Giving Ag Retail a Voice

20th Anniversary

Giving Ag Retail a Voice

By Paul Schrimpf, Marketing and Communications Director

Some of AgGateway’s earliest member work emerged from its segment-centric council structure, which was largely dominated by input manufacturers. Ag retail was usually in the room, but small and mid-tier organizations in particular did not have a robust voice in the process.

A solution to this imbalance was championed by Ron Farrell, then AgGateway’s President: create a council exclusively for retailers to come together, share challenges and opportunities in digital connectivity and electronic commerce, and to arrive at consensus on projects and priorities.

“Ron encouraged us to bind together and create a retail voice,” says Ann Vande Lune, Agronomy Administrator with Key Cooperative. The organization lent early leadership to the inaugural Retail Council – Key’s Brian Gates was the Council’s first chair in 2011.

One of the first recommendations to come out of the Retail Council revolved around digitization of the original seed order shipping notice. “Seed has always been a big challenge for retail,” says Vande Lune. “Frankly, it’s the market segment that everyone wrestles with, but it’s a necessary evil.” A seed number is about 40 characters long and represents a ton of critical information, from trait to seed treatment to package size to the size of the seed. Receiving this information in a digital format would save time and reduce errors to almost zero.

This first success led to several more digitized seed data initiatives that further streamlined the seed ordering and inventory process and cemented the retailer’s participation in AgGateway. The original council structure has been replaced by a more agile task-focused system for initiating and managing projects, but retailers continue to meet regularly to discuss their unique needs and interests and to recommend new initiatives.

“The relationships and bonds we formed during those early years still continue today,” says Vande Lune. “A number of the individuals who were there doing the work in the Retail Council are still with us. The value we continue to get from it is that we have a voice at AgGateway that is just as big and just as important as the large manufacturers, and no voice is bigger than any other.”