Harvest Season: When Too Many Relationships Are Buried [Academy]

Harvest Season: When Too Many Relationships Are Buried  

For too many farmers, fall harvest season spells the end of their relationship with some of their seed suppliers. It could have been a first-time association with their seed rep or it may have been a relationship based on years of socializing, trusting, negotiating, joking, and ultimately buying.  

The longer term the relationship the more enjoyable it usually is, but the more devastating it can be for the grower AND the seed seller when it ends.  In long term relationships farmers have not only learned to trust their seed guy, but they have also found him or her fun to deal with. 

But so many relationships will be lost this year following a highly variable harvest season. No, not just product variability, but relationship variability. In fact, harvest season should really be renamed the “Funeral Season.” It should be called a time for “mourning the loss of thousands of relationships” and their interment into the “crypt of low perceptions”.    

Why is fall a time of year when farmers lose so many of their relationships?  Especially ones as important as the ones with their seed guys?  Well, it’s mostly because farmers don’t understand the real value of a seed relationship. They don’t realize that it’s not about yield, and it’s not about product and it certainly isn’t about price. A true seed seller/grower relationship is based totally on dependence.  Because if a farmer takes the time necessary to develop a trusting relationship with his seed supplier, (which takes more than one season) he will have all of those things and more.  But instead, he puts every one of his relationships on the line every year by looking at his “side by side” trial or his “on farm test plot” or his “yield monitor” and shoots himself in the foot by “burying” the relationships of the seed reps whose products didn’t perform to his expectations, despite the kind of growing season he may have had. 

What today’s farmers need more than ever is someone they can rely on, 24/7 for things they need or don’t know they needs. They need a seed leader, someone to tell them when to buy, what to buy, when to pay, how to pay, where to use it, how to use it and how to measure it’s performance.  They need to learn the value of having a relationship with every seed seller they work with.  And when they gets upset with the performance of a certain brand from a certain sales rep, they should not be asking that rep to leave his farm, they should be asking for more help in managing the 1000 variables that affected the performance of that product in the first place. But too often growers sever relationships that actually have the potential to bring them a lot more than just bushels in the field. 

And that’s what they don’t understand...