Right Now: Top of Mind Challenges for Ag Retail Leaders
A recent panel of four agribusiness leaders at the 2022 Council of Producers and Distributors of Agrotechnology Adjuvant and Inerts Conference revealed the top challenges for the ag retail business in the next 10 years.
All four companies have impressive footprints and legacies, which serve as their foundation and springboards for growth.
As Troy Bolt, Simpot, vice president and general manager, says the company’s founder J.R. Simplot set the company’s path for entrepreneurship with his approach of taking issues and problems and turning them into solutions.
As such, Bolt outlined four challenges:
- People. “How do we continue to attract people into agriculture?” he says.
- Data management and digital tools. “There's been a lot of sizzle in the space. But we haven't created a lot of value. This is where we use our farms as pilots. How do we bring new tools to make better decisions and do more efficiently,” Bolt says.
- Global farmer relevance. “How do we continue to work with our grower customers to make sure that they can compete on a global basis,” he says.
- Sustainable agriculture. “How do we grow more with less,” he questions. “For example, how do we use less water, especially in California with the significant drought that we're facing right now.”
Adding his perspective, Brett Bruggeman, Winfield United president, shared five imperatives he sees for the sector.
1. Align the channel.
Bruggeman says their business starts with the customer, and he’s a believer in segmentation as such identifying customers by appetite to growth, transparency with data, and willingness to advocate.
2. Accelerate innovation.
He says the pace of new product development is an area to continue to focus on and shared WinField United launched 100 new products last year.
3. Drive digital.
“With digital I think we are finding three pain points: labor, supply chain efficiency, and decision ag. That's where we're focusing all of our resources,” he says.
4. Optimized supply chain.
"Instead of putting all of our calories into a reactive hustle, we put it more into a proactive hustle. We're forecasting so we have visibility into the system to where inventory is. And last year we took a million miles out of our supply chain,” Bruggeman shares.
5. Evolve our model.
“We're 100 years old, and we’ve got a lot of work to do yet. It's like owning a farm–we’ve got to have continuous improvement every day,” he says.
Keeping close to the customer is a driving statement for Nutrien in more ways than one, says Jeff Tarsi, president for global retail of nutrien ag solutions.
“We don’t have a business if we don’t have a customer,” he says.
With 900 retail locations and 28,000 employees globally, Tarsi says the company has a customer-centric value proposition.
Tarsi outlines ways Nutrien is staying close to customers:
- employ more and more technology into those into retail branches.
- building bigger facilities that we can get product in and product out of much more rapidly
- growing a footprint to serve larger-scale farmers who are consolidating
“I always ask the question, are we building this because it's neat to build? Are we building this because it's something that one of our customers needs to produce more efficiently; does the customer see value in what we're doing?” Tarsi says.
He adds, “We try to focus ourselves on solution selling. And when I look at our platform today, and it amazes me from where I started in this business 37 years ago. Our platform as a retailer is much broader today than it's ever been beforeؘ–chemical, seed, fertilizer—and now add digital to that.”
Eric Cowling, Helena, president and CEO shares how some things in ag retail are indeed changing—and changing rapidly—however, some things have stayed the same. Helena recently marked its 65 year anniversary.
“All of our customers, from a producer standpoint, still rely on one thing. They have to make yields,” he says.
When thinking about the past two years, he cautions his team to measure improvements in light of the strong commodity markets and the challenges in logistics.
“There's a lot of other challenges that we've never had to deal with. Supply challenges, production forecast, managing active ingredients closer than we've ever had to manage. We’re using a different thought process in many situations that I’ve never experienced before,” Cowling shares.
He says Helena will stay rooted and invest in partnerships–partnerships with customers and partnerships in supply.
