Case study: Ohio ag retailer creates new efficiencies with agronomy ecosystem

TELUS AGRONOMY | MERCER LANDMARK | POSTED OCTOBER 25, 2023

The team at the northwest Ohio ag retail cooperative Mercer Landmark has a simple mission that applies to everything it does: Help farmers farm better. And now, our agronomy platform — and its strength as a foundation for the company — is a key part of making that happen. 

With 25 locations in eight counties along the Ohio/ Indiana state line, Mercer Landmark provides a range of services to area crop and livestock farmers, from grain marketing and agronomy services to feed manufacturing and hog and laying hen production. It’s a business in which leaders know the importance of vertical integration from the farm gate to the end-user. At the ag retail level, that integration is made possible today in part by the tools we proviede that help Mercer Landmark COO Neal Horrom and his team manage and execute on a range of tasks for grower partners. 

“Everything that we do is to help our farmers produce their goods and make their operations more successful and sustainable,” said Horrom, who joined the Mercer Landmark team in 2021. “We give them access to markets they would not normally have whether that means purchasing the products they need like crop inputs or feed or buying those products as grain and reselling them into the global market.” 

Building enterprise-level efficiency 

Horrom had only been with Mercer Landmark for a short time, but he’s no stranger to our platform. Though he’s worked with it for several specific functions in the last 12-plus years, the crop protection product label database was his initial entry into the platform. The original motivation was how the database seamlessly plugged into his company’s enterprise resource planning (ERP) platform. After that, he worked with us to connect his company’s ERP and digital agronomy platforms, later adding precision ag data connectivity. Gradually adding functionality across operations over time has targeted a specific goal for his team: efficiency at the enterprise level. 

“Our digital agronomy platform in TELUS Agronomy is what our crop production advisers use to plan and make recommendations to manage fertility prescriptions, and manage data generated by equipment during times like harvest,” Horrom said. “We have been transitioning to a centralized dispatching system in which we could dispatch our application fleet in a more central way versus managing individual pieces of equipment and applicators for every single location and job. We’re trying to drive some enterprise-level efficiencies.” 

Integrating field applications into the ecosystem 

Today, that means the Mercer Landmark team using our integration with AgLogic for this type of enterprise-level application dispatching and job management at each of the retailer’s location. This latest step in the team’s technology evolution has contributed to new efficiency through seamless data management and deployment for specific tasks, like fertilizer and herbicide applications, a large part of the cooperative’s fieldwork during the growing season. We are helping the team create a data ecosystem that helps his team manage every trip to a customer’s field. 

“The reason we moved to AgLogic was driven by what we were trying to accomplish for all of our operations. The tool that we were using before just was not going to be able to give us what we needed,” Horrom said. “My vision is an ecosystem of solutions that work together to provide a streamlined experience for our internal teams and our customers. TELUS Agronomy is helping us create this ecosystem where everything syncs and talks.” 

Though assembling the right tools in that ecosystem is important to its success, the effort also depends on the working relationship Horrom’s team has with us. It’s made the process work smoothly and keep everyone involved on the desired results. 

“Two of the driving factors in the decision were the integration and relationship. The TELUS Agronomy client success team supports the platform and are very familiar with what we want to do,” Horrom said. “If you’re partnering with somebody who already knows the tools you’re going to be working with, it makes the integration process easier. TELUS Agronomy was very transparent with us early on. That helps us streamline our workflows.” 

Looking ahead with the right platform 

Moving forward, Horrom expects to continue fleshing out this ecosystem for all internal and customer field operations, ultimately integrating everything into one platform. In doing so, he’s increasingly emphasizing useability for his team as a way to ease adoption and yield a seamless data management structure. 

“TELUS Agronomy makes for really good alignment and a streamlined user experience for our internal teams and our customers,” he said. “TELUS Agronomy is a partner I believed in, am confident in and know is up to the task of aligning everything as we move forward.”