Technology in Ag Retail

Tim Hammerich

News Reporter

Agriculture has long been a business of relationships. In a lot of ways that’s still the case. But technology is also changing the expectations many farmers have of the advisors and salespeople they work with.

Larson… “The little bit of time that we get in front of a grower, we have to maximize it. It's not the old days where he show up on the farm and you get an hour to talk and find out about their whole operation. They don't have time for that anymore. So when we show up at a farm, we have to have our ducks in a row. We have to have good information and we need to be efficient about it.”

That’s Matt Larson, sales manager for CHS in Holdredge, Nebraska. He says the handshake and relationship is still important, but so is data and technology.

Larson… “The big thing is just how you present data or information to a grower. There's a selling season for everything or a time that we go out and pitch an idea or new things to a grower. It's a results first industry now. They want to know, okay, where have you tried it? How local is it? Where's the hard data? And where does that come from? The old days of hey, try this product and take it out of the back of my pickup and dump it in their planter and then throw a flag. And then we meet it at the end of the year and find the flag and then harvest it and then talk about that data. Those days are kind of gone. So that's the biggest change is just using those platforms efficiently.”

Larson utilizes digital tools that allow him to offer more data-driven insights to his farmer customers.