The wizard of crops: Microsoft’s ‘Oz’ aims to transform farming

It shouldn’t be much of a surprise that an AI-powered tool called “Oz” is heading out of, or near, the Emerald City.

On November 12, Microsoft and Land O’Lakes announced that the two companies have co-developed an AI-powered agricultural science tool called “Oz,” designed to help farmers and agricultural operations. Specifically, farmers are facing some very serious problems: labor shortages and lower yields associated with changing climates. Further, costs for fuel, fertilizer, equipment, and tools, not to mention international trade issues, have put agricultural operations in an even tighter vise.

Oz was built to help agronomists and farmers do more with what they have, tapping into Land O’Lakes’s vast reams of agricultural data and insights, previously available only in a bound, 800-page book. Oz itself is an AI application that is accessed and used on a mobile device, tapping into Land O’Lakes’s intellectual property to offer guidance and information on the fly. 

“We’re putting 20 years of data into [farmers’] hands,” says Leah Anderson, who serves as SVP of Land O’Lakes and president of its crop inputs and insights business, WinField United. “Oz is designed to be put into the hands of an agronomist,” or an agricultural scientist, she says, who can then offer the farmer on the ground insight and guidance about what to plant, where to plant it, and when—along with myriad other things, such as weather insights, pest and pesticide information, and more. 

“What we’re doing with AI . . . is using the structured, high-quality, standardized data from over the past 20 years and feeding it into Oz. That cuts out the noise,” Anderson says, noting that it also helps farmers trust that “the data source was correct.”

In other words, using Oz as an AI assistant or tool to ask questions about a given farming operation should be more trustworthy and less prone to hallucination than a broader AI tool, such as ChatGPT, which is trained on the entire internet. Oz, instead, generates insights from only one source, which is known and trusted by farmers.

Oz is currently in beta testing and is in the hands of numerous retailers across the country, with plans for further expansion this year. It’s also been in the works for a while—the product of a now five-year-long partnership between Land O’Lakes and Microsoft.

Lorraine Bardeen, corporate vice president of AI transformation at Microsoft, says she has worked at the tech giant for more than two decades in numerous departments, from finance to the Xbox team. But she decided to work on the project with Land O’Lakes because it was a chance to get AI tech into the field—literally.

“The first major waves of our partnership were about digitally transforming American agriculture, bringing a lot of workloads and capabilities to the cloud,” she says. “Over the last five years, Land O’Lakes has really established itself as an innovator in American agriculture.” 

Farming on the brink

The timing is critical, too, because the agriculture industry is in crisis. A June 2025 study published in Nature finds that even if farmers adapt to a changing climate, staple crops will be 24% lower by the end of the century than they are today. This year, farmers are facing an estimated $44 billion in crop losses due to rising costs, low crop prices, and international trade issues. Farmers are also struggling to find workers, a problem exacerbated by the The President administration’s immigration raids.

Unchecked, these issues could compound, leading to less food production, higher prices, and even shortages.

While a tech tool can’t help on the trade war front, it may be useful when deciding how much or little to water certain crops, when weather patterns are expected, what types of fertilizer may be the most effective given specific soil compositions, and more. In all, it could help replace lost manpower and make better decisions with materials on hand in order to reduce waste and costs. Again, all the suggestions and insights that Oz generates draw on data that Land O’Lakes has compiled over many years.

“Land O’Lakes has created this really rich set of intellectual property,” Bardeen says. “But it’s historically been brought to bear in an 800-page tome. It brings incredible value, information, and insights to farmers. Oz shifts everything from a literal, static book to a dynamic, AI-powered coach.” 

Anderson adds that farmers have more to look forward to from the Land O’Lakes-Microsoft partnership. “American farmers are under incredible pressure—we see the stress on their faces,” she says. For those farmers, “it’s about reducing uncertainty, and nobody knows more about that than we do. What we’re doing with Oz is really the tip of the iceberg as to what we’re going to be able to do with AI.”

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