With a legacy dating back to 1889, Five Star Cooperative has more than a century of service as an ag supplier, but its focus is keenly on the future.
For achievements in digitizing its business, Five Star Cooperative and its headquarters in New Hampton, Iowa, is the 2025 Business Innovation Award winner, which is sponsored by AgVend.
This past year, the team retooled and recommitted to a digital journey. The northern Iowa-based company launched Operation Easy with the goal of becoming the easiest place for customers to do business.
“The best ideas come from our team, the best ideas come from our customer base. And so, as we introduced Operation Easy, we went around, talked to customers, talked to team members,” says Scott Black, CEO of Five Star Cooperative. “And it became quite obvious to us, right out of the gate, that digitalization was of utmost importance.”
The result was the co-op partnering with software vendors AgVend, AgVance, Kahler Automation, Smartwyre and others to integrate systems, automate data whenever possible and give real-time transparency to the customer. Benefits for the business have been:
- Directly meeting customer needs.
- Stronger team and department collaboration.
- Giving customers greater visibility and timely communication.
Customer-Centric Focus
From customer interviews, surveys and more research, the mandate from the customer was clear: They want quick, self-service options available to them on their phone while they are on the go.
To directly meet customer needs, Five Star Cooperative launched real-time grain data with auto-uploading scale tickets, inbound grain offer management tools and Five Star Link, a customer portal.
“Uses of Link are varied, everything from our growers to home heat customers,” says Nick Sawyer, agronomy director. “We’re using it for digital signatures on contracts. We’re using it to let growers know when their fields had an application done. So, if they’re waiting with a piece of tillage equipment to get out in that field until after we put the fertilizer on, they know instantly when our applicators pull out of that field, so they can pull in.”
The Five Star team alludes to a previous customer portal launch that floundered at 8% adoption over five years. When they launched Five Star Link, early goals were set at 25%, but the adoption quickly climbed above 47%.
“A lot of the feedback we’re getting from customers right now is how much they enjoy being able to access their accounts at any given time,” Sawyer says. “Having that instantaneous access to their operation and their relationship with Five Star has been very impactful and very well received.”
Sawyer says the portal is a business tool that allows the co-op to be wherever the farmer is. In addition to account access, the communication tools are used by the co-op and the customer.
“I think availability is the biggest thing for us. We don’t expect anybody to be available every hour of every day, but just being able to have a touch point when we need it, when we’re busy in the field, knowing that the people at Fiver Star are there to support us,” says Michael Tupper, Poppe Farms TK.
Marc Throndson, grain director at Five Star, says the quick sharing of information has been a customer satisfaction driver. Cutting out a five-to-10-minute phone call to get an answer is a time-saver for the customer and the co-op.
“People want to be able to quickly see anything from bids to scale, tickets to contract balances, all those types of things at the palm of their hand,” Throndson says. “They can just do it at the palm of their hand, whether it be setting their GPS after they turn around, taking a quick peek, or maybe they’re at night and something crossed their mind.”
Improvements Pay Dividends
Five Star’s divisions span grain, agronomy, feed and energy across 19 locations and 15 counties in northern Iowa. Operation Easy had the goal of making the internal work for its 220 team members more efficient and more accurate.
“Some of our processes that we came up for Operation Easy was doing things smoother internally. If we do things smoother internally, then it can affect positively on the outside circle to our customers,” says Sara Jerdee, grain accounting assistant.
The team says they’ve crossed the threshold of having more than 50% of all contracts e-signed. Throndson describes the new tools and greater visibility as a win-win.
“This has been a great journey for us, as far as tying something together that allows our customer to easily do things, whether it be in the field, at their desk, at home at night,” he says. “It’s doing the same on the flip side for our employees to be able to be a little bit more accessible to our customer; they aren’t spending time finding information for the customer because the customer can find it themselves.”
Throndson gives examples such as soybean moisture levels and grain settlements, which required a lot of one-off phone calls and conversations to share information.
