The current marketing environment will lead to some significant changes in attitudes.Two years ago, I hired a 28-year old to work with me in my farm marketing consulting business. He had three years' experience in the commodity business and grew up on a farm. His Dad and brother still farm. It struck me in the past weeks that he has never experienced a bear market. In fact, there is almost a generation of young people involved at every level of agriculture, including young farmers, who have not encountered a bear market like we are currently mired in for corn and wheat and, perhaps, soybeans as the year wears on. What brought it to my stream of conscience is that he has become very bored with the markets. The excitement has disappeared. The...
Illuminating the value of technical research
On behalf of a commodity producer organization, WPI evaluated the outputs from a project that featured a $5 million investment into technical research over multiple years. WPI’s team captured the results of this extensive effort and synthesized them for presentation to the organization’s governing board; among the findings uncovered and presented for the first time was the development of genomic traits proven, via rigorous testing, to provide crop yield advantages of 50 percent or more to U.S. farmers in times of drought. Capturing measurable results from long-term efforts can be challenging. Educating clients on the dynamics of success measurement when quantifiable results are not readily available requires deep client-consultant collaboration and an ability to consider both near- and long-term client aspirations with market/policy dynamics – attributes that WPI brings to every consulting engagement.