When Minutes Matter: How Agronomy Teams Turn Efficiency into ROI

Margins are tight. Acres keep climbing. The workday doesn’t get any longer.

That’s the reality for agronomy teams across the country, and it’s exactly what we dug into during our recent webinar, “Ease of ROI: How Efficiency Fuels Growth.” In this conversation, Taranis’ Chief Commercial Officer Jason Minton, Customer Experience Lead Jennifer Stutz, Regional Account Manager Tim Pearson, and Trevor Cox from Central Valley Ag (CVA) shared how retailers are turning time savings into measurable, repeatable ROI.

This blog pulls together the big ideas, real stories, and practical examples from that session.

Efficiency Isn’t a Buzzword. It’s Survival.

As Jennifer put it, efficiency isn’t just a hot topic—it’s a lifeline.

Agronomy teams are being asked to:

• Cover more acres per agronomist
• Deliver more service and insight
• Navigate tighter margins and labor constraints

All without adding more hours to the day.

Jason kicked off the session by tackling a common concern head-on:

“AI is not going to take anybody’s jobs. AI is going to make you better at the job you’re doing.”

Taranis does that by capturing leaf-level imagery of every acre and using AI to assess those images. Instead of just sending back “interesting pictures,” Taranis delivers summaries and maps that tell you:

• Where stands are weak
• Where weeds are breaking through
• Where insect feeding or defoliation is creeping up
• Where fertility problems are showing up in the crop

You get actionable intelligence on every acre—before the grower even calls.

That’s where efficiency starts to become ROI.

From Skepticism to Trust: CVA’s 8-Season Journey

Central Valley Ag has been working with Taranis for nearly eight seasons. Trevor Cox, ACS Regional Manager for Kansas at CVA, was honest about where they started:

At first, their agronomists were skeptical. New tech. AI. It felt risky.

So for the first couple of seasons, CVA built in ground-truthing:

• Agronomists went out after the flights
• They checked stands, weeds, bugs
• They compared what they saw in the field to what Taranis reported

After two seasons, something happened: they stopped needing that extra step.

“If it was saying the stand was this, we’d go out and confirm it. It was correct every time. If it said pigweeds were there, they were there. If it saw bugs, the bugs were there.” – Trevor Cox

Ground-truthing became repetitive and, frankly, unnecessary. Trust went up. Extra trips went down. And that’s when efficiency really kicked in.

Capacity Gains: Reclaiming 6–8 Hours a Week

When Taranis became part of the daily workflow, the first change CVA saw was capacity.

For high-touch agronomy customers, Trevor described a typical day before Taranis:

• Drive from field to field
• Walk or scout each one
• Try to “find” the problems
• Repeat, all week long

Now, that same agronomist starts the day by opening the Taranis dashboard:

1. See which fields have new flights and new issues
2. Sort by worst problems (e.g., stand, weed pressure, defoliation)
3. Drill down into the worst zones within each field
4. Decide exactly where to go—instead of guessing

“Now they can just select what’s the worst, go to the map, see the worst spot in that field, and go directly there. It’s much, much faster.” – Trevor Cox

For one CVA salesman managing a large dairy account, Trevor estimates that Taranis has saved:

• 6–8 hours per week in-season
• Two full days a week they used to spend scouting that one operation

Across the broader team, Trevor feels confident most agronomists are saving 5–7 hours a week in the busiest parts of the season—hours they’re now putting into:

• Higher-value service
• Supporting more customers
• Or, for mid-career agronomists with families, simply getting home earlier

Tim summed it up from his own 35 years in retail ag:

“If I can go home an hour or two earlier, sit at my kitchen table and go through Insights instead of spending three or four hours driving around for a ‘peek’ at fields—that’s a big deal.”

Capacity gains aren’t just about productivity. They’re also about employee retention and quality of life. It’s harder to burn out a team that has the right tools.

Smarter Scouting, Sharper Decisions

Efficiency isn’t just “faster.” It also makes decisions more precise and less wasteful.

Trevor shared several field-level examples from CVA and his own farm:

1. Stand Counts and Replant Decisions

Traditionally, stand calls meant:

• Walking a handful of spots
• Doing 5 or 6 stand counts
• Extrapolating to the whole field
• Replanting everything if it “felt” low

With Taranis:

• You see a stand map for the entire field
• You can identify which parts truly need replant
• You can generate shapefiles or use the app in-cab to replant only the low-stand zones

“99% of the time, not all of that field needs to be replanted. It might just be a corner, or 50%. Now we know exactly where.” – Trevor Cox

2. Spraying Only Where the Weeds Are

On one of Trevor’s own farms:

• The field was 45 acres
• Taranis showed weed pressure (pigweed) in only 17 acres
• He sprayed just those 17 acres with Liberty and Roundup

He wasn’t putting residual down, so a targeted pass made agronomic and economic sense.

