Working to Advance On-Farm Stewardship and ROI Goals

Advancing a farm’s natural resource stewardship while achieving optimal ROI hasn’t always been viewed as the same opportunity. Now there is a tool that helps farmers achieve both. And it’s available through participating WinField United–affiliated retailers who are members of Land O’Lakes SUSTAIN™, a leading conservation solutions provider.
 
The Truterra™ Insights Engine is an interactive on-farm digital platform that helps farmers advance their stewardship goals and ROI potential acre-by-acre through customized insights and tools for identifying practices to improve performance. Land O’Lakes SUSTAIN launched the Truterra Insights Engine to help farmers improve their efficiency, enhance profitability and increase the sustainability of their operations’ natural resources.
 

How Truterra works

Production and field operation data generated by farmers — from planting through harvest — is securely stored in the Answer Tech Data Silo^®. We then include soil and weather data to create an overall view of how a field is performing, both agronomically and environmentally. From this, Truterra Insights Engine users receive two products.
 
The first is the Truterra Insights Score, which provides farmers with a benchmark rating and a live “sandbox” model, where they can plug-and-play different practices to identify new ways to improve environmental performance. This allows farmers to compare fields across their operation and show improved performance over time. The score is a live tool that helps farmers understand the impacts of changing field operations and conservation practices as well as tell their sustainability story.
   
The second product is Truterra Profit Insights, which generates a live tool that enables farmers to see where a field is making or losing money based on acre-by-acre or whole-field crop performance. It also helps farmers understand how they can improve ROI potential by altering management and conservation practices. Available crops in the Truterra Insights Engine include corn, soybeans and wheat.
   

Putting farmers steps ahead

The Truterra Insights Engine allows farmers to gain a robust understanding of how each of their fields is performing — from their ROI per acre to the level of soil organic matter is going to how to tackle nutrient leaching and runoff risks. Our aim is to improve the financial and environmental performance of every field enrolled in our sustainability platform based on customized solutions for that field and every business.
 
Other features include a field-by-field assessment that provides farmers who manage multiple fields or multiple farms with unique insights into the inherent environmental risks found in each field at the sub-field level, such as erosion, leaching or runoff. This enables farmers to better monitor each field and adjust management practices such as input applications and tillage passes accordingly.
 
Financial assistance opportunities for conservation practices with the USDA are also identified for every field enrolled in the Truterra Insights Engine. The platform helps the ag retailer serve as a one-stop shop for information for their farmer customers, and farmers get access to the best information with which to make business and stewardship decisions. 
 

Participation by food companies

Further downstream in the process, participating food companies can use Truterra when they source crops like corn, soy or wheat for production. Land O’Lakes SUSTAIN connects these companies with farmers and helps them achieve their sustainability goals. They can then communicate the impact of their stewardship efforts to consumers.
 
To find out more about how the Truterra Insights Engine can be woven into your current agronomy services package and help you improve conservation and ROI efforts on your operation, contact your locally owned and operated WinField United retailer to inquire about Land O’Lakes SUSTAIN.
 
 
^{© 2019 WinField United. Answer Tech Data Silo® and WinField® are trademarks of WinField United.
SUSTAIN™ and Truterra™ are trademarks of Land O’Lakes, Inc.}