The chief technology officer at Land O’Lakes has a secret to making the cooperative, its owners and its customers more digitally adept: the human touch.

A majority of Teddy Bekele’s calendar is purple — the color assigned to one-on-one meetings — as he spends his days vacuuming up knowledge and dispensing it in turn.

“It’s not just my direct reports, but all the way down to the entry level,” Bekele said. “I say, ‘Tell me about the problem that you know you’re facing every day and how we can solve it.’ In the process, I’m learning everything that’s happening. Which is a lot of fun.”

Land O’Lakes appointed Bekele the company’s first tech executive in 2018 amid a growing need to connect agriculture with big data and insights. Six years on, it’s still in Bekele’s job description to “lead digital transformation” at the 103-year-old cooperative, especially as artificial intelligence unites a common theme tech and ag share: optimization.

“For the amount of inputs you’re putting in, you’re getting the maximum outputs,” he said. “That’s the core of where our insights and AI come into play.”

Bekele’s team of about 250, plus another 750 consultants and contractors, are dispersed throughout the cooperative’s business units: dairy foods, WinField United crop inputs, Purina animal feed and Truterra, in addition to areas like supply chain. Some of those employees even report to other leaders, giving tech a seat at many tables.

“We’re going to help them get smart about data and analytics,” Bekele said. “As a technology organization inside Land O’Lakes, we’re only successful if Land O’Lakes businesses are successful, and the business is only successful if the retailers and farmers are successful.”

Excitement builds in Bekele’s voice as he talks about the power of generative AI to find highly specific answers about pesticides while out in the field, or how it can help sales teams map out restaurants most likely to buy Land O’Lakes butter.

Ultimately, machine learning might become as revolutionary as the tractor itself if it delivers on the promise of offering trusted, data-driven recommendations that lead to lasting benefits for farmers, animals and the land.

A Purdue report found as the global population rises, it could take a “miracle that dramatically shifts the annual rate of corn yield improvement” to feed everyone.

“We’ve proven (corn yields) can push over 800 bushels per acre, yet the average is way below that” at around 180 bushels of corn per acre, said senior R&D manager Eric Spandl. “So how do we bring that up and be more efficient with the acres that we have?”

Digging through data

Young stalks of corn sat in pots juxtaposed against a sterile laboratory backdrop at the WinField United Innovation Center in River Falls, Wisconsin, on a recent Thursday. Phenotyping scientist Cody Hoerning was tracking how different fertilization rates perform using advanced imaging.

“This center is the creation of the data,” Bekele said. “Can we now use artificial intelligence to make that available in real time so farmers and retailers can ask a question about something we’ve tried here?”

That breakthrough has already happened with the company’s crop protection guide, an enormous book of pesticides, herbicides, fungicides and additives. An AI chatbot tool in development can offer “real-time advice and recommendations,” said Dawn Wyse-Pester, director of innovation at WinField United.

Though best known as a dairy brand, WinField is a major contributor to Land O’Lakes’ $17 billion in annual sales and typically brings in the biggest profit. The cooperative’s “farm-to-fork” approach means Land O’Lakes has a stake in growing and manufacturing the food for farmer-owners’ dairy herds in addition to processing billions of pounds of milk for its consumer brands.

Bekele began at WinField building up the technology to sort and analyze the company’s massive trove of data to create recommendations for a specific crop in a specific plot of land at a specific time of year.

“We had a lot of modeling that would help the agronomist make the right recommendation to that farm,” he said. “The goal became, ‘Can we replicate this model across the rest of Land O’Lakes?’ ”

Wi-Fi required

Bekele said digital efforts are already paying off for the company’s supply chain, which is crucial for quickly moving perishable dairy products to processors or grocery shelves.

With all the holiday baking and feasting, the last two months of the year account for a huge slice of Land O’Lakes butter and cheese sales.

“However, the cows milk 365 days of the year,” Bekele said. “We have predictive models in place to track where higher consumption may happen in one place versus another and where products need to go in the country.”

All of these breakthroughs are important, but without a reliable high-speed internet connection, the arrival of AI in American fields won’t happen.

Bekele chairs the Minnesota Broadband Task Force and says a big influx of federal dollars is coming to make the state more fully connected, which he said is a matter of “productivity and food sustainability and food resiliency.”

“Ultimately, it’s about the health of those rural communities as well,” he said.

A lot of Bekele’s attention targets cutting-edge innovations. But he also focuses on the bread-and-butter elements of IT and cybersecurity with a team he says knows a little about everything as well as contracted experts who can specialize. In any of those purple-coded calendar invites that signal a one-on-one meeting, Bekele says he aims to empower.

“My job is more advisory and cheerleading at the end of the day,” he said, “and letting the business shine.”

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