Agribusiness Blueprint

Uncertainty is the name of the game in ag today, and when it comes to strategy, traditional tools like SWOT analysis and strategic plans don't stand a chance. 

From rising farm debt and dicey trade policies to geopolitical breakdowns and the unpredictable arms race of AI, the risks facing farms and agribusinesses are multiplying faster than any one plan can anticipate.

So where does that leave us? 

In today's season finale, hosts Sarah Mock and Trey Malone tie together lessons learned across the series, with the help of experts like Jennifer Ifft, Mike Boehlji, Mike Gunderson, and Allan Gray. They dig into why conventional strategic planning fails agribusiness, and they lay out an options-driven approach that farms and firms of any size can use to prepare for a future nobody can predict (no matter what the keynote speaker at the next ag conference tells you).

You'll walk away with insight on:

• Why to skip the SWOT analysis and what to do instead (spoiler: how to carry out a rigorous diagnosis of the real problem your dealing with, without the jargon)
• How to use scenario analysis strategy and probabilistic thinking to better understand what issues and opportunities might be coming down the pike
• And how to create a menu of options — treating decisions like "renting before buying" or "joint-venturing before acquiring" — to capture upside while protecting yourself from catastrophic downside risk

Agribusiness Blueprint is brought to you by Purdue Center for Food and Agricultural Business: agribusiness.purdue.edu. To learn more, follow The Center for Food and Agribusiness on LinkedIn.

Agribusiness Blueprint is supported in part by the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA), Award No. 2022-68006-36433.

AgTech has a ketchup sandwich problem. 

In other words, there's a lot of technology and "innovation" being created, but increasingly, it's technology and innovation that no farmer or agribusiness really wants. It's a ketchup sandwich. 

How to avoid making— and buying— these agtech ketchup sandwiches (or doing "innovation theater") is what today's episode is all about. Join hosts Sarah Mock and Trey Malone, alongside guests Jay Akridge and Allan Gray, as we explore farmer adoption in agtech, data sharing woes, and the future of AI in agriculture in the agribusiness world. Along the way, you'll discover a practical framework that entrepreneurs, farmers, and agribusiness leaders can use to separate real solutions from expensive distractions.

You'll gain clarity on: 

• How to advance farmer adoption, not by selling ROI or some "bushels per acre" benefit, but by reducing a farmer's "jobs to be done."
• Why auto-steer succeeded where so many precision ag tools stalled, and what that tells us about simplicity in ag innovation.
• What's the real "wicked problem" with data-sharing across food and ag supply chains, and what that will mean for the future of AI tools on-farm.

Agribusiness Blueprint is brought to you by Purdue Center for Food and Agricultural Business: agribusiness.purdue.edu. To learn more, follow The Center for Food and Agribusiness on LinkedIn.

Agribusiness Blueprint is supported in part by the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA), Award No. 2022-68006-36433.

Lending to farmers has always been a difficult proposition. After all, banking and finance are all about managing risk, and agriculture is uniquely resistant to that effort. Today, our current ag finance tools are being tested in new ways, but even as new strategies and technologies emerge, the old question remains: how much risk can  farm business — and their lenders — afford? 

To answer that question, hosts Sarah Mock and Trey Malone dig into the past and future of agricultural lending with experts Mike Boehlje and Mike Gunderson. Along the way, they unpack a practical framework, the partial budget, that farmers can use to weigh the opportunity cost of a financial decision.

You'll walk away with a better understanding of:

• Why farm lenders have to contend with systemic risk than almost any other industry, and how that risk shaped the creation of institutions like the Farm Credit System.
• How to use a partial budget to evaluate opportunity cost — turning a big financial decision, like whether to repair or replace a piece of equipment, into a clear comparison of added costs and returns.
• What a "K-shaped recovery" in the farm economy reveals about who's positioned to weather the next (or current?) downturn.

Agribusiness Blueprint is brought to you by Purdue Center for Food and Agricultural Business: agribusiness.purdue.edu. To learn more, follow The Center for Food and Agribusiness on LinkedIn.

 Agribusiness Blueprint is supported in part by the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA), Award No. 2022-68006-36433.

Ag sales have always been a hard sell — quite literally. 

After all, farmers are conservative spenders, and the people attracted to working in the industry, people who know farmers well (and maybe are farmers themselves), are not excited to be seen as pushy solicitors. That's why agribusinesses have struggled to recruit and train successful sales people for decades. 

The secret is, salespeople who do succeed rarely look like salespeople at all — they look like helpers and trusted advisors.

Today, hosts Sarah Mock and Trey Malone are joined by ag sales experts Dave Downey and Scott Downey to unpack the rapidly evolving ag sales world, why relationship-building eats up nearly twice as much of the sales process in ag as it does in other industries, and what AI means for the future of the ag sales call.

You'll walk away with a better understanding of:

• How "Ready, Set, Sell" — a hands-on training model built on real sales role-play — has transformed the perception of ag sales, from a career coded as "manipulative" to one seen as positive, and increasingly, essential to farmer success.
• How top-performing salespeople and organizations use discovery calls to uncover what customers actually need (not just what they say they need) — and how they turn that into a risk management service for farmers.
• Where farmers get their most trusted product information — and how reframing the salesperson's role in information delivery is key to staying valuable as AI reshapes what farmers can learn on their own.

Agribusiness Blueprint is brought to you by Purdue Center for Food and Agricultural Business: agribusiness.purdue.edu. To learn more, follow The Center for Food and Agribusiness on LinkedIn.

Agribusiness Blueprint is supported in part by the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA), Award No. 2022-68006-36433.

Agriculture's labor problem is chronic. But attention is focused on the hands in the field, even while another talent crisis looming, and new tech and tools (even AI) seem unlikely to solve it. 

