The 2024 CropLife 100 Preview
November 11, 2024 
Every year at this date, I spend much of my time digging deep into the numbers/figures that make up our magazine’s annual CropLife 100 listings. This year, it’s been an eye-opening experience, to say the least.
Overall, compared with the past few years, ag retailers had a difficult time during 2024. Revenues look like they will be down several billion dollars from the 2022 and 2023 totals. Of course, this is subject to change as many of the nation’s largest companies (those with sales in excess of $1 billion) have yet to submit their 2024 CropLife 100 forms.
Final numbers notwithstanding, there are two areas of this year’s survey results I want to highlight in this column’s preview of the CropLife 100 report. The first has to do with technology for agriculture.
For the past year or so now, many folks in the ag community have been experimenting with/adopting in their operation’s new technological innovations. Chief among these has been products powered by artificial intelligence (AI). According to the nation’s top ag retailers, these systems should help dealers and their grower-customers better cope with numerous parts of their businesses. This includes in the areas of decision-making, labor, and cost savings on crop inputs.
But how big an impact will these AI systems have on agriculture in 2025? Here, there’s a fair amount of uncertainty. Slightly more than half of 2024 CropLife 100 respondents think “it’s too early to tell” how these systems will affect the industry. Another 36% believe the market penetration will be “small” at best next year. Only 10% think AI systems will have a major impact on agriculture during the 2025 growing season.
The second area I want to focus on is growers themselves. It’s no secret that net farmer income has fallen significantly over the past two years. Therefore, conventional wisdom might predict that grower consolidations would be on the increase as well.
But according to the data from the 2024 CropLife 100 survey, this isn’t the case. This year, 66% of respondents said the number of growers consolidating was less than it was during the 2023 growing season or remained the same during the two years. However, 34% did note an uptick in this trend during 2024.
Speaking of growers, a new question added to this year’s CropLife 100 survey asked ag retailers how many of their employees were actually involved in farming themselves. According to the findings, 53% of the nation’s top ag retailers had one to 10 employees working their own farms. Another 20% said that between 11 and 30 of their employees were also growers. And 27% had more than 30 employees involved in farming operations.
As always, please check out the December 2024 edition of CropLife® magazine for the final results from this year’s ag retailers survey.
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