How COVID-19 Is Changing Nufarm’s Approach to the Ag Business
CropLife® interviewed Brendan Deck, General Manager of Nufarm North America, on March 31. Deck shared insight on managing a crop input business during the COVID-19 pandemic, including how the company is being affected from the standpoint of its U.S. workforce all the way through to its operations in China. He also opened up about how the pandemic is shaping the future of agriculture. Deck, a New Zealand native, has for the past five years lived in Chicago, where Nufarm operates two plants that are central to its U.S. business.
What are your priorities right now in how you go about managing your business?
If you look back two to three weeks, the conversations we were having were very different. In fact, I was reading (Nufarm’s) March report for the North America region at this time last year. We always open our report with a safety update, and the issue of the day – and I don’t want to take this lightly – was that one of our workers had a blister on his thumb for touching something that was too cold in the workplace, and we needed to talk about the safety of wearing gloves in cold environments. I look forward to what my report is going to be for March 2020, and I wish I was talking about a person with a blister on his thumb.
It is a dramatic change. In considering how we operate in this environment I start with the absolute first and foremost issue: Safety comes first. Fortunately, as a company, we’ve been driving what I call a safety culture as our number-one priority for the last five years. I think about safety going back five years, and we used to talk a lot a lot about wearing a safety vest or hardhat at the plants. Whereas in today’s environment, and over the last few years, the safety message has gone a lot wider across our business. For example, as we drive a car to visit customers daily, we have messaging around not using mobile phones. It’s not been a sudden a change in the way we talk but a reinforcement that safety comes first, and the health and wellbeing of our people is number-one priority in everything we’re doing.
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