-: 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.
Man: So, you're right that these bus--