Thinking Big: How Nutrien Is Redefining Global Ag Retail with Innovation, AI, and Sustainable Growth
The agricultural giant has laid out how it will aid the industry in its quest to be more efficient and sustainable, this year and beyond.
As agriculture companies go, they don’t get much bigger and more diversified in scope than Nutrien Ltd. From its headquarters in Saskatoon, SK, CAN, the company — formed from the merger of Potash Corp. and Saskatchewan and Agrium back in 2018 — oversees a vast network of more than 26,000 employees across the globe with operations in mining, crop nutrient and seed supply, and ag retail. Overall, Nutrien is the world’s No. 1 producer of potash, the No. 3 producer of nitrogen-based fertilizers, and the No. 1 ag retailer with outlets in more than 50 countries and annual sales of $29 billion.
Given this level of “bigness,” Rob Clayton, Senior Vice President, North America for Nutrien Ag Solutions, says it is only natural for the company to “plan big” as well. “There’s no point in being big if you can’t do big things,” says Clayton.
For Nutrien Ag Solutions, this has meant branching out across several different growth initiatives. This has included manufacturing proprietary products through the company’s own Loveland Products label, providing sustainable solutions to customers, and expanding into the areas of financial services and digital offerings.
A Focus on Retail
According to Clayton, the road to ag retail prominence for Nutrien goes back to the 1990s. At that time, the company’s ag retail outlets conducted business under a pair of names — Western Farm Service in the Western portion of the U.S. and Crop Production Services across the rest of the country, each sporting a few hundred locations.
During the early years of the 21st century, Nutrien steadily increased its ag retail footprint across North America. In 2006, the company purchased Royster-Clark. In 2008, United Agri Products (then the No. 2 ag retail in the U.S. by size) was added to the mix. In 2010, the Agriliance outlets joined the Nutrien family. Finally, in 2013, Nutrien acquired Viterra. According to Clayton, there are other smaller acquisitions made as well along the way.
“Today, we operate almost 1,500 retail selling locations across North America,” he says. “We offer a complete range of seed, liquid and dry fertilizer, crop protection, specialty nutrition products, and biologicals, as well as related services and solutions.” This has ranked the company as the No. 1 operations on the annual CropLife 100 list of the nation’s largest ag retailers, with sales well in excess of $1 billion.
Nutrien produces more than 13 million tons of potash per year, making it the world’s No. 1 supplier of the crop nutrient.
But Nutrien Ag Solutions’ network of ag retail outlets extends well beyond just North America. In fact, according to Clayton, the company has the largest grower direct retail distribution network in Canada, Australia, Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, and Brazil, servicing more than 600,000 grower accounts worldwide. “Our supply chain and strategic partnerships include more than 1,000 suppliers and 4,000 crop consultants who provide advice to growers, from the crop planning stage through harvest,” he says. “Our parent company, Nutrien, produces and distributes approximately 25 million tons of potash, nitrogen, and phosphate products for agricultural, industrial, and feed customers globally.”
People and Technology
Of course, overseeing such a big operation as Nutrien Ag Solutions requires not only good planning but personnel. For most of agriculture, finding new employees has been a consistent challenge since the beginning of this century. In fact, according to the annual CropLife 100 survey, the nation’s largest ag retailers rank finding/keeping good employees as one of their top three challenges each and every growing season.
Complicating this equation, says Clayton, is the requirements agricultural companies will need for their current and future employees to have in the way of skills. “We need to attract a whole new group of people to agriculture than we ever did before,” he says. “In particular, a knowledge of technology will be key.”
Like many other agricultural companies in 2025, Nutrien is looking at the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in its operations. “We’ve been looking at AI since March of (2024),” says Paul Bonnett, Senior Director of Digital Agronomy and Data Services. “Machine enabled agronomy is the future of agriculture.”
According to Bonnett, his team sees four different areas where AI technology can help agronomists and grower-customers. The first is by providing human readable insights.
“With AI, we can leverage our internal propriety data science and translate it into contextual reliable insights to lower the cognitive load of interpretation,” he says. “In other words, we can produce a huge amount of data for humans to use.”
The second area for AI use in agriculture is tied to labor. Here, AI programs can be used to target new crop consultants and emerging areas of agronomy to accelerate training using specialized chat-like capabilities to enable self-learning.
The third is building confidence in product use. “Here, AI can be used to enable our crop consultants to access on-demand crop protection and seed label information specific to state and use practices,” says Bonnett.
Finally, AI can be used to help solve agriculture’s persistent data problems. “Ag data has always been there,” he says. “There are files, there are PDFs, multiple formats. Using AI, we can convert these into one standardized dataset for use.”
Another “big idea” from Nutrien is FarmSmart. According to Dr. Sally Flis, Director, Sustainability Program Design and Outcome, FarmSmart supports the leading agronomic practices that the company’s crop consultants offer grower-customers everyday in a three-step process.
“First, the program identifies current practices and discovers new opportunities to evolve agronomic practices for the growers,” says Flis. “Second, the data collected can help set a baseline and identify areas for continued improvement. Lastly, with these first two variables, Nutrien Ag Solutions can work to identify new revenue streams and market access opportunities to help ensure the legacy of growers.”
Editor’s note: This article originally published in March 2025.
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