You have a talented team of precision farming experts in a department that houses the latest and greatest technology available to farmers. Your dealership website reflects that right?

Leadership of a precision farming business can take many forms and come from different places within a dealership. But it often takes a coordinated effort by ownership, management and specialists to create and sustain a productive culture.

This year has shown interesting new developments in market sentiments, with dealers continuing to slowly move away from hardware and steer sharply toward data management for future revenue, according to the seventh annual Precision Farming Dealer Benchmark Study.

Agronomic service is still a push-pull offering for dealers. Some have proactively embraced and invested in providing robust support options to customers that include soil sampling, data analysis and field prescriptions.

The more things change, the more they stay the same, at least in terms of how dealers are selling and servicing precision farming products. While strides have been made establishing precision as a standalone business, dealerships continue to seek a better balance between revenue generated by hardware sales and service.

Despite the downturn in the ag economy, precision farming dealers have largely maintained an ambitious sales outlook, banking on their ability to increase billable service and capture ROI-based revenue from new products.

Topcon Agriculture is dedicated to developing innovative technology and solutions to help farmers around the world achieve greater profitability through efficiency and productivity.

Building the next generation of leaders is the key to any successful dealership. That leadership journey can start during a recruit’s education as an internship opportunity. More and more dealerships are offering precision farming internships to both high school and/or college students to give them a taste for what working at a dealership entails.

Finding good employees — and retaining them — is a challenge for all farm equipment dealership departments, but it is particularly challenging for the precision farming department where burnout rates are high.