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When Leah Anderson joined Land O’Lakes, Inc. in 2014, one of the nation’s largest farmer-owned cooperatives, she brought with her an unusual résumé for someone stepping into agriculture. Banking. Health insurance. Digital strategy. Not a single line about crop inputs, soil health, or agronomy.
Today, she’s SVP of Land O’Lakes and president of WinField United, the cooperative’s crop inputs and insights business, helping lead a technological transformation in a sector that feeds the country but has long operated on slim margins, volatile conditions, and risk profiles that would make most executives blanche.
Her secret weapon, she says, is precisely that she didn’t grow up in agriculture. What she grew up in, professionally, was disruption.
Anderson admits that from the outside, her career might look like a series of unrelated industry jumps, but she happened to land in several sectors right as they were undergoing major digital disruption. Those moments shaped her trajectory.
She cut her teeth at a major U.S. bank during the early stages of the industry’s digital shift, a period when basic mobile banking features were far from a sure bet. As she recalls it, “We were trying to decide if anybody would ever actually deposit a check from their phone, and how the heck we would ever secure that and make people trust that.” Strategy meetings included heated arguments over whether customers would ever open a checking account without setting foot inside a branch.
Fast forward 20 years, and those debates feel almost quaint. These days, people rarely visit banks unless they need cash or must handle a particularly sensitive transaction.
Anderson’s next chapter placed her in health insurance, another industry on the cusp of transformation. Wearables and biometric data were beginning to reshape patient care, shifting the paradigm from episodic check-ins to real-time monitoring. Anderson worked on early-stage thinking about how technology could catch disease earlier, engage consumers differently, and improve health outcomes.
Those experiences, along with what she’d seen in banking, showed her just how profoundly technology can reshape an entire industry, she says.
Learning agriculture from the ground up
When Anderson arrived at Land O’Lakes, she was joining an industry where the pace of change had not historically mirrored that of Silicon Valley. And she was the first to admit she was starting from scratch. “I came to agriculture at Land O’Lakes in a technology role, so at least I knew how to do the job in some sense,” she says. “But it was in a totally different context from an industry perspective.”
So Anderson went outside.
She walked fields with dairy producers. She toured manufacturing facilities to see how milk becomes butter and cheese. She spent time at rural retail locations, talking directly with the people who sell seed, fertilizer, and crop protection products to America’s farmers. Anderson says she wanted to grasp the business in a way no slide deck could offer, through real conversations and hands-on encounters. Agriculture, she came to understand, is something you learn by being in it, engaging the senses, and experiencing the work up close.
Her immersion came at a pivotal moment for American agriculture, which is facing mounting macroeconomic pressures that are hitting farmers especially hard today. “It’s a challenging time for farmers in the United States,” she says.
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The stress is acute. Farmers are worried about their children, their futures, and their communities, says Anderson. And unlike most workers, they cannot simply walk away when margins turn negative. “Most of us, if we weren’t making any money at our job, we might quit. But they’re not making any money, and they’re still growing their crops every year,” she says. “It’s pretty humbling to see.”
This is where Anderson’s digital disruption experience comes into play. WinField United holds more than 20 years of research data across every type of weather environment—wet, dry, frigid, scorching—and knowledge of how different seeds, nutrients, and biological products perform under those conditions. That intelligence is invaluable, says Anderson, but historically has been hard to surface in real time for the people who need it most.
Bringing AI to the field and supply chain
Now, technology is the connector.
WinField is beta-testing an AI assistant designed to put decades of agricultural insights directly into the hands of agronomists, the on-the-ground experts who help farmers make real-time decisions. The tool is built to address the high-stakes questions growers face daily, like when to spray their crops or how changing weather conditions might affect how much they can grow.
The initiative is part of a broader effort to show farmers and their retail partners how technology can improve returns, increase predictability, and reduce risk. The goal, Anderson adds, is to make these tools accessible and approachable in rural communities, not something that feels imported from an out-of-touch Silicon Valley tech giant.
Agronomy isn’t the only area where digitization is accelerating. WinField United is also investing heavily in AI-driven supply chain optimization. Agriculture still carries significant inefficiencies, including large stockpiles of products scattered across rural communities as a safeguard for unpredictable demand. Those excess inventories create unnecessary costs, waste, and redundant truck routes.
By using AI to forecast demand more accurately, factoring in weather patterns, disease pressure, and regional cropping trends, Winfield aims to help farmers position products exactly where and when they are needed. The result is a leaner, more efficient, and more responsive supply chain, says Anderson.
What Anderson proves, perhaps more than anything, is that skills are increasingly industry-agnostic. She says the future belongs to leaders who can translate technology across sectors and recognize patterns in one domain and apply them to another.
“Agriculture deserves the same digital transformation that banking or healthcare went through,” she says. “My job is to help make sure farmers, especially those under tremendous strain, benefit from that transformation.”
Written by Ruth Umoh for Fortune as “Meet the Land O’Lakes exec bringing AI to the heart of American farming” and republished with permission.
