As the calendar closes in on spring planting in many areas, anxiety is building among some customers, dealers and even manufacturers as to the timely delivery of parts and technology to be installed, tested and ready to take to the field.

When it comes to the evolution of farming, it’s been said that the pace of change has never been so fast and change will never be this slow again.

The 2021 recipient of Precision Farming Dealer’s 9th annual Most Valuable Dealership is Van Wall Equipment, based in Perry, Iowa.

I’ve never fully understood the phrase ‘work smarter, not harder.’ Perhaps it’s because I tend to have a hard time separating effort from efficiency.

With farmers placing more emphasis on getting more economic return on investment from their technology and equipment, they will also increase service expectations, says Kevin Depies, manager with Ritchie Implement, a 4-store Case IH dealership in Wisconsin.

Anticipation mixed with a little anxiety as to how soon autonomous vehicles will be roaming farm fields in North America continues to build. But this week, Raven Autonomy announced it is accepting pre-orders for its first commercially-available autonomous system.

According to the USDA’s Farm and Land in Farms report published earlier this year, the average U.S. farm size has increased about 10 acres from 2012-2019, to 444. But the number of farms has decreased by more than 86,000 during that same span.

Talking with farmers, especially during the last few years about their cropping systems, more are steering the conversation toward other areas of their operation that have allowed them to maintain or increase overall profitability during an extended time of low corn and soybean prices.

The outlook supports 93% of dealers view precision farming systems as one of their best bets to remain the same or improve unit sales in 2021, according to Ag Equipment Intelligence’s 2021 Dealer Business Outlook & Trends report. But digging deeper into each of the major manufacturers outlook for best bets to improve units sales in 2021, not all of them place the same priority on precision in the coming year.

For the second year in a row, precision farming ranked high on dealers’ list of best bets for improving unit sales, according to Ag Equipment Intelligence’s 2021 Dealer Business Outlook & Trends report. While the category lost its first place slot from last year’s report, it still ranked second among 21 different areas, with more than 93% of dealers betting on precision systems to remain the same or improve unit sales in 2021.