Our editorial team recently asked the 100 largest dealers in North America (The Farm Equipment 100™) for their most pressing concerns in 2025. The most-cited concern was interest rates, but a close second was labor, which includes recruiting and retaining good talent. 

Precision dealers shared their top strategies for addressing those labor challenges — finding, developing and keeping precision talent — during a roundtable at the Precision Farming Dealer Summit. Let’s look at some of the top takeaways from the discussion. 

Some dealers are having good luck recruiting talent from outside the ag industry. One dealer had huge success hiring people from the auto industry. Another dealer has hired ex-military members who had a great understanding of electronics.

Several dealers offer internships to local community college students. They also reach out to high schools to gauge their interest in a partnership. When you recruit high school students, you’re recruiting their parents at the same time, one dealer said, and the parents have a good influence on what their child ends up doing.  

One dealer recommends working with high schools to establish a course where students can earn college credits in precision ag. 

WATCH: Adam Gittins of HTS Ag talks about a unique incentive program that motivates people to stick around.

“If you can get students started in the field, they’re very well accepted on the farm,” the dealer said. “There’s a lot of data management that needs to get done that farmers never want to do. They see a younger person come out to their farm who’s energetic and ready to work on it, and they’re more than willing to turn that data over to them because the farmer usually doesn’t have time to deal with it.” 

As far as retention strategies go, training and educational sessions often serve as motivators for employees to stick around. 

“The training helps with retention because it’s one of the things people really look forward to in the off-season,” a dealer said.   

If you’re having trouble retaining employees, look at changing the culture or structure within the dealership, another dealer suggested.

“Realize that precision work is service work,” the dealer said. “People from the service side tend to be able to jump on billable hours, and it supports the precision department if service can handle more things to free up the precision team’s time and lower their stress.” 

WATCH: Ben Flansburg of LandPro Equipment details creative training sessions that keep his precision team engaged. 

Also, make sure to show the precision department that you're investing in them and appreciate their hard work. 

“Get everyone together with lunches and appreciation events organized by the leadership team, so that people don’t feel like they’re isolated on an island," one dealer said. "They're more likely to stay and not give into that burnout when they feel like they're being treated as an important part of the team."

Finally, employee referral programs haven’t paid off for the precision dealers participating in this roundtable discussion because they’re looking for a specialized person with precision ag. The referral programs have worked better for the service side, they said. 

WATCH: The Great Game of Business is a structured open-book business strategy that gets employees at every level involved in the success of the company. Bryan Fehr and Nate Kelson of Jenner Precision explain how they put this management style into practice and how it’s resulted in more engaged employees.