Mark is a Master Agronomy Advisor Manager for Land O’Lakes, an agriculture cooperative and household name in dairy products. Mark oversees fifteen Master Agronomy Advisors whose main jobs are to work with farmers on increasing yield as well as reviewing finances and hiring practices. Mark explains how his team works tirelessly to ensure dairy farmers can continue to meet crop yield goals well into the future.
Transcript
My name is Mark Zenner and I am the Master Agronomy Advisor Manager covering the states of Minnesota and Wisconsin. So, a Master Agronomy Advisor, these are individuals that work directly with growers in the country, large farmers, typically 5,000 acres or greater. And, they work with them as far as helping them select their inputs whether it's seed, crop protection products, plant food. And, these individuals help growers manage their crops through the growing season to basically maximize their production per acre. Like, this time of year, this is the end of September, early October, we should be harvesting at this point. So, my team would be spending time with the growers, kind of doing, setting yield expectations, kind of reviewing the year, so to speak, and riding with the growers in the combine, maybe pointing out why some of the areas within the field are performing very, very well where others are not. And then, maybe having a conversation on how we either push that high producing area even more next year and maybe how we take that lower producing area and try to raise that production or maybe we don't spend as much money on that acre either. So, we wanna make sure that we're utilizing our resources in the most efficient manner, environmentally sound manner, and having this type of information allows us to do that. So, we do a lot with response to scores whether it's response to population, response to soil type, response to nitrogen, response to continuous corn, response to a fungicide. These are all factors or all conversations that we have with a grower and we have data to back up all of our recommendations basically. We've actually done more training to help our MAA's understand financial statements a little bit better to maybe have some of those conversations with the grower and maybe add some expertise, so to speak, or be able to look at all aspects that the growers are certainly looking at and dealing with. But, that has been a change. So, almost, we're seeing, not only agronomy information that is so important but, kind of more from a business orientation standpoint and also maybe from a people managing standpoint because these large farms are getting bigger and these farmers are dealing with additional challenges and maybe some things that the farmers haven't dealt with in the past, like more employees.
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