Land O’Lakes CEO Beth Ford on the challenges reshaping American agriculture | Fortune
Search
Subscribe
Sign in
Home
Latest
- Fortune 500
- Finance
- Tech
- Leadership
- Lifestyle
- Rankings
- Multimedia
- Trending now
- Texas businessman gets 13 years in federal prison as feds seize his Lamborghinis, Ferraris, Firebird, and dozens more cars to pay back fraud victims
- Move over, DINKs. SPLITs are the new financial power couple: They have two incomes, no kids yet, and no joint bank account
- Billionaires have left the U.K. and taken $160 billion to the likes of Monaco, Switzerland, and the UAE—that's more than those who stayed are worth
Newsletters
- MPW Daily
Land O’Lakes CEO Beth Ford on the challenges reshaping American agriculture
By Emma Hinchliffe, Most Powerful Women Editor
Down Arrow Button Icon
Follow
October 8, 2026, 1:45 PM ET
Beth Ford, president and CEO of Land O’Lakes, in conversation with Fortune’s Emma Hinchliffe, at the Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit on, Oct. 14, 2025.
Melissa Flynn—Fortune
Google source logo
Add Fortune on Google for similar content.
At the Economic Club of New York this week, inside an ornate room upstairs, we got a rundown of many of the United States’ most important problems.
Recommended Video
That’s just a typical afternoon for Land O’Lakes CEO Beth Ford, who spends her days thinking about everything from the lack of hospitals in rural America to U.S. farmers’ competition with Brazil.
Profiling Ford last fall, for an award-winning Fortune piece focused on her work as immigration chair for the Business Roundtable, the Trump administration’s immigration policy and enforcement, and its effects on American agriculture, I wanted to hear the latest. Unsurprisingly, we are dealing with many of the same challenges a year later.
Diesel prices are a bigger problem than they were a year ago, thanks to the Iran war. “Diesel costs at double is difficult,” Ford told us, for truckers, farmers, and “any part of the economy that’s got equipment.”
Another challenge on her mind is the generational handoff of American farms. More farmers are over 75 than under 35. “It’s a math problem, and it’s very difficult,” she explained. At a recent farm auction in Iowa, she noted, out of 400 bidders only two were local farmers. The rest were financial buyers. “Should that concern us?” Ford asks. “Certainly, the fabric of the community changes.”
Speaking of that community, I joined Land O’Lakes again later in the evening for a gathering of its Modern Rural Collective, an effort to improve portrayals of rural America and Americans in film and TV and online. That gathering, hosted by CMO Heather Malenshek, was off the record, so I can’t share too much more (although you can read my piece from a few months ago for more on this genuinely fascinating work!).
It’s a mindset you see reflected across the company. As Ford told her audience: “What a privilege this job is.”
Emma Hinchliffe