Why It’s Time for Ag Retail to Accelerate Digital Offerings to Meet Growing Demand
Disruption to the supply chain during the pandemic has highlighted the need for better ways of working, writes Scott Cogdill at CropLife. It has been a cross-industry wake up call to the value of digital, which has provided a lifeline to many sectors. However, this shift shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise, COVID has merely accelerated long-term trends. In the case of agriculture, this evolution had been progressing far too slowly.
However, necessity breeds change. Many of us in the field, myself included, came to the same realization: Could we work faster and more efficiently with remote, rather than face-to-face, interactions with retailers?
You can now manage your life almost entirely from a smartphone. I can monitor my personal finances, order ingredients to make delicious dinners, and communicate instantly with anyone through many communication channels — all with a swipe and a click. It’s wonderful. But you’d be hard pressed to run an agricultural business from your device.
This matters because growers’ digital expectations are shaped by their consumer experiences. However, the current mishmash of disconnected systems does not — generally — live up to these high standards.
MORE BY CROPLIFE
2024 Annual CropLife Ag Tech Awards of Excellence — Nominations Are Now Open
The Urgency of Rapid and Accurate In-Field Testing to Tackle Crop Diseases
This puts an onus on those players to address any comparative shortcomings that have been thrown into sharp detail over the past year. Digitalization will ultimately impact ag retailers the most as they currently focus on face-to-face relationships to build trust. But they also stand to gain the most from a shift to a digital mindset.
Grower Demands Are Shifting
From football scores to fact-checking even the most obscure facts on Wikipedia, we come to expect instant information when we need it. However, growers typically need to access multiple channels to pull together the background detail they need to make informed financial and agronomic decisions.
A fragmented industry that relies heavily on outdated, and often incompatible, systems has meant it isn’t easy or quick to access this information. The issue for the retailer, as pinpointed by a McKinsey report, is that customer data is often scattered across multiple on- and offline systems.
Interoperability (or the lack of it) is the elephant in the room that can no longer be ignored. To be recognized as a reliable partner to growers, ag retailers will increasingly need to have oversight of all the information their customers need as and when they need it. Simply put, it needs to be aggregated and systems need to communicate through a single platform.
Subscribe Today For
