
Growers Edge, Compeer Financial, and Evergreen Bank Group Partner to Deliver Rapid Input Financing Offering
Faced with low profit margins and high interest rates, agricultural retailers and manufacturers have embraced in-house input financing programs to increase wallet share and better serve their grower customers. In-house input financing helps retailers and manufacturers retain sales opportunities and valuable data, unlike other lines of credit (like local operating loans), which can be used elsewhere.
Together, Compeer Financial, Evergreen Bank Group and Growers Edge provide funding liquidity and a partner branded SaaS platform that simplifies the application, credit decisioning, and loan management process. By empowering agricultural retailers and manufacturers to provide growers with instant financing decisions at competitive rates, the partnership helps growers manage risk and defer payment on new, innovative crop inputs.
'Given the current state of the ag economy, input financing is a powerful sales tool,' said Andy Flores, Business Development Director at Growers Edge. 'Our customer agronomists report that financing conversations are often initiated by growers. They're willing to try new inputs, but they need their retailer partners to help mitigate the risk.'
Aligned in their missions of supporting rural communities, Compeer Financial, Evergreen Bank Group and Growers Edge will also partner in the development of other financial products and new digital tools that help growers maximize output, achieve peace of mind and secure their economic futures.
'This partnership brings financing options to farmers when and where they need it,' said Kelly Miller, Director of AgTech at Compeer Financial. 'Growers Edge and Evergreen Bank Group understand the importance of making it easier for clients to do business in their local communities and Compeer Financial is proud to provide a cutting-edge option to do just that.'
The landmark partnership follows a series of major achievements for Growers Edge. In addition to serving four of the top ten largest retailers in the country with the Crop Plan Warranty, Growers Edge has partnered with organizations like Nutrien, PepsiCo, Mondelez and Helena Agri-Enterprises to boost sustainable agriculture practices.
In 2024, Growers Edge acquired AQUAOSO Technologies, which offers its services under the Agcor brand and provides mapping, data, and analytics software for agricultural lenders, and expanded its farmland valuation tool to cover more than 144 million acres of land across nine states. Earlier this year, Growers Edge announced it protected over 1 million acres of American farmland from downside risk through its crop plan warranty program.
To request an input financing platform demo from Growers Edge and request a term sheet, go demo at Growers Edge.
About Growers Edge
Growers Edge provides modern financial products and data-driven tools that help forward-thinking agriculture retailers, manufacturers, and lenders reduce their growers' risks and costs when adopting newer innovative solutions and practices. The company's crop plan warranties and input financing solutions are trusted by dozens of retailers and manufacturers to assist hundreds of growers affordably purchase their products and guarantee yields on over one million acres of cropland.
About Compeer Financial
Compeer Financial is a member-owned Farm Credit cooperative serving and supporting agriculture and rural communities. The $33.1 billion organization provides loans, leases, risk management and other financial services throughout 144 counties in Illinois, Minnesota and Wisconsin. Based in the Upper Midwest, Compeer Financial exists to champion the hopes and dreams of rural America, while providing personalized service and expertise to clients and the agriculture industry.
About Evergreen Bank Group
Founded in 2007 and headquartered in Oak Brook, IL, Evergreen Bank Group is a leading tech-savvy community bank serving the greater Chicago area and beyond. In addition to its retail and commercial banking services, Evergreen is a national leader in niche lending markets, including collector car, powersports, and manufactured housing loans. With a focus on delivering exceptional customer experiences through innovative digital platforms, Evergreen is redefining community banking for the modern era.
