Corteva Agriscience Presents: A Conversation with CCO Tim Glenn and Agronomist Mary Gumz

Thank you, Delaney. Mary, I'm excited. I want to start off here the discussion with you because you have a... acres. We raise corn and soybeans, we also raise seed corn for the Pioneer plant in Plymouth, Indiana, and we raise peppermint as well. So that's a little bit less common of a crop across the Corn Belt. But if you've ever chewed Wrigley's gum or brushed your teeth with Colgate toothpaste, you've probably tasted Indiana peppermint oil. My other hat, like you said, that I wear is that I'm also a full-time employee for Corteva. I'm the Agronomy Manager for Pioneer for the Eastern Corn Belt, so I cover Indiana, Illinois, and everything kind of north and east of there going out to the Eastern Seaboard. So I've been with Pioneer since 2008 in a variety of agronomy roles, and now I have a husband who's a very good sport about putting test plots on the farm.

Yeah, great question, Delaney. For me, my role is leading the global commercial organization for Corteva. Our business really starts with farmers. In my team, we have about 5,000 colleagues around the world who wake up every morning thinking about how we can go out and serve farmers. Those people are experts in sales, marketing, agronomy, digital solutions, really working directly with those farmers. We're thinking about it from both the seed and crop protection... really focused on serving customers in a very individual and localized way. I've been doing this for a long time, as you said, 29 years for the company this month, and I will tell you it never gets boring. There's always something new and interesting, a new challenge, trying to bring a new solution to solve a problem that our customers are facing, and always working to try to deliver more service to our customers.

Yeah, it's a great question. Mary talked about some of the challenges we had with COVID, and certainly we were seeing that earlier in the calendar year than we did here in the US. So it ranged from... we hear a lot of consistent themes around the world. Obviously, economics, the economics that farmers are facing is a big deal right now. I would say it's not just low commodity prices or challenges in the market, it's really around a lot of uncertainty. There's always concern about the need for new solutions that customers are facing, whatever that big challenge is today. It could range from things like dealing with herbicide resistance challenges or other issues. So we're always working to bring them new solutions, and customers want that where it delivers good value to them. Finally, I think our customers are dealing with issues around sustainability. We're getting more and more feedback and guidance in the marketplace from consumers around consumer... year, trying to help them work through their biggest challenges of the time. So those are the themes that we're hearing across 2020.

And Mary, I think you hit the nail right on the head there. Farmers are... and create content and talk to consumers. You spend a lot of time listening to them. How have things changed in recent years, and how do you respond to concerns and changes that you have and share those with consumers?

Yeah, absolutely. I think we've always been close to our customers and gotten direct feedback from our customers, but I would say historically maybe we operated in more commoditized markets, and the voice of the consumer was not always as visible or direct. Today, we clearly do get a lot of feedback. One of the things that we definitely spend more time on today is getting that feedback not just from our farmer customers but also from consumers. Consumers clearly care not just about what they're consuming but how it's produced and the technologies that were utilized, and we should only expect that to... where the alignment was and maybe where some of the great differences were. One thing that really came out was that there was a lot more alignment between the interests of farmers and the interests of consumers that doesn't always get reported. A few examples would be around the future of farming. Obviously, if you're a farmer, that's very important as you think about building an operation for the next generation, but consumers do care about that as well. They want to see successful farmers and a successful aggregate structure out there as they go forward. Food security is a common theme. One of the things that has probably motivated me through most of my career is that calling that we have in agriculture to help feed the world. I see that firsthand around the world, how when food security increases, how... sustainability in the environment. Farmers are very concerned about that, and they're living in most cases in the area where they're farming, so that local stewardship is very important, and clearly consumers care. Now, do we always align on the individual messages around that? No, not necessarily. But another point of alignment is that there's a general agreement that we need to have more transparency, transparency on both sides. Coming with that is communication and compromise, recognizing that we're not going to all get everything we want. But if we have strong communication and strong transparency, I think we're going to continue to move more and align with our consumers.

How widely available digital technologies have become. That can range from a very smallholder farmer in India who, on their simple cell phone, can receive a text message that gives them an alert to start to scout or potentially treat for a pest that may be outbreaking in an area, to our farmers here in the US where most of them today have smartphones and have ready access to data. So it's amazing. Any place I go in the world, it's one of the topics that really comes up. I sat in a meeting with very small rice farmers in India, and a farmer was asking me a question about a seed treatment that we'd introduced in the US because he had seen a YouTube video on it and wanted to know when it was... have comprehensive tools that allow them to take data and ultimately apply analytics and make better decisions, have more profitability in their operation. We've invested in Granular, which brings a business management approach combined with our agronomic expertise and allows the farmer to look across the entire enterprise in order to use that data to make better decisions and drive more profitability. But one thing's been clear, especially during 2020, as we've all had to adapt with less face-to-face and more communications online, is that we need to make sure that our customers have ready access to broadband technology as well. There's clearly a gap in America... that's really focused on ensuring that we have good broadband coverage across the entire country.

Yeah, absolutely. Like farmers have preferences, they have preferences where they want to purchase their inputs, they also have preferences on who they want to do business with. So at the core, what we want to do is be able to serve our customers the way that they want to be served. When you think about crop protection, generally speaking, our crop protection business is going to go through full-service retail, so we work with... we're much more visible today in the retail seed, and this year we made an announcement where we launched the Brevant brand and got a lot of good feedback around how Brevant is being accepted in the marketplace. Being able to serve those customers' needs through retail is really important. There are some farmers who like to do business more directly, and the Pioneer brand fits that agency model where we're working with customers directly, premium service, right product, right acres, strong agronomy, and it's just a very reliable and trusted brand that customers like to do business with. In some countries, and the US would be an example, there are even other ways to do business. We've got four other brands that we have... more local way that they prefer. Finally, we'd love to think that we have a brand or a route to market that serves every customer's needs, but the reality is some customers have brand preferences that don't necessarily have a brand. So we also work aggressively on licensing and distribution relationships to make sure that our technology is readily available in the marketplace for customers. So it's really at the core what we do, and it's about going out there and making sure that we can serve customers the way that they want to be served.

Clearly number one... second is around profitability for our customers and really allowing our customers to meet the goals that they have for their operation, whether it's financial or agronomic, really allowing our customers the opportunity to pursue their goals. Then finally, about less uncertainty and stress. This has been a lot of stresses that have been put on our customers, and there always is in agriculture. We deal with uncertainty, and if you wanted to have certainty, you wouldn't do what we do every year. I'm thankful that we have customers who can handle that, but we certainly could dial that back a notch or two and get back to something a little bit more normal. From a professional standpoint, I normally spend about 50% of my time out in the marketplace with our teams and... radius of where I live here in central Iowa. So I look forward to getting back to a more normal situation where I can really be out there getting a sense of what's happening in the marketplace and being with our teams and helping serve our customers.