Our employee spotlight this month is Les Wallington, Crop Inputs Manager at our Tisdale North location. With a wealth of knowledge and over 30 years of experience in the agriculture industry, Les understands how important it is to build relationships with and make the right decisions for the farmers he works with.

Keep reading to get to know more about Les and the work he and Tisdale North location do for the farmers in their area.

~*~

I’ve lived in the Tisdale area my whole life. I started out my career working in the oil field, but I didn’t like being away all the time. I moved back home in the early 90s and got a trucking job hauling ammonia. I worked in a few other roles afterwards before I came here to the P&H Tisdale North location. I started with P&H in 2018, but I’ve been with the agriculture industry since 1991.

When I started at P&H, the company was still new to the world of crop inputs. We had been selling crop inputs for only a few years and the fertilizer shed was only two years old when I started. We’ve had such tremendous growth in the last 8 years—we have two high-throughput elevators in the same town (Tisdale North and Tisdale South)! Being part of the that expansion has been a highlight of my career so far. We’re still a smaller location in the grand scheme of things, but we work with a lot of growers that have on-farm storage and we do a lot of direct-to-farm business.

The sales team and I are also very in-tune with the needs of the farmers and what they should be doing next. So right now, we’re looking at opportunities for next year’s fertilizer. In the short time that P&H has been here (Tisdale), we’ve been the local leader in being proactive and knowing what our growers should be doing next. We’ve got so many of them who called us recently, for example, saying that they already want to start booking fertilizers for next year. We were waiting for a few more details before starting, but they just said to call them back once everything is finalized. It’s good to have that kind of trust with the farmers, especially since we’re in such a highly competitive area. The growers pick up on it if you can’t make decisions right away, so you run the risk of sounding like the “used car salesman” type that always has to go back to the manager. And if you tell growers that enough times, they just don’t come back. That’s why P&H puts the trust in us to make those decisions in the field—it helps us build a close working relationship with the farmers. It’s good working for a company that put trust in its people to make the proper business decisions, especially when you have to be fast to react and get the right products at the right prices to the farmers. It creates a lot of value for them.

With the planning we do for the farmers, some of them hadn’t realized the full extent of all the products we can get. There aren’t many products or inputs in the market right now that P&H can’t get in some way, shape, or form. To be a farmer, you have to be optimistic and to be optimistic, you have to forward plan. We can help with that forward planning.

For us, it’s all about being proactive and being in front of the grower. Being prepared to answer their questions and asking them some of your own. Some farmers will be hesitant at first, but as the relationship develops, they see the value of what we do.

~*~

To work with someone like Les, find your nearest P&H location.