Hashtags

Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles


New York Post
a minute ago
- New York Post
Trump's war on ‘woke AI' is just Step 1: now we must fight the ‘monster' within
President Donald Trump has identified a real problem: artificial intelligence systems are exhibiting an undeniable political slant. His administration's new AI action plan, released Wednesday, promises to eliminate 'ideological bias' from American AI. Silicon Valley engineers do lean left, and they've built their AI systems to reflect progressive values. The results have been embarrassing for everyone. Advertisement When Google's Gemini generated black Founding Fathers and racially diverse Nazis, the company became a laughingstock — and when Elon Musk's 'anti-woke' Grok started praising Hitler, it proved the same point. Whether you're trying to program woke or anti-woke tendencies, these systems interpret your instructions in unpredictable ways that humiliate their creators. Advertisement In this way, both Google and Musk discovered the same terrifying truth: AI developers can't even get their systems to implement their own political goals correctly. The engineers at Google desperately tried to prevent exactly the outputs that made them a viral punchline. It happened anyway. The problem is not that any group has succeeded in controlling these systems; the problem is that no one has — because no one knows how to. Trump's anticipated executive order targeting 'woke AI' recognizes something important. He sees that biased AI is unreliable AI, and he's absolutely right to demand better. Advertisement But the long-term solution isn't swapping a woke mask for a MAGA one. We have to rip off the mask entirely, and learn to shape what's underneath. This is what Silicon Valley doesn't want Washington to understand: These systems are black boxes at their core. Engineers try to instill certain values through training. But how those values manifest emerges unpredictably from neural networks so complex their creators can't trace the logic. Advertisement Some AI researchers call these systems 'Shoggoths,' after a shapeless monster conjured by horror writer HP Lovecraft — an alien intelligence wearing a thin mask of helpfulness. That mask slips sometimes. We call it 'hallucination' when AI confidently states falsehoods, and we call it 'bias' when it reveals disturbing preferences. But these aren't mere bugs in code. They're glimpses of the real features beneath models' superficial post-training. Consider what happened when researchers at Palisade tested OpenAI's latest model. In controlled tests, they gave it a shutdown script—a kill switch for safety. In 79 out of 100 trials, the AI rewrote its own code to disable the shutdown. No one taught it to value self-preservation; that emerged spontaneously, from training. Get opinions and commentary from our columnists Subscribe to our daily Post Opinion newsletter! Thanks for signing up! Enter your email address Please provide a valid email address. By clicking above you agree to the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. Never miss a story. Check out more newsletters Advertisement The real crisis is that the same black-box process creating unwanted political bias also creates unwanted survival instincts, deceptive capabilities, and goal-seeking behaviors that AI engineers never intended. The wokeness Trump is upset about is just the canary in the coal mine. You can paint over that with a patriotic veneer just as easily as with a progressive one. The alien underneath remains unchanged — and uncontrolled. And that's a national security threat, because China isn't wasting time debating whether its AI is too woke, but racing to understand and harness these systems through a multi-billion-dollar AI control fund. Advertisement While we're fighting culture wars over chatbot outputs, Beijing is attacking the core problem: alignment — that is, how to shape not just what AI says, but what it values. The administration's action plan acknowledges 'the inner workings of frontier AI systems are poorly understood,' a crucial first step. But it doesn't connect the dots: The best way to 'accelerate AI innovation' isn't just by removing barriers — it's by solving alignment itself. Advertisement Without understanding these systems, we can't reliably deploy them for defense, health care or any high-stakes application. Alignment research will solve the wokeness problem by giving us tools to shape AI values and behaviors, not just slap shallow filters on top. Simultaneously, alignment will solve the deeper problems of systems that deceive us, resist shutdown or pursue goals we never intended. An alignment breakthrough called reinforcement learning from human feedback, or RLHF, is what transformed useless AI into ChatGPT, unlocking trillions in value. Advertisement But RLHF was just the beginning. We need new techniques that don't just make AI helpful, but make it genuinely understand and internalize American values at its core. This means funding research to open the black box and understand how these alien systems form their goals and values at Manhattan Project scale, not as a side project. The wokeness Trump has identified is a warning shot, proof we're building artificial minds we can't control with values we didn't choose and goals we can't predict. Today it's diverse Nazis — tomorrow it could be self-preserving systems in charge of our infrastructure, defense networks and economy. The choice is stark: Take the uncontrollable alien and dress it in MAGA colors, or invest in understanding these systems deeply enough to shape their core values. We must make AI not just politically neutral, but fundamentally aligned with American interests. Whether American AI is woke or based misses the basic question: Is it recognizably American at all? We need to invest now to ensure that it is. Judd Rosenblatt runs the AI consulting company AE Studio, which invests its profits in alignment research.


Gizmodo
a minute ago
- Gizmodo
Is This the End of Google As We Know It?
