Crop input and protection company Nutrien Ag continues to evolve its digital platform, Hub, with new features and services, becoming an all-in-one tool for growers to plan crops, receive financing, and improve yields, as the company explores how AI can add even more functionality.
Launched in 2018, the Hub was initially designed to streamline payment processing for Nutrien products, but over time evolved to include agronomy, weather, and environmental insight, Jeff Garlich, director of product management at Nutrien Ag, told AgTechNavigator. Nutrien Ag is adding new features to Hub, like an ability for “a grower to enroll in competitive financing offers,” the company shared in a press release.
The agriculture leader is also exploring how it can use AI to improve product recommendations and help crop consultants and customers alike, Garlich noted.
“We tend to look at AI as a tool set that can help provide additional value to our users — be that crop consultants or growers — and so we are using it behind the scenes to power our recommendations and help give additional context,” he elaborated.
However, for all the talk of AI replacing humans, Nutrien understands the importance its nearly 3,500 crop consultants have in the communities that they serve across the US, Garlich explained.
“The differentiator for Nutrien is still our crop consultants,” Garlich said. “We certainly do not see [AI] as a replacement for our team that is out there in the field today, interacting with our growers.”
He added, “We are focused, from a digital capabilities perspective, [on] how do we strengthen the collaboration between our growers and our crop consultants to leverage a lot of the proprietary data that Nutrien has on-hand to build higher quality recommendations for growers to use, as well as giving them the data of why that recommendation would be good for them to use.”
Improving collaboration between consultants, growers
For the future, Nutrien is exploring ways to improve crop consultant workflows and digitize more manual processes, improving the collaboration between the grower and crop consultant in the process, Garlich noted.
“We are looking at the broad workloads that our crop consultants and growers are collaborating on. Variable rate seeding was one thing. A lot of how recommendations get shared is through ‘sneakernet,’ with a USB drive. There is obviously a lot of opportunity to streamline that — automate that workflow,” Garlich elaborated.
He added, “You look at collecting samples out in the field and scouting a field not only is that done manually today, but analyzing that data is done manually today as well.”
Integrating different digital solutions can also be crucial for farmers to make informed decisions about growing crops, and this is why Nutrien Hub can be integrated within John Deere Operation Center and Bayer’s FieldView, Garlich said.
“Integrations are key to our business, not just in terms of how our branches operate, but also how our growers operate. We need to meet [the farmer] where they run their operations, but we also want to become a platform of choice for our growers to be able to make these agronomic decisions, make their financial decisions, and hopefully optimize the outputs of their farm to be as profitable and sustainable as possible as well,” he added.
