The week of June 10, Farm Journal is celebrating the next generation of American agriculture. Our goal is to encourage you to plan for the future and cultivate multigenerational success through the transfer of skills and knowledge. Think tomorrow, act today to align your asset, resource and financial legacy.
What does the next generation of ag retailers look like? According to Rob Clayton, Senior Vice President of Retail North America at Nutrien Ag Solutions, he says the professionals in this industry will uphold a trifecta of characteristics: be tech savvy, passionate about the role, and keep the farmer’s best interest first.
“You can’t be an agronomist today that isn’t digitally enabled,” Clayton says. “Think about drones, selective spraying, and predictive weather forecasting. You have to be someone collecting data and then using the data to feed back to the grower for the best outcomes on a risk adjustment point of view.”
Clayton says his own career beginning as an agronomist was completely analog. Knowledge sharing was limited to phone calls, however, today, with its network of more than 4,000 agronomists on three continents, the Nutrien Ag Solutions network can leverage its scale in ways impossible even a few years ago.
“We have to have a different agronomist today than we did back then. Our teams are thinking about a holistic cropping cycle: taking in the productivity, the fertilizer and inputs applied along with the data points to predict the future. It’s a night and day difference,” he says.
He points to the developments in soil science, artificial intelligence, and biologicals as leading examples of how innovation is central to unlocking new possibilities.
Recruiting the Next Generation of Ag Talent
When Clayton thinks about the future, he says one of the biggest challenges forthcoming is having the professional talent required to help move the industry forward.
As the world’s largest agriculture inputs company, Nutrien Ag Solutions hires around 1,500 people each year- adding to its total corporate team of more than 25,000 global employees.
“The workforce dynamics in agriculture is rapidly evolving as technology and innovation drive the industry forward,” says Clayton. “Today, many of the professional and technical roles that we hire for at Nutrien Ag Solutions didn’t exist 30 years ago—data scientists, computer engineers, finance analysts, and marketing—these are new roles to the business,” he says.
In five years, NAS went from not employing any data scientists to now having 50 on their team.
“And there are still many roles we haven’t thought of yet,” Clayton says.
As such, it’s opened the agriculture industry to be competitive with a broad set of employers seeking employees from the same talent pools. But Clayton sees agriculture as having a unique advantage.
“I hear from the young professionals, the new generation that say they want to work for an organization that makes a difference. We are primed for that in the ag industry. We answer the questions of how to feed a growing planet and we solve the environmental issues in doing so,” Clayton says.
A supporter of youth programs that deepen the connection between science and agriculture, Nutrien Ag Solutions’ multi-year commitment of nearly $850,000 to the National FFA Organization underscores the company’s dedication to ag education and the development of future industry leaders.
“This is a role for all of us to be better linked as an industry– delivering the message that agriculture is a great place to be,” he says. “It’s a noble industry. It’s a meaningful industry. And it’s a great fit for those who want to do something of meaning and be successful at it.”
