Future of Agrian as Part of Telus Agriculture
Agrian founder and CEO Nishan Majarian shares an update on the company since it was acquired as part of the group to form Telus Agriculture.
How did Agrian come to become part of Telus Agriculture?
Agrian had been approached by several different groups over the last several years and as a result our board of directors wanted us to hire a professional group to work though that process. That process resulted in 120 global companies expressing interest. From there, we narrowed the search to 34 and Telus was one of them. This was about January/February of last year. Then COVID hit. We thought the process would end. Then 11 companies made offers to acquire Agrian.
What would you share makes Telus Agriculture and its approach to the market unique?
I’ve been in the industry for 18 years. I’ve seen a lot of different broad attempts to consolidate agri-food. Whether it be a supplier or private equity group. What struck me about Telus was a rational, well thought out plan, and a proven track record. They’d done this before with Telus International 15 years ago. And then 12 years ago with Telus Health. Telus is going to be the first truly independent, unified technology partner for the entire agrifood supply chain, and I’m excited to be a part of it.
What do you think will lead to the success of Telus Agriculture?
It’s the day-to-day blocking and tackling capabilities. We’ve brought these companies together and we have a playbook of lessons learned by the various companies.
With eight companies, we’ve formed four business units:
- Food, beverage and consumer goods
- Animal health
- Agribusiness
- Global tech, which powers the three commercial units.
What’s an example of a lesson learned that is being used at Telus Agriculture?
Don’t let brands and capabilities sit out there too long. For example, the user interface/user experience is being unified with a Telus ag platform. We’ve put together an effort to consolidate companies at a service level—and a software level. We don’t need five systems with grower management, four mapping tools and three fertility systems. We are able to assess the scalability, weed out the redundancies and pick the best of what we have in the toolbox. We have nearly 500 software engineers at Telus Agriculture.
What will we see first as a product or service from Telus Agriculture?
We will have an Ag Service Exchange and the Ag Data Exchange. These are enablers with three goals:
- build a better business faster
- accommodate customers today
- and futureproof our operations and customer operations tomorrow.
The exchange network will allow us and our customers to integrate information across platforms and have it move throughout an operation seamlessly. For example, you can take soil sample results from one part of the system and use them in a fertility equation in another part of the system, and share that equation with a third-party software tool that you may be experimenting with to develop a fertility recommendation.
Has this business formation changed who you consider competition?
Our competition continues to be the fragmentation of data. Agrifood today is comprised of thousands of point solutions. There’s a scouting tool, a fertility tool, a label database, and mapping tools. What we started to do at Agrian early on is build a platform with all the capabilities in one location so customers don’t have to assemble it themselves. At the end of day—there are a lot of people who do that with building broad capabilities but they want to sell something. Our model has been different.
Do you see more industry consolidation and acquisitions?
I predict that we are about one-third of the way through a road map of consolidation in agriculture.
I think COVID is a factor, and I think the strong commodity prices are a factor.
And for 18 years I built a business on one truth—technology innovation is a growing and irreversible trend. Every grower and agronomist has to be more technologically engaged.
What trends are you watching in ag retail?
We will use advanced capabilities like unified data, artificial intelligence and a complete supply chain view to empower our crop advisor customers in the field with deep information and resources that help drive their growers’ operations forward.
