Land O’Lakes, a US farmer-owned cooperative that operates across dairy, crop inputs and agricultural retail, and Microsoft Corporation have entered a new multiyear strategic alliance, extending their earlier work on digital agriculture. The collaboration will focus on developing AI tools, including a digital assistant called ‘Oz,’ built on Azure AI Foundry and trained on Land O’Lakes’ farm data.
US farms are facing growing pressure as production costs rise, crop prices fall and farmable land continues to shrink. The companies say the system is intended to support farmer decision-making on operations, yield potential and risk management. The organizations add that technologies aimed at improving efficiency and resilience are becoming increasingly important for helping producers manage costs and maintain more stable operations.
Land O’Lakes, founded in 1921, operates across all 50 US states and 60 international markets, is headquartered in Arden Hills, Minnesota, and reported $16.2 billion in sales in 2024. The company’s businesses span agricultural production to consumer foods, including its Dairy Foods, Animal Nutrition and WinField United units.
Oz Digital Assistant
Land O’Lakes works through a network of agricultural retailers who advise farmers throughout the growing season, often relying on the cooperative’s long-standing Crop Protection Guide, an 800-page agronomic reference built from two decades of data to tailor recommendations to local conditions.
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Drawing on this dataset, Microsoft and Land O’Lakes developed a custom copilot, ‘Oz,’ designed to provide quick, accurate, mobile-ready responses to agronomic questions and support field-level decision-making.
Land O’Lakes has also undergone a broad digital shift through its collaboration with Microsoft, moving much of its IT environment to Microsoft Azure and testing Copilot tools to support internal workflows. The cooperative has used Copilot Tuning to adapt the system with agriculture-specific data, aiming to improve accuracy for its operational needs.
Land O’Lakes has supported American agriculture for more than 100 years, and the AI-powered technologies we’re building with Microsoft will be key to the next 100. The goal of our alliance is to deliver data-driven recommendations and solutions that lead to the best outcomes for farmers, who keep food on all of our tables.
These efforts have helped Land O’Lakes develop real-time data tools for farmers, including a digital agriculture platform focused on soil management and a digital dairy system that collects production data, even in low-connectivity areas, to support planning and supply-chain forecasting.
The new AI assistant, Oz, is the first product to emerge from the renewed partnership, with additional agriculture-focused tools expected to follow.
Land O’Lakes-Microsoft Synergy
Microsoft’s commercial business CEO Judson Althoff said the agriculture sector is facing mounting pressures, from rising costs to tightening margins, and that AI is becoming an important tool for addressing those challenges. He noted that the collaboration brings together Land O’Lakes’ long-standing industry experience with Microsoft’s cloud and AI systems to develop a Copilot tool intended to give farmers practical insights to manage costs, improve yields and support long-term viability.
In a world where farmers are inundated with data and emerging technologies, our partnership with Microsoft enables retail agronomists to efficiently access information and provide farm-specific solutions.By equipping retail agronomists with this information, we are enabling decisions that support long-term success and increased confidence across the agricultural ecosystem.
The Land O’Lakes–Microsoft partnership points to a moment when digital tools could start to influence everyday farm decisions more directly. If systems like Oz become widely used, they may shift some decision-making from traditional advisors to AI-based guidance.
The partnership can potentially illustrate how traditional agricultural knowledge could be adapted into practical digital tools for farmers. By grounding AI in real agronomic data and cooperative expertise, initiatives like this can support more informed decisions while still preserving the judgment and experience that remain central to farming
The potential benefits are considerable, but so are the ethical considerations, as agriculture adopts more AI-driven tools, maintaining strong data-privacy standards, clear transparency and safeguards that protect farmer autonomy will be essential for building long-term trust.