The 2015 CropLife 100 Preview
November 5, 2015 Harvests should be largely done and grower-customers and the ag retailers that rely on them for income will have a definite idea of what kind of year 2015 turned out to be. The picture might not be a pretty one, however — at least based upon the early information being gleamed from the annual CropLife 100 survey.
Last year at this time, I wrote a column that detailed just how concerned the nation’s top ag retailers were going into the 2015 growing season. In fact, when respondents were asked to rate their level of confidence in the new year, almost half believed 2015 would not be a good year overall for ag retailer fortunes.
Luckily, at first glance, 2015 doesn’t look all that bad. According to information taken from approximately 75% of CropLife 100 survey forms already returned to our offices as I write this column, overall industry sales for the year should top the $30 billion mark — a modest 1.3% increase from the 2014 figure. Better still, about half of the returned forms show that revenues at the nation’s top ag retailers have grown from 2014 — a far cry from the 2014 survey, where a single acquisition-hungry ag retailer accounted for approximately 80% of all CropLife 100 sales gains.
Here are a couple of other quick thoughts regarding the 2015 CropLife 100 crop inputs and ag retailers taken from this year’s forms.
It’s Good To Be In Crop Protection! Crop input/service category-wise, most segments suffered some sales setbacks, similar to the pattern witnessed in 2014. Significantly, the largest category, fertilizer, looks like it will continue dropping in overall sales once the final numbers are tallied.
Despite this, the big news in 2015 is just how well the crop protection products category performed. According to the early returns, this segment will be up almost 8% from its 2014 total. This will also mark the first time the category has hit the double-digit billion dollar plateau, with total revenues in the $10 billion range.
What’s driving this growth? According to respondents, continuing weed resistance issues and 2015’s early, wet spring — which saw many crop disease pressures appear sooner than normal — kept herbicide and fungicide sales brisk for the year.
Go West, Retailer Sales. The other odd trend to note in the 2015 CropLife 100 survey so far is how geographically-oriented sales gains were. Of the 36 ag retailers that reported sales gains compared with 2014 on the early returns, better than 40% are located in the Mountain and Pacific Time Zones.
As always, some of these early numbers are subject to change once the rest of the CropLife 100 forms show up. But so far, so good!
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