Welcome to another edition of “SFTW Convos” with Tami Craig Schilling, Vice President, Agronomic Digital Innovation Lead for Bayer Crop Science.
Tami’s resume, her list of achievements and community engagement are longer than a CVS receipt.
Tami has spent almost 35 years at Monsanto and Bayer Crop Science! Over more than three decades Tami has had roles in commercial, corporate affairs, R&D, corporate engagement, market development, global agronomic impact, and digital innovation. I doubt there is any role Tami has not been in (maybe outside of facilities???) at Monsanto and Bayer.
Early on in her career, she had the opportunity to work with Dr. Robb Fraley, the father of genetically modified seeds.
Tami is extremely active in her local community. She is on the Board of Trustees for the University of Illinois, on the board of Illinois 4-H Foundation, Illinois Agriculture Leadership Foundation, and has won many awards both for her professional and community involvement. Tami is very active with her family and was recovering from a foot injury sustained while doing a sport activity with her granddaughter!
As you will see through the conversation, Tami is naturally very curious, collaborative, and has a sense of knowing where things are headed. She has recently been a critical part of the team which is responsible for the Generative AI based work done by Bayer Crop Science through E.L.Y.
Summary of the Conversation
In this conversation, Tami Craig Schilling shares her extensive career at Monsanto, detailing her journey from sales to leadership roles in R&D and communications. She discusses the importance of understanding farmer needs, the impact of social media on agriculture, and the challenges and innovations surrounding GMOs. Tami discusses the evolution of agronomic support through data analysis, the introduction of the agronomy wheel, and the impact of GEN.AI on agriculture. She emphasizes the importance of understanding farmer behavior, linking data insights to business outcomes, and preparing the next generation for future agricultural innovations.
Humble beginnings with Monsanto
Rhishi Pethe (RP): Tami, thank you so much for joining. I'm excited to have this conversation. And I'll be honest, when you first sent me details of your experience, I was like, this is crazy. You have spent almost 34 years at Monsanto / Bayer in different roles. This is an impossible task to try to talk with you in an hour. So we'll try to hit some highlights.
Could you give our readers a brief history of your career at Monsanto and Bayer? Which role did you like the most and why?
Tami Craig Schilling (TCS): I grew up in agriculture, but honestly, I didn’t plan on making a career out of it until sometime in high school. That’s when I realized agriculture wasn’t just about raising livestock or growing crops—there were all kinds of jobs beyond what my dad and my grandfather were involved in.
After college at the University of Illinois, I joined Monsanto. And I’ll be honest—my reason for choosing Monsanto probably wasn’t the best way to evaluate a career decision. But at the time, what mattered to me was that Monsanto invested in 4-H and FFA. I cared deeply about those ag youth organizations and their role in communities, both small and large. That shared value—believing in the importance of youth and community—sealed the deal for me.
I started in sales and spent the first 15 years of my career in sales management and customer operations. My first role was as a crop protection sales rep in Michigan. Over time, I moved into sales management, leading teams in Illinois and Missouri. I saw firsthand how Monsanto transitioned from a small crop protection company into a major player in seeds.
Tami Craig Schilling (Image provided by Tami Craig Schilling. Artist rendering by EI)
My background was in Ag Communications, and that opened up an opportunity to shift into corporate affairs. I worked on media, issues management, product launches, and eventually strategy operations, where I led training. This was around the time social media really started taking off, and I led a global effort to educate our employees on how to talk about who we were as a company and what we stood for. There were a lot of misunderstandings—people didn’t know what we were trying to do, and, frankly, the company didn’t always realize how important it was to show up and own its role. That was a huge responsibility. Through that effort, I personally trained around 6,000 employees worldwide, and I learned a ton in the process.
Then Dr. Rob Fraley, our head of R&D, reached out and said, “Hey, I want you to lead R&D pipeline communications, sit on our leadership team, help us make pipeline decisions, work with the board of directors, and get our technology leaders out there—talking with farmers, employees, and the scientific community.” So I did that for a while, then transitioned into global community engagement, focusing on our social licences to operate, then moved into business sustainability strategy integrating sustainable practices into our operations.
At that point, the company was preparing for an acquisition, and I felt pulled back toward the commercial side of the business. After 15 years in commercial, 11 years in other functions, I returned to help shape communication strategies for growers, partners, and employees. I leaned on everything I had learned—about our pipeline, the challenges we faced, and the importance of bridging those gaps in understanding.
Whether it was applying products or using biotech traits, I wanted to bring that understanding to farmers. Around that time, I was sitting in a two-day meeting about customer experience, looking at company metrics, and something just clicked. I immediately latched onto the idea of improving how we handle product and agronomy components to enhance the farmer’s experience with us as a company—while also improving the experience for employees and partners along the way.
That led me to spend the last eight years in an organization we call Market Development, which sits between R&D and sales and marketing..
During my time in North America, I spent a lot of time studying how people make decisions—how they move, what influences them. One of the things that’s always fascinated me, going all the way back to when I was a little girl reading farm magazines on my grandparents' floor, is how farmers get their information. What sources do they trust? How do they make decisions? And as an industry, how do we do the best job of giving them the information they actually need—not just company talking points, but the real, useful insights that help them tackle their challenges?
By 2018, it became clear that things were shifting. We saw that 40% of farmers were checking Facebook at least once a day. If 40% of your market is in one place, you have to be there. You’re doing yourself a disservice if you’re not. So we launched a massive initiative to get our 100+ agronomists on social media—not just to be present, but to actively share important insights in a way we’d never done before.
The knowledge transfer team did some really innovative things in the digital space. It didn’t replace the traditional way our people called on farmers—it just put more information into more hands. And as we started creating videos, we realized we weren’t just reaching farmers in the U.S. and Canada—we were reaching a global audience. That’s how I ended up in a global role, doing something very similar on a much larger scale.
At that point, we were trying to solve a big question: How do we take all this valuable knowledge and get it into the hands of employees, partners, and farmers? There was a massive amount of information, but knitting it together wasn’t simple. Farmers make decisions based on so many factors—their behaviors, crop management practices, field characteristics, soil conditions, the environment, and then agronomy challenges like weeds, diseases, and insects that change constantly. On top of that, they’re dealing with products not just from us, but from multiple companies.
So we started exploring different ways to connect all of this information in a way that actually improved the farmer’s experience over a full 12-month cycle. It wasn’t just about treating farmers as a single group—it was about understanding what each farmer needed, when they needed it. The horticulture grower in California has completely different concerns than the irrigated farmer in Nebraska or the corn and soybean grower in Illinois. And that challenge? That became a huge passion of mine.
We didn’t get the full funding for the project in 2023, and by 2024, it was clear that wasn’t going to change. But then ChatGPT came out, and several of us started having the same thought—if we can’t build the infrastructure ourselves through IT systems, can we leverage what’s already here?
For the last year and a half, I’ve been fully focused on how to use generative AI and large language models to build a farmer-focused product and agronomy tool that’s better than anything off the shelf. Something fine-tuned, highly advanced, ahead of everything else out there.
A lot of people are interested, but at the end of the day, the decisions farmers make—and the information we provide—have to be right. That’s what I’ve been working on, and we’ve launched a tool within our company that’s been absolutely game-changing.