The Crossroads of Technology & Ag Retail with Margy Eckelkamp

Technology is everywhere in today’s Ag retail world. Maybe even a little too everywhere.

It can be challenging for retailers to keep up with all the new innovations, the laundry list of tools they suddenly “need” to keep their businesses running, and what new digital solutions are already coming down the pipeline.

In this Q&A, we discuss what the Ag retailer of the future looks like, with Margy Eckelkamp from Farm Journal. (Read Part 1 of our conversation, focused on the industry’s labor issues, here).

Margy has been at Farm Journal for 17 years in several roles, most of them centered on machinery, agronomy, and technology. She’s been reporting on Ag retail for the past seven years and now also leads The Scoop and Top Producer Magazine.

Today, she offers her thoughts on how Ag retailers need to adapt in the coming years, how to organize that long list of digital tools you use, and how the industry can move away from the ever-present data silos:

How should ag retailers think about technology moving forward?

We did a research project with our friends over at Aimpoint, and that research really highlighted five things the ag retailer of the future will do.

Number one is they are going to transform their business from being based on goods to services.

Number two, they are going to be supplying new inputs. I was just doing a series of interviews about the future of fertilizer. Now we have enhanced efficiency fertilizers and nitrogen stabilizers and biofertilizers. So retailers are always going to have to be open to selling new inputs.

Three, they'll have to engage digitally with their customers and suppliers.

Four, they're going to have to have a very well equipped service around data and traceability.

And then five, they have to be seen as a gateway to new technology for farmers. They have to be seen as somebody who's going to bring new ideas to the farm. Otherwise, farmers look for the information elsewhere, right?

There’s so much someone can do digitally. How do you think about organizing the digital space for retailers?

We live in a society that's full of information, so how do you then categorize all that technology? How do you make sure you have all your bases covered? I think it's really important you do your own inventory of what you are doing today. Everybody subscribes to a software and then forgets they subscribed because they end up not using it. Or everybody may buy the gadget and try it and then forget about it — but not realize they could pick up the gadget and do something completely different with it in the fall than the spring.

I think an inventory is important, and there are four categories to look at. One is around the machinery, application, GPS, autonomy, space.

I also think this whole space around remote data collection and what we're able to learn, whether it be drones or airplanes or satellites and field monitoring on that level, also in field sensors, I still think has a huge amount of potential.

And then there's the business technology: ERP accounting, digital portals, ecommerce. It's not a question of if Ag retailers will offer products in some kind of digital format for users to engage in with ordering online. It's just a question of when.

Then there's also all the innovations around agronomic technologies, whether it be soil sampling, selective spraying, or machine learning.

You talked about doing an inventory of subscriptions. What are some examples of apps or tools people aren’t using even when they’ve subscribed?

I don't know if it's an issue of things that haven't gained traction, but rather redundancies that just have not been acknowledged.

Last week I got another announcement of a co-op that's going to go through a unification study. It continues to happen where you have these businesses that have operated with their software stack. When two of them join together, that inventory process is super important so you aren't layering things on top of systems that aren't already aligned.

We had a great columnist write about this concept of technical debt. So you think you're always investing in something because it's either costing you money or you feel like you're paying for this to continue. But you're not catching up with things. And that's what was attributed to that big Southwest Airlines snafu last holiday season. Their technical debt caught up to them, and they didn't have a Plan B in place when their systems went down.

So both are important: do your inventory, eliminate the redundancies, but still keep your backup plan.

There’s this idea of data silos in the ag industry. You’ve got data at the farm gate, data at ag retail, all the way up through distribution and suppliers. It can be a real barrier to get all that in one place, and make it applicable, practical, and easy to use. How do you see that evolving? Does that problem hinder the industry and keep folks from getting the full potential out of some of these technologies?

Ag retailers need to put customers at the center of their business. And there are three distinct customer segments of farmers. There's your full service customer. They lean on their Ag retailer for a lot: recommendations, soil sampling, application. That's their relationship.

Then you have the straightforward — some folks call it bare bones– cash and carry customers. They're simply walking in, buying the input they need.

Then you've got the messy middle of the farmers that aren't completely full service and they're not really cash and carry. You also have farmers who have multiple retailer relationships.

There's been this very unstructured way of us collecting a ton of data. But it's not ever labeled, stored, processed or analyzed in exactly the same way, by exactly the same people.

We did a survey at Farm Journal this spring. We still have one-third of farmers who are not collecting data on their planter pass. So when it comes to knowing a planting date — it's a paper record, then somebody digitizes it. That planting date is a very important piece of data for all kinds of carbon opportunities that are emerging. We don't have those digital records from one-third of our farmers.

I think we have to be respectful that farmers are independent business people. They're always gonna do it their way. So for retailers, how do they structure a business to where they've identified their farmer customer segments? How do they help communicate opportunities around data and help them adopt either new ways of doing things or completely new ideas for their farm?

Read Part 1 of our conversation with Margy here, where we talk about the labor challenges that the Ag retail industry faces, how to leverage technology to overcome some of those hurdles, and how the new generation of Ag labor is embracing technological innovation.