What’s Stopping You From Maximizing Your Precision Program?

Day 2 of the PrecisionAg® Professional Accelerator will challenge you to evaluate and improve your approach to customer value and overall program profitability.

What’s keeping your precision program from achieving maximum value to your operation, and your farmer-clients? And what can you, the precision program manager, do to improve your ability to achieve success?

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The pivotal second day of the PrecisionAg® Professional Accelerator program dives deep into these issues, driven by Dr. Michael Boehlje of Purdue University. A full day of presentations, case studies, and group exercises are designed to help you move through a clear understanding of the challenges toward real ideas for improving your program.

The program is being held June 26-28 at the Swiftel Center near the campus of South Dakota State University in Brookings, SD.

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The day starts with a discussion of the precision program and its role in modern farming production, which Boehlje relates more closely to traditional manufacturing. “We describe growing crops through precision production as ‘biological manufacturing,’ or the interface between nutritional technology, agronomics, and the various sensing, monitoring, and measuring technologies being utilized in crop production,” he says. “It’s how we manage the systems and intervene in real time to control and enhance the growth process.”

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Boehlje will then provide some real-world context for this concept via a case study and interview with the progressive, South Dakota-based cooperative Agtegra. “This will start us down the road of developing a business model that creates and captures value for both the farmer-customer and the ag retailer,” says Boehlje.

Next, Boehlje will guide attendees through the process of how to evaluate and replicate best practices for improving a precision program. “There must be the recognition that a precision ag program is not just a cost center, or something you build into the existing cost structure,” says Boehlje. “There needs to be direct and indirect revenue streams from service fees or additional product sales, as well as costs. We will think strategically about the market and customer needs and how to best organize the business to meet and exceed customers’ expectations in getting the job done that he/she has hired us to do. Through group discussion and individual exercises, Boehlje will work to get attendees to think about individualized solutions for each attendee’s businesses.

The day’s work will focus on how to create a more effective precision program by creating a clear value proposition for customers, and a profit center for the retailer. A second case study from Farmers Cooperative, Martel, NE, will close out the day.  “Attendees will work through a questionnaire that explores key questions they need to answer about their precision programs: What makes customers happy? What problems are their customers trying to solve? What is preventing them from getting the job done themselves, making them want to hire you? What kind of product and service offerings would be useful to relieve those pains and create business gains for you?  We really want attendees to focus on sitting at the customer’s side of the desk and thinking about the business from their perspective. They must figure out what the customer needs, and whether they have the technology and staff to deliver.”

For the full agenda and registration information, visit www.precisionagaccelerator.com.

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