Land O’Lakes exec grew up in the suburbs, now doesn’t want to leave the farm

Leah Anderson admits she can seem like a fish on land as a Land O’Lakes executive: She didn’t grow up on a farm or graduate with an agriculture-related degree.

But today: “There’s no place I’d rather be.”

“You can be born into it, or you can choose being part of agriculture. And in my case, I chose it,” she said.

As president of WinField United, the Land O’Lakes crop inputs and insights business, Anderson is ushering in a tech boom for ag retailers and the farmers they serve. The Woodbury High School and University of Minnesota alum has led WinField since the start of 2024.

The business operates in 37 states and touches half of all harvested acreage in the U.S. through its member cooperatives that sell seed, fertilizers, pesticides and crop advice. Now imagine that happening with the help of a ChatGPT-like AI digital assistant trained on millions of data points collected through decades.

“That’s not just spidering across the internet like a lot of large language models would,” Anderson said. “This is literally using all of that data collected over 20 crop years to put the absolute best recommendation in the hands of an agronomist who’s working locally with that grower.”

Anderson has gone through the disruptions new technology brought to health insurance and banking as a former tech exec at Blue Cross Blue Shield and U.S. Bank. So when the Minnesota native arrived at Arden Hills-based Land O’Lakes in 2014, it was déjà vu.

In an interview edited for clarity and length, Anderson talked earlier this summer all about ag retail.

So I actually joined here in a technology role and have rotated across lots of different parts of the business. I got to be out across the United States with dairy producers who welcomed me into their homes, welcomed me into their barns, let me meet their cows and their kids, and fed me lunch.

That was the first time I started getting deeply connected to what it is that we’re doing here, in terms of the obligation we have to help farmers and producers thrive. And not only them but really their communities they’re living and working in as well. It gets personal quickly when you know that the decisions you’re making are impacting someone’s farm, someone’s family, someone’s community. Not only is it personal, they own us.

Ag retailers right now are navigating a lot of the same challenges as farmers. They’re trying really hard to make sure they’re bringing them value and differentiated insights to help the growers make the best decisions right now, because every penny that growers spend matters because profitability is so challenged.

So I would say our retailers are still looking for help from us. You know, one area that’s been an interesting one for us to help them with is around their labor challenge. It’s hard to recruit talent into rural communities, and then it’s hard to retain and develop talent and skill them up. We said, well, if that’s one of the top problems we hear about from the general managers of these ag retailers, how can we help?

You think about if you’re a new young agronomist or seller, you’ve never actually had to make a high-stakes recommendation to a grower who’s struggling with their profitability.

And then for a more experienced seller, there’s just so many things to remember. Our annual crop protection guide really is like 850 pages, so it’s knowing for sure that you’re not remembering wrong and just being more productive and efficient with how you’re doing.

We’re doing it right, not fast, because you’re dealing with living organisms here, right? And farmers who are making multimillion-dollar decisions. So we have to make sure the data that’s backing that tool is accurate and clean.

We are really pressure-testing the heck out of this thing with Ph.D.-level scientists asking every possible crazy question you could ever imagine would be asked to make sure that this thing is trained appropriately, so that it answers the question accurately. We take that really seriously, because the decision has to be right.

There’s a lot of potential to layer in all transactional datasets on top of the agronomic ones to really start maximizing productivity. We’re pretty excited about working with our owners around that.