The week of June 10, Farm Journal is celebrating the next generation of American agriculture. Our goal is to encourage you to plan for the future and cultivate multigenerational success through the transfer of skills and knowledge. Think tomorrow, act today to align your asset, resource and financial legacy.
Ask Garrett Asmus about his role at the family owned and led Asmus Farm Supply, Inc. (AFS), and the third generation leader will say, “I’m a fireman. People come to me, and I help fix the problems.”
The can-do, solutions-oriented attitude is part of what’s shaping the up and coming wave of leaders of ag retail. Simultaneously, as farmer needs are evolving, technology is advancing, and business dynamics change, ag retail businesses and the leaders who are behind them are responding and trying to anticipate what will lead to their future success.
Recognize the Change
One front on which ag retail is changing is its scale. For example in 2020, GreenPoint Ag increased its footprint across 10 states.
“The merger brought about a scale that required us to look at our processes,” says Sara Williams, director of marketing and communications. “From our customer management, data management, and how to get by from day to day, it was just so much more.”
She shares, “What hasn’t changed is we didn’t lose our values and how we treat our customers. We recognize that if they aren’t successful we aren’t doing it right. It means we treat them as partners. We’ve seen how you can go so much further when you open up to one another and have deep conversation about what is important to the customer.”
Williams says the team has adopted a growth mindset to pursue excellence and deliver an incredible customer experience.
The second front of change is the farmer customers’ expectations.
“Ag retailers are recognizing the changes at the farm gate and need to be willing to adapt to the difference in how farmers want to do business,” says Jason Weirich, executive vice president of operations for MFA.
For MFA, and many other retailers, that has led to thinking about doing more business digitally and leaning into the business interactions and transactions taking place from mobile phones rather than paper.
“Customers will always like to do business the way they want to do business, but we’ve recognized that means more interaction digitally,” Weirich says. “We’ve hung our hat on being service-oriented, and our people are our competitive advantage. The digitization allows us to share even better decisions than in the past and better manage our relationships.”
Who Is the Future Customer?
Industry consultant Brad Oelmann emphasizes how business leaders need to provide vision.
Specific to ag retail, he says, “the grower keeps evolving in what they are looking for and technology changes will impact value propositions dramatically, so sorting through all that will be an important puzzle to figure out.”
With the two fronts of change, internal and external, the importance of ag retailers understanding their value proposition and how it relates to customers directs their future.
At AFS, customer segmentation revealed opportunities, focused efforts and reinforced the business model.
“We didn’t stop at identifying four customer segments; I took it one step further. In addition to their segmentation, agronomists rated customers on information and partnership 1 to 10, but they excluded 5 so no one could just be neutral to either,” Asmus says.
This gave a clear assignment in the quadrants measurement by two axes: willingness to partner and eagerness for information.
“When new products come out, we know who to approach based on their buying habits, and we target our outreach in a way for the biggest benefit to the farmer,” he says.
A key benefit to the customer segmentation is the focus it provides to staff and the business.
“It helps our agronomists plan. If a customer is a price shopper, it helps the agronomist to provide a price list to the customer and then ask how the farmer wants to proceed. It saves our agronomists time because it helps the farmer inform how we approach them,” Asmus says.
For the business strategy, it has given clarity for the present and future. As another example, it has streamlined efforts in finding customers to trial new products.
“Our biggest segment is the informed collaborators. That’s where we shine,” Asmus says.
He’s bullish on the need of agronomic advisers. AFS has launched its own customer portal, which helps illustrate how business can be augmented with technology, but expertise and customization are paramount.
“We aren’t selling toasters and toothbrushes,” Asmus says. “Your toothbrush doesn’t come with a booklet of instructions because you don’t need a book of instructions. With herbicides, for example, you need to know the weeds you are targeting, if you have resistance, the temperature for storage, application instructions and rates.”
Weirich says the future of the business is providing information and services at each customer’s doorstep.
“We want to enable customers to do business outside of the normal hours,” Weirich says. “It’s about meeting their needs in the way they want them to be met.”
