This is the 15th year for the annual Precision Agriculture Survey sponsored by CropLife® magazine and Purdue University’s Center for Food and Agricultural Business. As in previous years, the survey takes a broad look at the status of precision agriculture in retail crop input dealerships across the U.S.
The questionnaire was sent to 2,500 retail agronomy dealerships across the U.S. earlier this spring. Dealerships were asked questions about the types of precision services they offer and/or use in their businesses, how many of their customers are adopting precision agriculture practices, how profitable they are finding precision services to be in their businesses and some additional questions about the current barriers to adoption in terms of customers, dealers and technology.
The Respondents
The 248 survey respondents (a 9.9% overall response rate) came from 35 states, with the highest representation (as usual) from the Midwest (73% of the respondents). Dealerships from Illinois accounted for 12% of the respondents, followed by Iowa with 11% and Minnesota with 8% of the respondents. Indiana, Kansas, Wisconsin, Nebraska, Ohio, Missouri, Michigan, North Dakota and South Dakota rounded out the Midwestern states.
Two-thirds of the surveys (61%) were completed by the owner or manager of the outlet, while 11% were completed by departmental managers and 15% of the respondents were involved in sales. Technical consultants, agronomists and “precision managers” accounted for the remaining 12% of the respondents.
The responding dealerships represented a wide range of organizational types and sizes, with over four out of 10 representing local independents (45%), almost as many representing cooperatives (42%) and the remaining 13% belonging to a regional or national organization.
Bruce Erickson of Purdue University would like to thank Terry Griffin, University of Arkansas, for his contributions in the development of this survey. Additional contributors included Matt Darr, Iowa State University; John Fulton, Auburn University; Raj Khosla, Colorado State University; Eric Lund, Veris Technologies; Chad Pfitzer, Trimble; and Scott Shearer, University of Kentucky.
