Soothe Customer Pain, Grow Your Business

In the movie classic Field of Dreams, Iowa farmer Ray Kinsella follows a voice no one else can hear with memorable results. Among the messages he receives: “Ease his pain.” That’s not a bad mantra for ag businesses to keep in mind as we close out the 2016 production season. The company that does the best job of making life easier for their customers will likely gain more of them next year. Word travels fast in the country.

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Nebraska Co-op Employees go Above and Beyond to Help a Fellow Employee

At VistaComm we serve a lot of clients who work and live in rural America. In helping our agribusiness clients market and communicate with their customers we come across all kinds of amazing stories of how these cooperatives and ag retailers are helping people in their communities. We recently published Farmers Ranchers Cooperative’s newsletter which contained one of those great stories about how co-op employees came together to help a fellow co-worker in his greatest time of need, and we had to share.

Read the exerpt below, or view the full newsletter by clicking here.

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Future of farming: Driverless tractors, ag robots

Within the next decade, farming as we know it is expected to be revolutionized by the use of self-driving tractors and robots that can perform time-consuming tasks now done by humans.
Sales of major farm machinery have been in a continued slump amid weak prices for key crops such as corn and soybeans, but the ever-present need to control farm costs and increase output will eventually drive farmers to adopt autonomous technologies.

"They (farmers) are a pretty cautious bunch, which is understandable," said Kraig Schulz, co-founder and CEO of Autonomous Tractor Corp., a small private company based in Minnesota that is developing AutoDrive technology for tractors. Its technology is aimed at turning existing tractors into semi-autonomous machines.

Experts say the first wave of autonomous tech in ag will go primarily to higher-value crops, such as tree nuts, vineyards and fresh produce. Also, some suggest that the big tractors could be replaced with self-propelled autonomous implements, such as sprayers in row crops, orchards and vineyards or with other robotic equipment for other specific tasks on the farm.

All told, Goldman Sachs predicts farm technologies could become a $240 billion market opportunity for ag suppliers, with smaller driverless tractors a $45 billion market on its own. Tens of billions could be spent on advanced tech for major farm uses such as precision fertilizer, planting, spraying and irrigation, Goldman predicts.

Rising costs for farm labor and falling costs for self-driving technology also will provide further catalysts for the shift.

On Monday, California Gov. Jerry Brown signed into law a bill giving farm workers in the state — the nation's largest agricultural producer — historic overtime pay.

"This is going to have a serious effect on farming out in California," said Schulz, who expects rising labor costs to be an opportunity for autonomous and even semi-autonomous equipment to replace some of the human labor needed in farming.

Read the article here: http://www.cnbc.com/2016/09/16/future-of-farming-driverless-tractors-ag-robots.html