From the driest year in over 130 years to extreme hail events, Evan Fust and his teams work with farmers across Colorado and Kansas. Fust is general manager of CHS High Plains, CHS Quintec and CHS United Plains which totals more than 40 locations.
“I’ll quote the famous quote, ‘whiskey is for drinking and water is for fighting about,’” he says. “I look at agriculture in the U.S. and our limiting factor is water. Certainly out here in these arid areas it’s all about water.”
Fust says his team is ready to take on the challenges alongside their customers with a new go-to-market structure.
“We’ve reorganized the way that we go into the marketplace,” he says. “Historically we had dedicated sales professionals for feed agronomy, energy, grain procurement and those report up to the respective teams. Now, all of our sales staff are together and that allows us to have a lot more cross functionality.”
He says the needs was realized when it was identified how many individual team members were calling on farmers but not realizing the cross-selling opportunity. For example, customers who sold 100% of their grain to CHS had opportunity for seed sales that weren’t being realized. Or a farmer bought most of their inputs from CHS but weren’t buying their diesel.
“This standardized go to market approach allows our professionals to get on that farm and try to partner with those growers and make sure that we’re meeting all their needs,” Fust says.
He’s also looking to bring technology to elevate how the CHS team can help farmers.
“There’s a new technology on the market that allows us to map compaction levels in soils and that’s a big thing of our soils,” he says. “Compaction is something these guys fought for decades and now we might have a tool that helps us do a more methodical approach towards combating it.”
