US farm co-op Land O’Lakes is expanding north of the border thanks to a merger of its WinField crop inputs and insights business with United Suppliers Canada to create a new company, WinField United.
The move ties Land O’Lakes, which is ranked third in the National Cooperative Bank’s list of top revenue-earning co-ops, in with a powerful player in the Canadian market, which has more than over 100 locations.
On its website, Land O’Lakes said: “Adding United Suppliers Canada to our portfolio means we’ll have access to the country’s largest crop production market—the western Canadian provinces (Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba).
“This geography accounts for 80% of Canada’s crop production—more than 65 million acres.”
As Winfield United, it will be moving base to Saskatoon, Saskatchewan.
Farmer-owned Land O’Lakes, based in St Paul, Minnesota, has about 4,500 members and last year earned $13.2bn in revenue.
Mr McDonald says the deal means services are available that would have been out of reach of smaller organisations.
It includes crop input, white-labelled pesticides, including technologies such as Interlock, a spray drift control product, and Winfield’s R7 agronomy software, which provides satellite imagery combined with the field, crop and soil data. These services would not have been available to smaller organisations, said McDonald.
Source: thenews.coop