“And in the heat of the battle of harvest, it’s improved the efficiency of our staff greatly,” he says.
The work done in bringing forward the technologies to improve business continues to be impactful with customer conversations. For agronomy sales and operations, the tools put the emphasis on where the co-op adds value.
“Five Star Link has done a really good job of making our meetings with the grower much more impactful, because we can concentrate on what matters, not necessarily the busy work. We can utilize Link to get the contract signed, to send quotes out, to show the farmer what the plan could be,” Sawyer says. “We really want our salespeople’s time with the grower to be spent talking about the farming operation and what we’re going to do to make it better, not just getting something signed or stopping out to get this paperwork done. We’re going to utilize our digital solutions for that so that when we’re face-to-face with a grower, we can talk about what matters to them.”
Jerdee says a key feature is having a mirror image of what the customer sees, so when everyone gets acclimated to the system or walks through where to find something, the staff and the customer are seeing the same screen.
The digitization journey has also been in line with labor and efficiency trends.
“Our grain department runs a lot leaner on staff than we did five years ago and, frankly, will run leaner in five years from now than we are today,” Throndson says. “How we become more efficient can be hard to measure, but we have to do it because there’s constant pressure to become more efficient.”
Digital is a Baseline
The third goal was to improve customer communication and visibility. The team at Five Star acknowledges customer engagement expectations have evolved with the customer base itself. For example, three years ago, the largest number of customers were aged 65 years or older. Today, customers aged 45 and under make the same proportion.
“For our customers, for Five Star to be easiest to do business with is [that] they know that Five Star is going to get them their answer correct — and the first time — that they know we have a good relationship with them and we know what they want for their business operation and can help them make the process easier for them,” Jerdee says.
And the effort has been noticed by customers.
“The suppliers that we have, whether it be another seed company or something like that, they don’t have an app that has all this information tracked, where we have it at the palm of our hands like Five Star does,” Tupper says. “To me, it’s head and shoulders above any other businesses that we currently work with.”
Tupper says he might log into the portal every three hours to check on different things, and its toolset has dramatically improved his workflow. For example, in doing the hog closeout paperwork, it previously took him three hours to export feed tickets into a spreadsheet and do the analysis. Now, it’s a 30-minute project.
Team Effort
On receiving the Business Innovation Award, Black says credit goes to the team in how they drove the customer-centric approach from concept to execution.
“The reason why we’re here having this conversation is because of our team, and so we’re very proud of what we’ve been doing and where we are today,” he says.
“To me, it is a never-ending initiative because you can be great today, and we can be delighted with where we are today with our digital transformation, but we can never be satisfied,” Black says. “We have to continue to evolve and adapt. We’ve done it for 136 years. We have to do it for another 136 years.”
Guru Groups
The team at Five Star Cooperative use a concept they call Guru Groups to bring forward new ideas or procedures in the business. This was core to how they implemented Operation Easy and how they continue to evaluate technology.
“We like to take things in small bites,” Sawyer says. “So, when we try to launch a new initiative or bring something new to the market, we’ll go to some of our professionals within our organization and have them work through the problems with the new software with a new plan. By doing that, we can work out a lot of the kinks before we roll it out to the organization as a whole.
Guru Groups were pivotal to ensuring the rollout was smooth and provided the solutions promised to customers and the internal team.
“While there’s a lot of good software out there, we needed something that worked for all departments and could really tie everything together,” Throndson says.
Once confirmed, the new procedures and tools were introduced to the team with training so they could feel confident about using them and be enthusiastic about sharing them.
Black says this team approach is part of an ongoing strategy.
“A couple of years ago, we made it a focus to be on top of effective use of emerging technologies,” he says. “To me, this isn’t about today. This is about tomorrow. With artificial intelligence, all the things were coming. We have to be able to stay ahead of that if we’re going to maintain relevancy in today’s world. We have to be able to adopt and change and make decisions maybe we’re not comfortable with going forward, and that’s the key, in my mind. This is just a journey that never, never ends for us.”
