What’s the elephant in the room? I’ve always gravitated toward this admittedly tired expression at meetings, mostly because it works. As I interpret the expression, the “elephant” is the big, lurking issue, idea, or problem that no one really wants to acknowledge, or that everyone acknowledges but doesn’t know what to do about. So it sits, in the office, next to the glyphosate bulk tank, in the cab of your post sprayer, lurking.
Elephants are big and imposing to be sure, but also a discreet grey color and generally docile. On the other hand, we’ve all seen videos of agitated elephants going postal on people. Things get broken, people get hurt — not pretty.
Anyway, after perusing the entire body of work gathered by our editorial staff for this issue, and coursing through notes gathered from meetings and discussions at the Ag Retailers Association Conference last month, I have identified 2009’s Elephant of the Year: People.
At the conference and at several points throughout this issue, retailers talk not only about the challenge of employee hiring and retention, but about the need for proper training.
The kinds of “training” being discussed today is about ensuring that employees fully understand the pressures and challenges that retailers are facing in 2009, and nudge growers toward a closer partnership.
One retailer I talked to said that this is what keeps him up at night — wondering if he’s doing an adequate job of sharing information with his people, and whether his people do, or are even capable of, sharing this information with growers.
“Things are moving so fast globally, and we are trying to communicate with our growers so they can understand the information and they are comfortable with accepting risk,” he said. “Because if we want to move more of the risk to the farmer — the entity that can actually hedge against that risk — our people need to have broader business skills and truly understand the market so they can have a meaningful conversation with the grower.”
This winter is critical for ag dealers across the country. Cheap fertilizer is sitting in storage and not likely to strengthen in price until the bins empty out this summer and fall. Logistics have never completely failed us, but the 2009 season is promising to strain it to the limit. While it will be difficult, if not out and out impossible, to control these realities, what we can control is how we react to the challenges and how closely our growers will ally with us in meeting these challenges.
It won’t be easy. Another retailer lamented that his sales force has been beaten up on the perception that somehow retailers could have foreseen the fertilizer price crash and that they were sold a bill of goods last summer.
But as Heartland Coop’s Dave Coppess says in the cover story, just about everyone who’s sitting on cheap N-P-K is in the same boat, and all thought they were doing the right thing at the time.
If your growers aren’t aware of the challenges you face, I would argue that they need to be. More open discourse will lead to better decision-making that benefits both grower and retailer.
Maybe you can’t vanquish the elephant, but you can certainly shrink it down to size.
