Landus Launches Innovation Center To ‘Change the Script’
“We need to get innovation to the farm and get the farmer at the center of that innovation,” says Landus President and CEO Matt Carstens. “The role Landus wants to play is clear–as a cooperative owned by our farmers we must find a way to be that.”
He delivered that message during the grand opening of the new Innovation Center, which is located in Ralston, Iowa, and will serve as the center point for the cooperative’s technology and data efforts.
“We get one to two business calls a day wanting us to consider a new technology, a new data path, anything that’s new in the space of agriculture,” Carstens says. With so many new products and technologies, the cooperative wanted to develop a strategy for how to help farmers find the best solutions for their farm.
The cooperative built the Innovation Center as a way to showcase new technologies and as a testing ground with its 10-acre test plot on-site for field trials. Partners include Syngenta, Sentera, Rantizo, Sukup and more.
The team at Landus says they are approaching the innovations in two phases: a staging gate of early-stage technologies still be developed and a funnel of available technologies that could be solutions for a farm.
The work of the Innovation Center dovetails with the Landus launch of the Grow Solutions Center—the virtual connection point for Landus subject matter experts and farmers.
“I look at the way we call on our farmers and serve them, and we've got to increase our speed, our expertise and our ability to give them here and now information, lead with the data group, which will be the heavy push of our Grow Solutions Center,” Carstens says.
A product offered to Landus farmers is the cooperative’s data locker, which securely stores on-farm data for use as the farmer gives permission. Google Cloud will be a strategic cloud provider for the Landus farmer data platform.
“We can’t turn on the power of innovation without data,” Carstens says.
Molly Toot is the Grow Business Leader at Landus, and she adds, “we really believe that farm data will eventually become another commodity in itself for that farmer.”
Toot says this is setting up to be the new way Landus does business with farmers.
“We have a very experienced team that will work through what is needed to help a farmer collect that data, put it into our data locker where it's safe and secure at the farmers farmer owned cooperative, and then we can start being able to monetize that and get it out for different programs,” she says.
Another spoke off the hub of the Innovation Center is the Innovation Cell—a way to bring together thought leaders in science, technology and small business to collaborate with Iowa farmers.
You can watch the grand opening here:
