U.S.: Ag Retail Distribution Feels Pressure from New Concerns
There’s a famous Chinese curse that’s rather straightforward when it comes the events of the day: “May you live in interesting times.” In other words, this statement hopes listeners will be facing myriad new challenges and opportunities whenever in time they happen to be vs. being stuck in some kind of unchanging, stagnant daily/yearly routine, writes Eric Sfiligoj at CropLife.
But it’s doubtful, however, that the ancient Chinese philosophers that gave birth to this curse could have imagined how it might apply to the current year the world is living through in 2020. In fact, referring to 2020 as “interesting” in the context of the many societal and business changes that have occurred seems like a gross understatement.
“I think I speak for many when I say the world has never seen a year like 2020 in terms of disruption,” says John Oster, Sales Specialist at The Morral Companies, Morral, OH. “After everything the agricultural industry went through during 2019 – with extreme weather and trade issues, for instance – I wouldn’t have thought 2020 could be more disruptive. But here we are.”
And in truth, the ag retail distribution channel was already undergoing some extreme challenges when it came to marketplace dynamics. This is why CropLife® magazine first started covering this area as the primary focus of our October issues a few years ago.
“We are definitely in a period of change in the market,” said Dave Coppess, Executive Vice President of Sales and Marketing for Heartland Co-op, West Des Moines, IA, back in the October 2017 edition of CropLife (our first look at this important topic). “There are new business models beginning to pop up, and they are threatening to destroy or at least radically alter the old ones.”
A few years later in 2019, Steve Rao, CEO of Farm Market iD, echoed a similar thought to Coppess. “The retailer part of agriculture will probably change dramatically in the next few years,” said Rao. “For the most part, this part of the market has a business model that hasn’t changed for many, many decades. But it will probably need to [do so] to survive going forward.”
And the Survey Says . . .
As we’ve done during the past four years now, CropLife magazine is once again taking an in-depth look at the State of Retail Distribution. We detail how the marketplace is addressing such challenges as e-commerce and some examples of distribution changes that have occurred outside the U.S. in other countries around the globe that might foreshadow similar shifts in the domestic market as well. But first, like we did in this November 2019 article, let’s start with some opinions from the readers themselves, courtesy of the 2nd annual State of Retail Distribution survey.
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