Farmers Edge is pulling the curtain back on its role building out and powering the back end of the Conduit online platform.
Conduit is a digital e-commerce platform that is connecting farmers with crop protection solutions. The website officially opened for business back in April 2024, launched by Iowa-based Landus Cooperative.
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According to Farmers Edge CEO Vibhore Arora, his outfit armed Conduit with a technology strategy and development team to launch its customized online crop inputs storefront in under six weeks.
What Farmers Edge specifically brought to the table was substantial: two decades of agronomic experience, $100M in R&D, and 100+ in-house experts, all right there ready to roll from within its Managed Services division.
“We realized, I’ve been in the CEO seat now for 2.5 years, and my first mandate was to inspect the business and learn our customer’s pain points,” Arora says. “We spoke to over a 100 customers – from large agribusinesses and cooperatives to independent ag retailers and even small family farms – and we realized there is a lot of interest in trying to use technology and digital solutions in farming.
“But many of these businesses don’t have the ability in-house to build, implement, and maintain these technologies for the entire life cycle. Our thinking shifted. We have strong credentials in the digital agronomy space – we have agronomic data sets across 50 million acres and we’ve developed and launched a number of digital solutions within precision ag, sustainability, and in crop insurance. Why not offer up our capabilities to other ag businesses to help them accelerate adoption?”
While the two sides in the end matched up quite nicely, in the beginning it was pure serendipity that led to the partnership. Arora was at an industry event where he heard Landus CEO Matt Carstens speak about his vision for transforming his business into the farm cooperative of the future. It spoke directly to Arora’s ethos as an entrepreneur and serial innovator, having spent the bulk of his career climbing the corporate ladder all the way up to the executive team at Amazon.
Once he got home, Arora picked up the phone and reached out to Carstens, making his pitch to help the cooperative leader he calls a “visionary” implement the digital e-commerce aspect of Conduit.
The rest, as they say, is history.
“This is a unique project to me because I came into ag to work on a more compelling mission. When I was at Amazon, it was mostly about shipping boxes,” Arora says. “The specific value proposition of what Conduit does and what we did for Matt, digitizing the benefits of a cooperative and giving it a farmer-first feel, which is what Matt was really looking for, and now we can look at the data – we’re seeing a 10% increase annually in online transactions – clearly farmers need a safe, secure, and responsive digital platform to transact on, and it has to have strong bones and a solid structure in the back end. I think besides the speed to market that we achieved, it is the alignment between the two business teams that helped make this happen.”
“Partnering with Farmers Edge has allowed Conduit to fulfill its commitment to empowering customers with innovative technology that enhances profitability, productivity, and long-term success,” adds Matt Carstens, Conduit President and CEO.
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Farmers Edge Managed Services supports multiple segments across the farm ecosystem with technology outsourcing, data licensing and white-labeling, and custom technology development.
Arora says Managed Services can develop tech solutions faster and reduce the cost of building technology by 30-50% for its commercial partners. He points to tie ups with companies like TCS, Google, and InfoSys, as well a deep bench of domain and tech stack expertise, as proof that the team can help any agribusiness navigate the digital revolution.
“Anyone in ag that is looking for a solution they don’t want to build themselves in-house, we can help out you out,” he says. “Or if you already built it and now you need help maintaining it, we can help there, too.”
With Conduit now launched and in a good place, Farmers Edge Managed Services is looking for new projects and partnerships in the digital ag space, Arora says. To learn more about Farmers Edge Managed Technology Services, visit: FarmersEdge.ca.
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