“That more than paid for Taranis right there. Only putting chemical on less than half the field.” – Trevor Cox

Because he was treating fewer acres, he also chose to increase the rate where weeds were present, leading to better control. More precise spend, better results.

3. Insect Defoliation and Justified Insecticide

Taranis doesn’t just show you where damage exists; it helps you connect it to thresholds.

• Late-season flights on soybeans show percent defoliation per image
• Advisors can compare that directly to economic thresholds (e.g., 20% defoliation)

Instead of clipping leaves and eyeballing charts, they see:

• Where defoliation is truly hitting thresholds
• How much of the field is affected
• Whether an insecticide pass is justified—or not

“On our farm, we haven’t sprayed insecticides since we started using Taranis, just because it was always less severe than we thought. With the bird’s eye view, we could see it wasn’t justified.” – Trevor Cox

That’s real, measurable product savings, driven by data—not by pulling back blindly.

Hard Savings: Where Efficiency Hits the Bottom Line

Jason introduced hard savings as a critical, and often overlooked, part of ROI.

Retailers tend to focus first on:

• Incremental crop protection sales
• Market share growth
• Seed retention and cross-sell

Those are all important. But hard savings matter, too:

• Fewer miles driven
• Fewer truck rolls up the driveway with nothing to show for it
• More precise product use
• Less wasted labor on low-value scouting loops

As Tim shared, one retailer he worked with years ago calculated it cost $500 every time a truck pulled into a grower’s driveway once you accounted for:

• Time
• Fuel
• Equipment
• Overhead

The question becomes: What are you doing with that $500?

“How do we make that $500 meaningful instead of ‘What do you think about the weather today?’ conversations?” – Tim Pearson

Taranis helps make each visit intentional:

• You already know what’s happening in the field
• You already know which acres need attention
• You can walk in the door with a solution, not just a suspicion

Hard savings are also hiding in employee retention, which is harder to quantify but just as real.

Trevor was candid:

“For the amount of hours one of our salesmen was putting in, I kind of doubt he’d still be here if it wasn’t for Taranis.”

Keeping good people on the team is one of the most valuable “hidden ROIs” of all.

Data-Powered Relationships, Not Price Wars

One of the clearest themes from Tim and Trevor was how Taranis changes the tone of conversations between advisors and growers.

Instead of:

• “What’s your price on 32?”
• “Can you match this generic?”

They’re having conversations about:

• Stand and replant strategy
• Weed escapes and logistics
• Nutrient deficiencies and next-season planning
• Which acres genuinely need a pass—and which don’t

“The conversations are much more agronomically based. You’re talking solutions, not just price. You’re no longer just a price tag.” – Trevor Cox

Growers are noticing. Some even tell CVA they use Taranis for the sales team’s sake, because they see how it improves recommendations and saves money over the long run.

Tim put it simply:

“Ag is the ‘get-it-right’ business. The folks offering the highest level of service with real data don’t have to win by being the cheapest. They win by being right.”

Why Taranis Becomes a Necessity When Times Are Tight

So why is a tool like Taranis a necessity and not just a “nice-to-have” when margins are thin?

Trevor didn’t mince words:

“You can’t make blind decisions anymore. With the amount of money guys are spending on inputs, it’s a stupid decision to just throw thousands of dollars on the ground not knowing if it’s needed.”

Taranis:

• Quantifies where problems are
• Shows how many acres are truly impacted
• Helps justify whether to act, localize an action, or do nothing

Sometimes, the right move is not to spend money. That’s still ROI.

Trevor shared that some growers initially felt like they didn’t “get their money’s worth” in seasons where they didn’t find major problems. His response:

“Isn’t that a good thing? You didn’t have significant issues. You didn’t need to spend an excess amount of money—and you knew that with concrete data.”

Peace of mind is a form of ROI, too.

Efficiency Doesn’t Just Save Time. It Creates Opportunity.

As we wrapped the webinar, Jason brought it back to what really matters:

• Grower ROI
• Retailer ROI
• And the one thing no one can give you more of: time

Taranis delivers actionable, leaf-level intelligence on every acre so agronomy teams can:

• Spend more time where it counts
• Make better, faster recommendations
• Protect margins for both the retailer and the grower
• And still get home in time to see their kids before bed

“Efficiency doesn’t just save time; it creates opportunity.” – Jennifer Stutz

If you’re already using Taranis, Jason challenged partners to do one more thing this year: measure your ROI—not just in product sales, but in capacity gains, hard savings, and retention.

If you’re not using Taranis yet, now is the time to ask:

• Where are we still scouting blind?
• Where are we over-applying just to be safe?
• Where are long hours burning out good people?

And how much could change if your team knew exactly what was happening on every acre—before they ever left the driveway?