Detailed Crop Plans Without The Time-Suck

The common phrase, ‘there aren’t enough hours in the day,’ has its merit. Time is our most valued resource – particularly when it comes to growing a business that requires face-to-face dealings with farmers concerning their livelihoods. Any crop advisor will tell you that there are certain hesitations they encounter each year when they sit down to crop plan with their growers for the coming season.

“From the grower’s perspective, you don’t ever want to feel like you’re working with a salesperson who is just trying to push an order through and make money,” said Sarah Butterfield, Product Manager, Agrian Inc. “Growers want much more of a relationship, and the faith that their advisor has their best interest at heart and has put the same amount of thought into managing their operation as they would.”

It all comes back to time. As a retailer, putting together a crop plan that’s detailed and specific enough to your customer’s individual operation, so that it makes the sound sense needed for any good advice to stick, is incredibly time-consuming. Further, we’re in an age of options. Growers don’t want a plan, they want plans – scenarios built-out in full for careful consideration and discussion.

“With Agrian’s Crop Planning, you can call up university or organizational templates with key variables already set in place, but still easily adjustable, so that you’re able to quickly produce extremely granular plans that are value-added for your growers,” explained Butterfield. “Templates can be shared across an entire organization, so a single seasoned agronomist, for example, could produce blueprints that can be used by all advisors in the field. Templates are simple to reassign and use across fields, so that all recommendations made are specific and personalized.”

In Agrian’s Scenario Comparisons tool, advisors can click a few buttons to duplicate plans, change one, or a small set of variables, and quickly have a few anticipated outcomes to share with their customer. “Showing, versus telling, is a powerful sales approach,” said Butterfield. “Crop Planning gives you an efficient and quick way to walk through a multitude of planning scenarios with your growers and show them the big picture results when it comes to profitability and net income; and at the end of the day, that’s what they need to see.”

Input Summary View

There will always be some logistical complexities that will come up whenever a detailed, field-by-field, crop plan is agreed to. But from an input inventory standpoint – Agrian takes the math and guesswork out of it. In Agrian’s Input Summary View the entire plan can be rolled up into a comprehensive summary – detailing quantities and amounts needed (in total) for each input across the entire plan.

Whether for early ordering, or forecasting purposes, growers appreciate the provided certainty in how much product they will need throughout the year. On the flip side – because Crop Planning is a feature that rolls into Enterprise Dashboards within Agrian – retailers also get a snapshot of all planned inputs across all active crop plans. This insight can be helpful to each location to ensure proper inventory is on hand throughout the season.

Introducing Booking

Agrian’s Booking feature takes inventory reports one step further. The newly integrated feature helps move the sales process seamlessly along by allowing advisors to create early order booking confirmations for their customers to sign. When you build accurate, customized bookings directly in Agrian from crop plans, your grower gets the benefits of locking in price and commitments, and you get easy, accurate visibility to what products and quantities are already booked per grower.