Truterra LLC -- the sustainability business at Land O’Lakes Inc., one of America’s largest farmer-owned cooperatives -- announced a new collaboration with EFC Systems Inc., a leading provider of solutions for agricultural retailers and growers. This initiative will unlock new value for agricultural retailers by allowing them to offer growers an easy way to benchmark their current level of stewardship and identify additional practices and products that could benefit their farm, improve productivity and profitability, better position their businesses and care for natural resources for the long term.

Through the collaboration, EFC Systems will integrate with Truterra by making available the Truterra Insights Score as a Service offering within FieldAlytics, its comprehensive data management tool.

FieldAlytics is widely used by agricultural retailers, including those within the WinField United network, the crop input and agronomic insight business of Land O’Lakes, to help growers analyze field data so they can more efficiently manage their land and increase yields and profit. The Truterra Insights Score as a Service will be available to all agricultural retailer users of the FieldAlytics platform.

The Truterra Insights Score as a Service, one element of the full Truterra Insights Engine experience, offers agricultural retailers a new way to start or deepen sustainability-focused conversations with their grower-customers, framed around how to address near-term business imperatives such as profitability, yield, input costs and more by implementing new practices, products or approaches to stewardship.

Looking ahead, this venture gives agricultural retailers a new tool -- integrated into a trusted, widely used platform -- to better position the growers they work with to meet growing demand from food, feed, fuel and fiber companies for information about the stewardship practices used on farms in their supply chains. As these markets mature, growers that have access to – and have been benchmarking against – such sustainability metrics will be better positioned to capitalize on new ways to market their grain, potentially for a premium.

“Farmers put their trust in ag retailers to help them build and maintain successful farm businesses,” said Amanda Neely, Truterra senior manager, technology and innovation. “The market is evolving quickly, and ag retailers need the tools and insights to make sure the farmers who rely on them are factoring sustainability and stewardship into the equation. Building on strong, long-standing relationships among EFC Systems, Truterra and WinField United, we are now unlocking the deeper insights that all ag retailers need to best position their growers for success in this environment.”

EFC Systems and WinField United have aligned on digital strategies for many years, with EFC Systems providing a variety of business and operational efficiency services to WinField United retailers. Many of these retailers also leverage the full Truterra Insights Engine, which provides additional sustainability metrics and modeling capabilities.

“We are thrilled to be partnering with Truterra to elevate the conversation about sustainability at the farm gate,” EFC Systems president and founder Ernie Chappell said. “It has been our focus to offer ag retailers cutting-edge insights they can use to help growers, and this collaboration marks a powerful expansion of these capabilities to include valuable information about sustainability, which has never been more important to farmers and their customers. Ultimately, we believe the types of sustainability insights that Truterra provides will become the industry standard.”

To learn more, visit www.truterraag.com or www.efcsystems.com.