Mining

Enabling food growth from mine to farm

Nutrien’s 26,000 employees come to work each day united by a single purpose: feeding the future. For Nutrien, this mission goes far beyond food production. The company provides end-to-end requirements and agricultural supply chain components to service growth.

Nutrien is the world’s largest producer of potash fertilizer, a primary potassium source and essential nutrient for plant growth. Potash helps regulate water uptake, enhance photosynthesis, and bolster plant resilience. Used correctly, it can lead to increased crop yields. Nutrien also produces phosphate and nitrogen for crop fertilizers that it sells in more than 2000 retail locations dispersed throughout sites in Canada, the U.S., Australia, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Uruguay.

Nutrien even has an agronomy division that helps growers determine their farm’s lifecycle and roadmap—which crops they will grow and sell over the next five years, what the cycle will be, and which Nutrien products they’ll apply at the right time to optimize growth.

“We may load up a million dollars of product to a single farmer over the span of a season. In some cases, we even do custom work where we’ll apply product to the field for them,” says Brock Richards, Senior Solution Architect, who is responsible for the company’s networks and global network architecture. “It’s all about enabling our customers to receive more cost-effective inputs to grow more food.”

Ensuring connectivity across diverse environments

As a large, vertically integrated company, Nutrien’s supply chain extends from the raw product that is mined out of the ground to the nitrogen that’s manufactured all the way to the retail storefronts where farmers buy products. Across this supply chain, Cisco Wireless allows Nutrien to operate with seamless, secure, high-performing connectivity—and to do so in vastly different environments that are complex and can pose challenges to network connectivity.

“One of the things we’ve been able to accomplish with the wireless technology has been to create a seamless experience across all our locations for workers who are moving around,” says Mark Murray, Vice President of IT Infrastructure and Cybersecurity. “They get the same experience when they’re in a forklift, warehouse, office, or mine.”

In its mines, that connectivity follows employees far below the surface of the earth. “My phone that was connected on the surface stays connected underground,” says Murray.

Nutrien also leverages Cisco Spaces and Cisco Wireless to connect and track assets such as sensors, worker safety devices, and large equipment throughout hundreds of miles of underground shafts. Safety is a paramount concern—but also critical to the company is that workers have the right information at hand, at the right time.

To enhance real-time data transfer and further increase throughput, reduce latency, and optimize spectrum efficiency, Nutrien has been an early adopter in deploying Wi-Fi 7. Particularly beneficial to operations, key features of Wi-Fi 7, such as multi-link operation (MLO), ensure reliable connectivity, even in areas with a weak signal.

“We were seamlessly able to integrate Wi-Fi 7 into our existing implementation,” says Richards. “Services like MLO could be a game changer for us to provide connectivity to our buildings and retail branches, reduce the amount of equipment we have to deploy, and be that next form of backhaul for our industrial operations.”

Mark describes how seamless and consistent connectivity follows employees to remote and even underground locations.

Deploying in extreme conditions

The company’s retail outposts—typically in remote, rural locations—also present extraordinary constraints. In Saskatchewan, Canada, where Nutrien is headquartered, temperatures can get as low as –40° F (–40° C). “Sometimes it’s been a challenge to get power to where we needed to enable some connectivity,” says Richards.

Utilizing a variety of Cisco switches, each satisfying the spatial or environmental constraints of its respective place in the company’s value chain, Nutrien can connect customers and process orders through cloud-based applications, even in the most remote scenarios. Nutrien leverages capabilities such as Power over Ethernet (PoE)—which allows a switch to transmit both power and data through Ethernet simultaneously—to power up backbone radios, wireless access points, and smart cameras.

Ultra-compact switches, such as the MS130R, make outdoor deployment easier and more efficient. “Form factor sizes and the PoE budget capabilities are quite impressive,” says Richards, enabling his team to serve its needs with fewer switches. “That just further reduces our costs, but also reduces our space required and number of devices we have to look after in the field.”

Brock speaks about how intelligent tools and platform experiences enhance and simplify operations.

Connecting and protecting

With Cisco, Nutrien has also been able to simplify how it secures connectivity. Enabling consistent delivery of services to the business and all the regions and geographies where it operates, Nutrien can enforce policy, authenticate users and endpoints, and ensure regulatory compliance using the Cisco Identify Services Engine (ISE) security platform.

“We’re leveraging Cisco ISE in a single posture across our wired and wireless solutions,” says Richards. “No matter where I travel as an employee—a branch in the middle of nowhere Saskatchewan, a facility in South America, or the office in Melbourne—I will have no issue connecting and will also have a consistent security posture that follows me wherever I go.”

In addition to early adoption of technologies like Wi-Fi 7, Nutrien has been a trailblazer in applying innovation to safeguard its workers in other ways, too. For instance, the company leverages its enhanced network connectivity to allow its boring machine operators to drive the equipment remotely—miles away, above ground in a room where monitors provide greater visibility of everything that the machine is doing.

“Technology at Nutrien is no longer merely an enabling function,” says Richards. “It’s become a leading, differentiating business function that is core to our overall company.”