MACA 2022: Navigating a Changing World in Agriculture
December 5, 2022 Following two year of “going virtual” because of the pandemic, the annual Mid America CropLife Association (MACA) returned to an in-person event in 2022. This year’s meeting took place in early September in St. Louis, MO, and featured several speakers discussing the overall ag marketplace and the changes that have taken place since the start of 2020.
According to Jason Henderson, Senior Associate Dean for Faculty Development and Director of Extension at Purdue University, economists generally rely upon market drivers of the past to determine what direction an industry will head going into the future. However, given some of the dominate trends of the past two years across the board, this method of forecasting might not be applicable when considering 2023 and beyond.
“Economists love their models, and these models are always based upon of the past,” said Henderson. “But COVID doesn’t look like the past.”
Still, Henderson pointed to five factors that could determine how agriculture performs overall in the coming years. The first is labor. “Economic growth is based upon two things — the number of people you have and how productive they are,” he said. “Agriculture has got to figure out where its people are going to come from and what skills they will need to help grow productivity.”
Factors Two, Three, and Four are not new to U.S. agriculture, but important, nonetheless. First, there’s demographics, relating to what kinds of food today’s consumers want to consume. The next ties to climate: How will agriculture manage all the changes currently impacting such variables as soil, pests, and water usage.
Then there’s finances. For more than a decade now, U.S. growers have been borrowing money to run their farming operations with low interest rates in place. But these are now on the rise as the Federal Reserve attempts to curb inflation in the general economy. “As these rise and profits get tighter, however, will farmers feel the pressure to leverage the farm?” he asked.
Finally, the historic social contract U.S. agriculture has with U.S. consumers might be changing. “Normally, the government has given subsidiaries to farmers to provide cheap food to consumers,” said Henderson. “But if this changes because of the changing demographics of the country, what impact might this have on agriculture going forward?”
The Change Panel
The association also invited three agricultural industry insiders for a panel discussion on the topic of Change Management. Although all three speakers focused on slightly different aspects of the question of change management, they all agreed on one major point: Change can be hard.
From left: Certis Biologicals’ Amy O’Shea, GROWMARK’s Jeff Bunting, and Bayer’s Gwyn Schramm.
“It sometimes comes down to the individual,” said Gwyn Schramm, Head of Strategic Accounts and Licensing for Bayer Crop Science. “They might ask: ‘What happens if we change? What happens if we don’t change?’ If that happens, I remind them of one of my favorite quotes on change: ‘If you don’t like change, you are going to like irrelevance even less.’”
In virtually all cases of change management, Schramm reminded MACA attendees that it largely boils down to two key groups — the individuals and the organization. When trying to implement change at the organizational level, Schramm recommended that companies follow a “building block” approach. “First, you should assess the environment and the organization at the same time,” she said. “It’s important to understand the assumptions you are working from and constantly review them over time.”
For another company represented on the MACA panel, Certis Biologicals, change hasn’t been as difficult to embrace, chiefly because the company’s product line is focused upon offering growers an alternative to synthetic agricultural products in their crop field and orchards. It also doesn’t hurt that the company’s leadership is comfortable with the idea of change management in the first place.
“I’ll be the first to admit it — I love change!” said Amy O’Shea, President/CEO for Certis Biologicals. “I’m motivated by change and always have been. But not everyone else in the world feels this same way about change.”
Part of the reason many people are hesitant to change ties back to the unknowns that often crop up along the way, she said. “In a perfect world, change is a straight path, from deciding to change to getting to the change goal,” said O’Shea. “But there’s always the unexpected issues that come up, such as a shark or tornado in the road ahead. That’s what makes change so difficult.”
Even older companies are having to deal with change management today. According to Jeff Bunting, Crop Protection Division Manager for GROWMARK, although his company has a 95-year history to rely upon, it regularly conducts meetings to discuss today’s key drivers for change in agriculture. “We do these every five years or so,” said Bunting. “We look at the things could come, things that are probably already here, and things that are so far out on the horizon that we just don’t know yet what they will mean.”
In the agricultural world of 2022, Bunting said that GROWMARK has identified several key drivers of change. These include digital platforms, consolidation, consumer demands, and increased volatility.
Citing this last point, Bunting pointed to the supply chain disruptions that have plagued the entire world since 2020. “Logistics has evolved the past three years like never before,” he said. “Today, we are looking at a truck driver shortage of approximately 80,000 workers.”
This ties to another key change driver that has been a persistent problem for agriculture since the start of the 21st century at least — finding labor. “Attracting and retaining quality talent is an incredibly big change driver for us, and although we always seemed to be dealing with it, the COVID years made the situation that much worse,” said Bunting.
To solve these manpower dilemmas, agricultural companies such as GROWMARK are increasingly adopting new technologies and digital platforms into their operations. In fact, this has been the trend for several years now.
But Bunting said more needs to be done. “We’ve spent a lot of money on technology and digital forums, but it’s not enough yet,” he said. “Our former CEO used to observe that agriculture is data rich and insight poor. That’s still so true!”
Bunting recommends remaining flexible and planning ahead further than ever before. “Today, it’s all about good planning,” he said. “It’s amazing to me how much earlier you have to plan to do things for the following year than we used to. But this gives everyone in the organization a better ‘line of sight’ into their farmer’s needs.”
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