This Q&A with Land O'Lakes President & CEO Beth Ford is part of a feature in TIME magazine which can be found here.

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Since Land O'Lakes is not a traditional corporation, but a cooperative owned by the farmers, does this structure call for a different kind of leadership?

I've worked in big, small, private, and public companies. I think if you stepped onto our campus, you'd see it’s like every other corporation. We're about a $20 billion (revenue) company. There's tremendous complexity. But I would say that there's an intimacy to the model. And it’s not just the simplistic, ‘hey, they're in my boardroom.’ It’s the joy. It’s the privilege of knowing their families, of being on their farms, of fighting for something for them or working for them to broaden the view of what success is for the business. We can talk the numbers, but it really misses the point, because it's about making sure [the farmers] are stable. What I've been pushing on is making sure their communities are invested in. Because how do you have a successful business if you're in a deteriorating community, if they have no technology, which is the greatest enabler of our time.

Before the [COVID-19 crisis], I was visiting with different families, different farms and recognized a lack of technology. I don't want to date myself, but it was the old-rabbit-ears-on-top-of-the-TV kind of tech. This is just simply unacceptable—that we are not investing in these communities.

Now interestingly, I had gone to Seattle, met with Satya [Nadella, Microsoft’s CEO]. I like him as a leader because he talks about tech as an enabler for other things. We talked about technology in these towns and we partnered on enabling technology. I said, we can put something on a silo to make sure that we are beaming this out so that we can get improved technology, not just on the farm but in the communities and their schools. We had that conversation and then suddenly the pandemic occurs. And my conversation with my chief of staff and others was, “We're going to have a real problem here because rural hospitals have shut down.”

They don't have the capability, the expertise with technology. That's not a criticism, it's just a reality. We started making calls to the Mayo Clinic, to the Cleveland Clinic, to multiple companies to say we need to have variances by governors for online healthcare so they can write prescriptions without seeing the doctor in person, so that we can make sure that the reimbursement rates for these hospitals were commensurate with in-person visits. We need to turn on free Wi-Fi in our own locations, but who else will do that? Who will be with us? What was magical about it is over 175 companies and organizations were with us to push for a policy change. Not just in rural areas but underinvested areas.

And from that there's $65 billion in the infrastructure bill to address this. My chief technology officer, Teddy Bekele, was named to run the committee for the FCC on rural technology. This is all a perfect example of structural change, of big changes that are necessary.

In 2019, you wrote an op-ed under the headline, “Farmers Are in Crisis and America Isn't Paying Attention.” Do you feel this is still the case?

You have to be an optimist to be a farmer. Too hot, too cold, too dry, global issues, volatility in commodities. And yet they love it. Our farmers were in crisis at that time. If you remember, there were trade issues, terrible weather... Very low commodity prices. Farmers were going through a period where they weren't making any money. What has happened since then?

Well, a lot. Grain farmers, growers… many had a good year last year, but they're already looking to see what's going to happen. They are seeing accelerated pricing, whether it's fertilizer, steel, they have no labor. We can't get labor into the country. So, are they in crisis? No, I don't think that's a word I would use right now. They are going through tremendous volatility, and I admire them because of their resilience.

But let’s jump to the second part of that headline. Do you feel like America is still not paying attention to what's happening with farmers?

I don't think Americans largely understand the fragility and the interconnectedness of the food supply. The planet’s population is set to grow to about 10 billion people by 2050. During that time, we need to produce more food than the last 8,000 years combined. That's the challenge—with less fresh water, less arable land. And then in the United States, we have dramatic issues in terms of lack of labor, 2.5 million workers short. You think about the Congress, 435 seats, only 35 tied to rural or ag. areas. There isn't an understanding in this country about the food supply, about production. And that makes it more challenging to not just get a farm bill passed, but to really explain what we need that is self-protective for all Americans. Food security is national security.