Change in Direction: Corteva’s Digital Future
After joining Corteva Agriscience over a year ago, Brian Lutz, vice president of agricultural solutions, is leading his team to make directional changes in their business. The company is redefining the strategy for Granular, exiting its Software as a Service (SaaS) activities, and taking the perspective that software itself isn’t the real value driver. He shares more in this one-on-one interview:
What is changing about the Granular brand and business?
The Granular brand will continue to be Corteva’s digital brand in the marketplace. There’s been confusion if Corteva is getting out of Granular or getting out of digital all together. Digital is central to everything we do at Corteva. And we’ll continue to be heavily invested in digital. But, as an industry, we spend too much time talking about digital for digital’s sake—farmers plant seed not software. So, we are focusing on how to use digital capabilities to help deliver the most value through the seed and crop protection products we provide.
So then, Corteva is exiting Software as a Service?
Yes, we have made the decision to exit the SaaS model. Previously, our Granular software featured three distinct product offerings: Granular Insights, Granular Business and Granular Agronomy. Granular Business and Granular Agronomy were focused on the SaaS model. We recently divested our Granular Business software to Traction Ag. Our Granular Agronomy option, which was mainly focused on fertility recommendations, has been discontinued. Both product offerings aimed to generate revenue from software subscriptions charged on an annual or per-acre basis. Moving forward, we will focus our efforts on Granular Insights—which does not have a subscription fee—and building on the tools it has to help farmers get the most value from their seed and crop protection efforts.
Specifically, what about Ag Studio?
We have had that product for quite a long time. We continue to use it internally, and we have retail partners and others who use it. There are no plans to change anything right now, and we’ll maintain the product as it plays a unique role for us and our partners.
Where will Corteva be investing in its digital future?
Through Granular Insights, we are increasingly focused on bringing information to customers in simple and easy-to-use ways. Across the industry, there has been too much focus on software when farmers just want the insights. There’s a lot of room for improvement to go beyond just giving farmers tools to analyze their data themselves. It shouldn’t take 300 clicks to find the most important results. Our goal is to automate much more of the analysis, while still providing the freedom and ability to do additional analysis if needed.
What will be Corteva’s differentiator in digital?
As we have made these changes, we have combined our digital teams in Granular with our digital teams in R&D. We’re the only digital organization in the industry that, in one group, spans from the earliest parts of the R&D pipeline all the way to the digital solutions being used by farmers. At Corteva, we’ve got more record-setting corn hybrids than anyone else in the industry. And we’ve got the most innovative crop chemistry pipeline, with more Green Chemistry Awards that all other companies combined. The researchers who are building the algorithms and recommendations that go into Granular Insights are literally sitting with the researchers who are developing our industry-leading products. There is no better way to ensure that we can deliver the best insights and recommendations on how to get the most value from our products than having these teams work in an integrated and seamless way.
Why is now the time for Corteva to make these changes?
We are investing differently than others to use digital to drive value for farmers rather than just build software for farmers. As we have recently shared publicly, we have a lot of industry-changing products and innovation coming through our pipeline. There couldn’t be a better time to realign our digital tools to make sure our customers are able to maximize the value they get from their seed and crop protection investments.
Is it time to consider farm data in a different way?
If you take a step back and look at the industry—others are measuring themselves by how much access they have to customer data. Our focus is on helping customers make better decisions with their data.
Like many others—we firmly believe farmers own their data. We only want to provide tools so they can make good decisions based on their data. This has always been our objective. Through the Pioneer agency we’ve long been the trusted advisor, helping our customers make decisions based on their results.
Where do you want to be a year from now?
If we are successful, we’ll ultimately talk about digital less. As an analogy—no one talks about the tech behind Amazon. They talk about free shipping, low prices, and convenience. They don’t talk about complicated databases, order processing, inventory, and logistics systems behind the scenes.
Our first opportunity when it comes to digital is delivering value from products. The second opportunity is how we can improve our processes as a company, such as being more agile in our supply chain. The real value of digital is continually improving how we get the right products to the right acres.
What’s the greatest challenge?
Right now, it has been around recruiting talent. For example, we’ve made the decision to pivot operations primarily to the Midwest to be closer to our customers and our global research and business centers. The science and engineering behind farming is not simple—we need top talent to help us do the work. We have truly exceptional scientists and engineers who are committed to our mission of driving sustainable innovation for farmers, and we are looking to grow our team.
