The State of Ag Retail Distribution is Still Changing
For those who business in the agricultural marketplace, change is an almost constant variable. Year in and year out, ag retailers and their grower-customers must deal with such changes as weather patterns bringing too much heat or moisture, soil conditions, insect/weed/disease pressures, and even unanticipated trade environments. And through it all, ag retailers and their grower-customers are expected to deliver crop inputs, custom application services, and crops to a waiting food producer/consumer driven end market.
With this in mind, for the past two years now, CropLife has looked at how all these converging factors have begun changing the way ag retailers conduct their business. In fact, in October 2017 – the first time that looked at this topic in-depth – Dave Coppess, Executive Vice President of Sales and Marketing for Heartland Co-op, West Des Moines, IA, made this observation about the ag retail space: “We are definitely in a period of change in the market. There are new business models beginning to pop up, and they are threatening to destroy or at least radically alter the old ones.”
Now compare this comment with one made this past August at a meeting with CropLife and Steve Rao, CEO of Farm Market iD, discussing the ag retail distribution market. “The retailer part of agriculture will probably change dramatically in the next few years,” said Rao. “For the most part, this part of the market has a business model that haven’t changed for many, many decades. But it will probably need to to survive going forward.”
To kick off this year’s coverage of this topic, we thought it might be nice to gauge how the overall marketplace feels about the changes currently taking place in the ag retail space. Therefore, this past August, we sent out an email survey to our readers, asking some of the questions readers have posed to us over the course of the past two years’ worth of stories we’ve featured online. As always, some of this feedback was surprising (see charts in slideshow above).
Click Here to read more.
With this in mind, for the past two years now, CropLife has looked at how all these converging factors have begun changing the way ag retailers conduct their business. In fact, in October 2017 – the first time that looked at this topic in-depth – Dave Coppess, Executive Vice President of Sales and Marketing for Heartland Co-op, West Des Moines, IA, made this observation about the ag retail space: “We are definitely in a period of change in the market. There are new business models beginning to pop up, and they are threatening to destroy or at least radically alter the old ones.”
Now compare this comment with one made this past August at a meeting with CropLife and Steve Rao, CEO of Farm Market iD, discussing the ag retail distribution market. “The retailer part of agriculture will probably change dramatically in the next few years,” said Rao. “For the most part, this part of the market has a business model that haven’t changed for many, many decades. But it will probably need to to survive going forward.”
To kick off this year’s coverage of this topic, we thought it might be nice to gauge how the overall marketplace feels about the changes currently taking place in the ag retail space. Therefore, this past August, we sent out an email survey to our readers, asking some of the questions readers have posed to us over the course of the past two years’ worth of stories we’ve featured online. As always, some of this feedback was surprising (see charts in slideshow above).
Click Here to read more.