates $2.4 billion in annual revenue.
Four years into its mission to turn traditional ag retailing on its head, the cooperative’s energy is pulsing throughout its sleek digs in downtown Des Moines—just a few blocks down the river from Norman Borlaug’s World Food Prize Hall of Laureates. It’s fitting that such farmer-focused innovation is taking place in the same city where Borlaug’s legacy endures.
“We really have a tremendous amount of passion and emotion for these farmers as a collective team. And even the communities that our team and farmers live in, for rural America,” president and CEO of Landus and Conduit Matt Carstens says. “We’ve got to do a job here that’s different than what the people before us and the people well before them did. It’s a different day and a different time, and we’re excited about it.”
Landus is indeed doing it differently and transforming itself into the farmer-first cooperative of the future.
A Different Spin on E-Commerce
Online ordering and on-farm delivery of crop inputs has become old hat at this point.
Landus’ Conduit program sets out to fuse the integrity of the cooperative system with the nimbleness of a tech company. To accomplish this, it leverages existing distribution infrastructure throughout the country rather than build out a distribution network. By partnering with local retail sheds and distribution warehouses, Landus can stage products where its data says farmers are going to need them.
The cooperative made waves this past spring when it launched 0% interest financing on all input purchases. And then beyond inputs, farmers using Conduit are able to apply for other financing opportunities in certain states for land and equipment purchase loans, according to Landus.
Illinois farmer Kevin Kennedy says buying products off the internet is a game he knows well, and it has worked for him in the past. He’s a charter member of FBN.
“So far, Conduit has worked even better,” he says.
Landus has brought on former FBN executive Amol Deshpande as an adviser within its Conduit segment. The co-op has leaned on Deshpande to bring the necessary technical expertise as Conduit turns this planned digital transformation into a reality.
Holistic Health & Wellness
Landus has also been reimagining its health and wellness program. The new program will include health insurance coverage options and a new leader with big-league experience in keeping high-performers fueled and ready to go.
Looking back, Carstens likens the undertaking of finding the right program as essentially “Mount Everest to climb,” but the CEO is convinced the business has finally been able to summit the peak. He says the still-developing program will offer strong overall coverage plans nationwide at “10% to 15% less than the average cost” of traditional insurance options.
“Some of our farmers are almost in tears over what this is going to do for them,” Carstens says. “For years, they had to go off the farm and take a second job just to get health insurance.”
Finding a strong leader to champion health and wellness was another priority for the Landus executive team. Dr. Dehra Harris, a former director of athlete performance with the Toronto Blue Jays, intends to do just that.
Dr. Harris and her team will address a constellation of issues, including daily diet and hydration to fuel the body, injury prevention, strength and conditioning and farmer mental health.
You get the sense this job represents a lot more than just another resume bullet point for Dr. Harris.
“An athlete, a doctor and a farmer—they all must perform. There is no opt-out. You don’t call in sick,” she says. “It’s about making sure our people know what stress feels like and how to reset your nervous system, educating them on being more nutrition-focused and connecting them to specialists.”
She says mobile outreach clinics will begin popping up around Iowa soon with resources available for the entire family.
“I don’t hear a lot of farmers give a list of a thousand problems. They’re not complainers,” Harris adds. “If we’re going to show up for them, we’re going to really have to show up for their families, too.”
Locally Produced Green Fertilizer
Landus recently installed a solar array ahead of the production of green ammonia at its facility near Boone, Iowa. TalusAg has partnered with Landus to manufacture and distribute locally produced sustainable green fertilizer.
The Talus modular system dispenses anhydrous ammonia produced from renewable energy that is in all ways equivalent to traditional anhydrous ammonia manufactured from natural gas. The system creates the ammonia from air, water and solar power. Shipping containers are repurposed to house and quickly deploy the units.