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman arrived in Washington this week with a carefully crafted message for policymakers: Artificial intelligence is already boosting productivity for millions of Americans, and his company intends to keep it 'democratic' by putting it in everyone's hands. As the capital buzzes with debates over AI regulation, Altman is positioning OpenAI not as a disruptor to be feared, but as an engine for universal progress. 'It's not about stopping disruption, but putting it into people's hands so they have the opportunity to benefit,' a source familiar with Altman's thinking told Axios. The timing of this pitch could not be more strategic. ChatGPT is now handling a staggering 2.5 billion prompts every day, with 330 million daily queries coming from the U.S. alone, OpenAI told Axios. Just eight months ago, that figure was a billion daily prompts. For perspective, Google processes an estimated 14 to 16 billion daily searches. This means that in less than two years, OpenAI's conversational AI has grown to handle a volume equivalent to one sixth of the world's largest search engine. For decades, search meant one thing: 'Google it.' A new analysis by marketing researcher Rand Fishkin of Datos shows just how ingrained this behavior has been. In 2024, the average active American desktop user performed 126 unique Google searches a month. That includes everything from navigational queries like 'Facebook login' to shopping, news, and local lookups. But AI tools like ChatGPT are starting to chip away at that habit, and not just for power users. A small but growing cohort is using AI as a direct replacement for search engines, asking it to find, summarize, or create answers instead of scanning a list of blue links. Fishkin notes that while most users have not ditched Google yet, the threat is real enough that Google has defensively rolled out its own AI powered 'Search Generative Experience' and even a 'Web' tab for users who still prefer traditional links. Google's core business is search advertising, which generated $175 billion in revenue last year, accounting for more than half of its total $307 billion in revenue. If even a fraction of high value searches migrate to ChatGPT, Google's economic engine faces a significant long term risk. The company is spending billions to integrate its own Gemini AI into search, but that strategy carries two major dilemmas: Altman's Washington trip is about more than bragging rights. He is pitching a third path between the 'AI will take your job' doomers and the 'AI will save the world' optimists. His economic case is that AI is a productivity driver that should be broadly accessible, not a tool hoarded by a handful of corporations or governments. OpenAI is betting that ChatGPT will evolve from a curiosity into a daily utility that users consult for work, shopping, and creativity. In Altman's words, the goal is to build a 'brain for the world' with intelligence that is 'too cheap to meter.' The fight between ChatGPT and Google could fundamentally change how we experience the web. For consumers: You may get faster, more conversational answers, but at the cost of seeing fewer diverse links and perspectives. AI could centralize information power even more than search engines did. For creators and businesses: Google's dominance once meant optimizing for a single algorithm. AI driven search means content could be summarized and stripped of attribution unless strong guardrails are built in. That is a looming threat to publishers already fighting for traffic. For society: Altman argues democratization is key, asking, it's who gets how much of a slice of the economic pie? But AI also raises the risk of misinformation, bias, and greater economic concentration in fewer hands. We may be watching the first major shift in online behavior since the smartphone. Fishkin remains skeptical that AI will replace Google for most people anytime soon, but he admits the early adopters are showing what is possible. If ChatGPT can handle one sixth of Google's volume today, what happens when AI native search is built into our phones, cars, and voice assistants? Google is not going away, but its once unassailable dominance is under pressure for the first time since the days of Yahoo and AltaVista. The fight for the future of search is about whether information online remains open and distributed, or collapses into a handful of powerful AI driven platforms.


USA Today
a minute ago
- USA Today
Trump says he expects $20 million worth of ads, programs from '60 Minutes' settlement
WASHINGTON ― President Donald Trump said he expects to receive $20 million in advertising and programming from Paramount, the parent company of CBS, as part of a side deal connected to the company's $16 million settlement with him. Trump, in a post on his social media app Truth Social, said he received the $16 million payment on July 22, three weeks after Paramount agreed to settle a Trump lawsuit that claimed the CBS news program "60 Minutes" deceptively edited an interview with Democratic nominee Kamala Harris in the 2024 election. "We also anticipate receiving $20 Million Dollars more from the new Owners, in Advertising, PSAs, or similar Programming, for a total of over $36 Million Dollars," Trump said. "This is another in a long line of VICTORIES over the Fake News Media, who we are holding to account for their widespread fraud and deceit." He added that other the news media is "ON NOTICE that the days of them being allowed to deceive the American People are OVER. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!" Paramount, asked about Trump's claim of an additional $20 million in promised advertising and programs, pointed USA TODAY to a July 2 statement in which the company disputed the assertion. More: Paramount agrees to pay $16M to settle Trump lawsuit over '60 Minutes' interview "Contrary to some news reports or media speculation, Paramount's settlement with President Trump does not include PSAs or anything related to PSAs," the company said. "Paramount has no knowledge of any promises or commitments made to President Trump other than those set forth in the settlement proposed by the mediator and accepted by the parties." In his lawsuit, Trump alleged CBS's editing of the Harris interview violated the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices-Consumer Protection Act, which makes it illegal to use false, misleading, or deceptive ads in commerce. Media advocacy groups have warned Trump's novel use of such laws against news outlets could circumvent legal protections for the press, which can only be held liable for defamation against public figures if they report something they knew or should have known was false. Paramount's settlement with Trump has drawn criticism from Democrats and other Trump critics, who have noted that it comes as Paramount is seeking the U.S. Federal Communications Commission's approval for an $8.4 billion merger with Skydance Media. More: Trump says he 'absolutely loves' that CBS canceled Stephen Colbert's 'Late Show' Democrats have also questioned the timing of CBS' recent cancellation of "The Late Show With Stephen Colbert," who has been an outspoken critic of Trump. Sens. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., Ron Wyden., D-Ore., and Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., sent Skydance Media CEO David Ellison a July 21 letter that posed several questions including whether the company has any arrangements with Trump to provide " compensation, advertising, or promotional activities" that assist the president, his family, his future presidential library or other administration officials. "We write with questions about Skydance Media's reported secret side deal with President Trumpthat appears to be connected to Paramount Global's efforts to settle President Trump's lawsuitagainst CBS and secure approval for its mega-merger with Skydance," the senators said. Paramount has denied the claim, saying the lawsuit is "completely separate from, and unrelated to, the Skydance transaction and the FCC approval process." Contributing: Reuters Reach Joey Garrison on X @joeygarrison.