And while it’s meeting customers where they are, it’s also providing novel and meaningful services.
Williams summarizes those as “services that take the monkeys off their backs, and insights that give them efficiency in operations.”
At GreenPoint, they are analyzing what it means for them to approach farmers differently based on behavior and mindset related needs.
“We know we will be changing our customer experience to improve it. In the consumer services world, that industry is seeing a shift from customization to personalization. Personalization anticipates what the customer needs and wants and doesn’t require the customer to lift a finger in the process. To do that, we have to spend time understanding our farmers’ entire purchase process, in-season considerations, and how they are feeling throughout the season,” she says.
Additionally, Williams shares how customer expectations about company organized events have changed.
“Farming is full of entrepreneurs, and sometimes it can be lonely in entrepreneurship if you aren’t connected with others who are doing it,” she says. “We saw 10 years ago farmers wanted events with insights and networking, but now we are acting on it.”
Williams has an outlook of ag retailers playing critical roles in times of change for farmers. She points to USDA ag census data showing the average age of farmer is 58, but there are more farmers over 65 than under 44. Particularly as land changes hands, ag retailers can bridge the gap.
“When farmers pick up new land they may not have access to the knowledge the previous farmer had. Whoever does farm the land, they need insights and they will need them quickly. They can’t wait 10 years to build up soil data. So we can be there to provide the diagnostic tools to make the best decisions in real-time,” she says.
Embrace The Analytics
What emboldens these changes and supports the decisions? The three next-gen leaders answer the same way: analytics from data.
“The biggest change I’ve seen since joining ag retail full time in 2016 is the exploration of the use of different data,” Asmus says. “The company and farmers have been collecting data but didn’t know it would amount to what it has. We’ve been able to take data and benefit our business and benefit our farmers in making us more efficient.”
One internal example he shares is their investment in automated filling systems for crop protection products.
“I make decisions off facts, not feeling,” Asmus says. “I ran a report of all tanks we fill. I could break it down by day, how many products we fill, and how many times we fill those products. Then I used that to calculate even if we were off 1% or 5% with manual filling, what would that dollar amount be.”
MFA is also doubling down on making data-driven decisions.
“We need to put the data we have to work — in our business and for our farmers. It’s up to us to decipher what products add value,” Weirich says.
What Is To Come?
Today, stacking up technology wins is becoming standard practice.
One example of how technology alleviates a significant pain point is replacing paper statements with digital access. Williams and the team at GreenPoint Ag have acknowledged the value of time.
“Farmers can see their statement the first day it’s ready, and they don’t have to wait two weeks or more for the mail,” she says. “It should be industry standard for us as retailers to give farmers visibility to their own data, information, and purchase history in real-time.”
A technology they are keeping their eye on for how it can augment the customer relationship is artificial intelligence (AI).
“With a growth mindset, you have to be open minded. When we fail, we have to fail fast, and then get up and grow forward. With the example of AI, if we aren’t leaning into how it can benefit our customers and improve our processes, then we’ll become stagnant and later, irrelevant,” she says. She adds for other retailers to, “Fix your processes. Fix your data. Challenge your bias in thinking that you know your customers and what they expect from you. Involve them in your future planning.”
Asmus shares the example of having access to real-time inventory is now irreplaceable.
“Anywhere in the world at any time, I can open my phone and see what we have on order, what’s in the warehouse, what customers have ordered, and what inventory customers need to pickup,” he says.
Access to information and visibility into the business is table stakes with the changing grower demands. As Weirich highlights, farmers are planting crops faster and harvesting them in shorter time frames.
“We have to meet their demands. That means modern facilities, greater transparency, good communication, and being easy to do business with,” he says. “In the near future, I don’t think our members will be tied to a location or a store. They will access information differently, and while we’ll still come on their farm and have the personal relationship, it won’t be tied to a storefront.”
With an eye on the future and a heart for ag retail’s legacy, Williams says: “We will see big change, but I think we can both honor the legacy the current and previous generations have built, spending time learning from their experience as much as we can in the meantime, and put our own fingerprint on what the future looks like.”