Using electricity for the major energy input can reduce prices for green ammonia, which typically has tremendous pricing volatility due to natural gas market swings and international shipping restraints. A second TalusAg facility is under development in Eagle Grove, Iowa, that will come on line this fall. Landus will be the sole distributor of the product.
“We can produce 20 tons per day and 7,000 tons per year with one of our talusTen systems,” says Hiro Iwanaga, Talus co-founder. He adds Landus was an ideal launch partner due to its operational scale and storage capacities.
The switch to green ammonia can lower users’ carbon intensity score in corn production anywhere from 25% to 30%, according to Iwanaga. The idea is to unlock carbon credits and other paid sustainability programs for farmer-members.
“Now farmers can go downstream to tell that story—whether that’s for customers interested in sustainability, biofuel companies or others. Farmers are improving their operations’ carbon intensity,” Carstens says.
Synthesis Introduction
Landus has also joined forces with Tesseract Ventures, an American invention company, to bring military-grade predictive data analysis straight from the high-tech battlefield of today into a new digital decision-support platform for farmers and Landus agronomists.
The partnership arose out of Landus’ Innovation Connector program. The cooperative describes the program as “a hub for emerging technologies to showcase how the field of agriculture is propelling into the future.”
The physical space enables Landus to host events that bring together farmers, community members, educators, legislators and more to promote the importance of agriculture and reveal the fascinating advancements Landus and its technology partners have on the horizon.
The cooperative is calling its new software offering “Synthesis.” Synthesis automates the collection and combination of data across an incredibly wide swath of sources—everything from satellites and drones to on-farm sensors, weather stations and even disparate farm machinery brands.
The Synthesis system leverages algorithms originally designed for advanced military intelligence applications to literally synthesize all the relevant available data for a select field or operation into three different modules (Plan, Perform and Prove) that farmers and their agronomists can use to make digital twins, or virtual simulations, of their fields.
By using these digital twins of their real-life fields, the farm management process goes from an inexact, multiple-variable guessing game to a laser-sharp predictive level.
Farmers and their Landus agronomists can run endless scenarios through the digital twins of their various fields to benchmark management practices and what effect they will have on the crop.
“It’s a radical way to reimagine information exchange and how to action it,” says John Boucard, Tesseract CEO. “We now can visualize the past and the present with real-time and edge data and then envision future events and their impact before they happen.”
Carstens adds, “Agriculture has great data, but we have never been able to get it into one spot and then let the farmer analyze the data in real time to create a digital twin that can visualize virtually any scenario. Now they can go out on the farm and be confident.”
The digital platform today remains in development, but the partners are getting very close to releasing the first iteration, and several Landus farmers have been involved in field tests. Kennedy is one of a handful granted with early access. He is convinced it will be a seismic leap forward in farm management information system innovation.
“Having a platform that I can bring all of the different types of data sources into one centralized location, it gives me the foundation I need to use AI toolsets to build these really detailed analyses around so many different scenarios in production,” he says. “We’ve never been able to have enough of our data in one location and have it in a format that we can access and do this type of predictive analysis.”
A Partner for the Future
Along its reinvention campaign, Landus has learned a few lessons. Chief among them is farmers are resilient, and “they will either do it with you, or they will figure out a way to do it without you,” Carstens says.
This long, winding journey to redefine its business model is just that: an insurance policy to stay relevant with today’s farmers and the next generation of growers.
“We will go into the future with a true focus on what farmers’ needs are. When we stay focused on that, the rest will take care of itself,” he adds. “Never underestimate the resiliency of a farmer. They’ve proven that time and time again. Our job is to stay in the mix with talented people, understand the challenges and use our scale to help them be more profitable. A well-rounded cooperative is a very tough model to beat, but at the same time, it’s got to be well-run. And you’ve got to be focused. You must be willing to do the hard things.”
Carstens credits good partners for progress made so far and says there is more to come.
“We’re excited about what this can all mean for our farmers. It’s been a rewarding journey,” he says.
