GROWMARK’s myFS Agronomy: Connecting Everything

In April 2026, GROWMARK, Inc. announced the formal introduction of its new artificial intelligence (AI) agent inside the company’s myFS Agronomy app. For Brendan Bachman, FS Agronomy Director, this moment represented the culmination of almost a decade of worth of developmental work.

“It’s nice to see this type of technology deployed to the field level, doing what it was designed to do,” says Bachman of the AI-powered myFS Agronomy.

According to Bachman, the AI agent inside of the myFS Agronomy app is a first-of-its-kind innovation that combines real-time data analysis with decades of boots-on-the-ground expertise from GROWMARK agronomists and FS companies crop specialists. This allows them to deliver faster, more precise agronomic insights to their grower-customers, providing highly customized, data-driven recommendations to support and improve profitability.

“When we look at AI, it is only as good as the context it has. Context equals data and source information. What we are doing with myFS Agronomy is getting all relevant agronomic, soil, environmental, and product data information into one spot to analyze a whole host of variables,” Bachman says. “To some degree, this would be manually impossible to do based on the hours needed to execute. myFS Agronomy’s AI capabilities allow our teams to focus on decision points, not data association, helping growers make better-informed decisions for their farm operations.”

A Companywide Digital Effort

For long-time market watchers, the fact that GROWMARK has introduced AI for myFS Agronomy should come as no surprise. As one of the largest cooperatives in the country, ranked No. 3 on CropLife® Magazine’s CropLife 100, GROWMARK historically embraces technology. The cooperative was No. 1 in Smart Tech sales during 2025 among all CropLife 100 ag retailers, according to the 2025 survey data.

Furthermore, the company has had an active program of adopting new technology into its own operations as well. In fact, over the last few decades, the company has moved much of its data applications into the cloud to enable easier data movement and interoperability via application programming interfaces.

Regarding the developmental path for myFS Agronomy, Bachman says the effort goes back to at least 2018. This initiative attempted to address a common problem for much of agriculture since the early years of the technology age — a lot of data, not enough insight.

For this technology effort, Bachman says that GROWMARK was decisive in investing in this space based on the foundational principles the company operated on — serving its farmer-owners and grower-customers — and implementing the values GROWMARK/FS needed to remain competitive for the future agricultural marketplace.

“At that time, we were running into an overload of data and information that was not being utilized very well at all,” he says. “We had been talking about ‘big data’ for more than a decade in the agricultural space. But we just kept amassing information from different data stacks without aligning this information to extract holistic value.

In that realization, we had to reduce the number of agronomic platforms we support, align consistent hierarchies, and connect these systems into usable data formats.”

GROWMARK realized that to achieve this vision for its new system, utilizing new technologies such as AI was a key for data interpretation and efficiencies. In addition, the company reduced manual efforts locally to give space to embrace new innovation.

“In the agronomic technology space, we realized that keeping up with the billions in capital coming into ag tech, we would be naive to develop everything a farmer or FS crop specialist would need,” says Bachman. “Thus, we used the hub and spoke model, where we bought/built the actual customer interface but designed it in a way where we could seamlessly plug in relevant technology innovations. This way, we could create a consistent and progressively more valuable system while providing scale to tested and selected partners to deliver unique but integrated tools to myFS Agronomy users.

“Our goal was to drive focused choice in FS data platforms while interfacing with all the grower machine data connections across the operations that we serve in our cooperative,” he continues. “We also wanted to put all of this data into one system so we could execute analytics on top of it structured data systems.”

Eventually, to maximize this “data in one place” system, GROWMARK realized it needed technical expertise from another company with a similar goal in mind. In early 2020, the company turned to Intelinair.

“Intelinair was originally one of our spokes,” Bachman says. “But they were very focused on many in-season functions such as remote sensing, analytics, and crop surveillance. They were doing this as well as anyone in the market and have the same high-service mentality about their customers that FS/GROWMARK does.”

As Intelinair transitioned to help build the hub, the two companies brought together GROWMARK’s vast pool of data with Intelinair’s AI and data analytics capabilities. The end result, the AI agent in myFS Agronomy, is built on information already available on the platform. This includes crop plans, soil data, field boundaries, product applications, imagery, historical outcomes, and much more. By bringing these datasets together, the agent can run analyses, uncover insights, and deliver answers that are grounded in agronomic data — all tailored to the needs of crop specialists working with growers across the FS System.

“AI should make agronomy simpler and more actionable, not more complicated,” says Conner Schmidt, Commercial Leader of Intelinair. “Working together with GROWMARK, we’ve created a tool that helps crop specialists quickly access the knowledge and field insights they need to better support growers. When advisors can spend less time searching for information and more time working alongside farmers, everyone benefits.”

The new myFS Agronomy platform was introduced in January 2024. Since then, GROWMARK has made a several enhancements and launched new features, but Bachman says “it is the same operating system” being utilized by FS crop specialist in 2026.

In Operation

The AI-powered myFS Agronomy is what Bachman refers to as a “365-day tool.” In the field, the system can aid crop specialists and their grower-customers with many different decisions. Among a host of other activities, this includes:

• Hybrid performance. myFS Agronomy can help determine which hybrids have performed best across the county a customer is located in and help them understand how to place these the next growing season, and how they should be managed.
• In-season decisions. The app can improve these by analyzing past performance alongside current crop and weather conditions.
• Breakeven and profitability analysis. The system can calculate the breakeven yield by field or hybrid for customers, factoring in such variables as land cost, machinery, seed, chemical, and fertility inputs to identify areas for improvement.

But Bachman emphasizes the human element of agronomy remains as important today as it ever has been.

“In addition to the connected data systems, all of our regional agronomists have instant access to thousands of real-time scouting reports FS companies have collect,” he says. “AI can put all of this data together in a way no human could giving us in-season insights on pest, disease, weed, and nutrient deficiencies to help advise our crop specialists more proactively. This element of crowdsourcing with our 600-plus crop specialists, combined with environmental modeling and alerts, gives us informed capabilities to what is happening where and provides guidance of where it may show up next to reduce yield limiting implications for our customers.”

Thus far, myFS Agronomy has been a hit. Since its rollout, Bachman says the platform is being used by all but one of the FS members in the cooperative’s system today.

“When I look at an individual grower, I think their perspective can be somewhat limited to the information on their farm, with the different management practices and outcomes affecting hybrids and performance outcomes,” says Bachman. “They may be gaining insights from secondary information with a mix of local field trials and different resource material, but this is static and has limited application to their specific operation. But by using myFS Agronomy, I can now show this individual grower thousands of acres worth of data with multiple variables from across their region or the county in an instant. My belief is this additional ‘perspective’ has implications to hone in on practices and products they should be considering to increase their farm’s overall performance.”