Today, hosts Sarah Mock and Trey Malone join experts Jay Akridge, Aissa Good, and Brenna Ellison to dig into why agribusiness is chronically short on skilled talent, and lay out a practical framework that anyone from farmers to agribusiness executives can use to determine how best to close that gap.

You'll walk away with a better understanding of:

• What a 100,000-graduate-a-year gap in agribusiness management means for how farms and firms should be investing in people now, even when budgets are tight.
• How to use the "make vs. buy" framework — plus two overlooked options, "bot" and "borrow" — to decide whether a role should be filled by training existing staff, hiring externally, automating, or contracting out.
• Why soft skills like communication, grit, and self-motivation are becoming just as critical to agribusiness hiring as technical expertise.

Agribusiness Blueprint is brought to you by Purdue Center for Food and Agricultural Business: agribusiness.purdue.edu. To learn more, follow The Center for Food and Agribusiness on LinkedIn.

Agribusiness Blueprint is supported in part by the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA), Award No. 2022-68006-36433.

The Iran War is hitting American farmers from multiple directions — not just through higher fertilizer costs, but through the rising price of diesel and gasoline too. 

But this is far from agriculture's first energy crisis. In fact, during past crises we built tools and strategies for surviving the exact kinds of disruptions we're facing right now.

Today, Sarah Mock and Trey Malone, along with special guest Otto Doering, look back at the 1970s propane crisis to find lessons for what to do (and what not to do) in response to our current energy squeeze. Then, they lay out a strategic framework for tackling these very kinds of "wicked problems" that seem to have no good solutions.

You'll walk away with a better understanding of:

• How to use Rumelt's Kernel of Good Strategy to accurately diagnose the real problem before reaching for solutions — and why skipping that step is where most strategies fall apart.
• Why building trust and surfacing hidden value judgments are prerequisites for solving problems that pit interconnected stakeholders against one another.
• What today's energy-agriculture collision, from AI's rural electricity demand to solar on farmland to farm bill uncertainty, means for how agribusinesses need to be planning right now.

Agribusiness Blueprint is brought to you by Purdue Center for Food and Agricultural Business: agribusiness.purdue.edu. To learn more, follow, The Center for Food and Agribusiness on LinkedIn

Agribusiness Blueprint is supported in part by the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA), Award No. 2022-68006-36433.

Risk has always been part of farming and agribusiness — but the way we understand and manage it has transformed dramatically over the past 60 years.

Today, hosts Sarah Mock and Trey Malone trace that evolution, from the irrational exuberance of 1970s American agriculture through the devastating farm financial crisis of the 1980s, and into today's high-stakes landscape of trade wars, AI disruption, and geopolitical uncertainty. Along the way, they dig into practical strategies that farmers and agribusiness managers can use right now — not just to survive the next crisis, but to find opportunity in it.

You'll walk away with a better understanding of:

• The difference between quantifiable risk (the thunderstorm you can forecast) and uncertainty (the tornado you can't) 
• How to use probabilistic thinking to score and rank the risks your business faces, and how to create a menu of options to help you react to both crises and opportunities
• And what all of this means for ag today, as the sector faces a Global Policy Uncertainty Index that has gone from 100 to 8,000

We'll go together on a journey through the history of risk in agriculture and the tools that have been built to help farmers manage everything from hailstorms to market downturns. And we'll explore a simple, practical framework for scoring your own risks — so that when the next crisis hits, you won't be making decisions in a panic. 

Agribusiness Blueprint is brought to you by Purdue Center for Food and Agricultural Business: agribusiness.purdue.edu. To learn more, follow, The Center for Food and Agribusiness on LinkedIn

Agribusiness Blueprint is supported in part by the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA), Award No. 2022-68006-36433.

What do a foot pedal trash can, Japanese automakers, and modern ag sales have in common? 

They were all invented (in a manner of speaking) by Lillian Gilbreth, an engineer, mother of twelve, and one of the most influential figures in modern management science. 

In this episode, host Sarah Mock and co-host Trey Malone trace Lillian's remarkable legacy from the factory floor all the way to the American farm.

Alongside Scott Downey, Director of the Center for Food and Agricultural Business at Purdue University, we unpack how Lillian, and her husband Frank, pioneered the study of human motion, and laid the groundwork for Lean strategy, the waste-reduction framework that Japanese automakers like Honda and Subaru used to quietly overtake American car companies in the latter half of the 20th century.

Then, we connect Lean thinking directly to the world of agribusiness — exploring what it really means to eliminate waste in ag sales, why risk management (not relationships) may be the true product a salesperson delivers to a farmer, and why so many sales managers can't answer the simple question: "How much does it cost to put a salesperson in front of a customer?"

The conversation also tackles the data overload facing both agribusinesses and farms today, the overlooked problem of labor waste in agriculture, and how AI may be shifting the most valuable skill in ag sales from providing answers to asking better questions.

In this episode:

• Why it's motion, and not time, that makes businesses more efficient
• How Japanese automakers used Lean to overtake American manufacturing — and what agriculture can learn from it
• The real product ag salespeople deliver to farmers (hint: it's not information)
• Why knowing your "measure of motion" is the first step to eliminating waste
• How "just in time" gave way to "just in case" — and why both are valid Lean outcomes
• Why the future of rural America might hinge on creating smarter, leaner agribusinesses

Resources: Learn more about Purdue's Center for Food and Agricultural Business at agribusiness.purdue.edu

Once upon a time, a barefoot man with a pan on his head set out to build a business in one of the most unpredictable and challenging sectors on Earth. 

That's how Johnny Appleseed became more than just an American folk hero, he became one of America's most innovate agribusiness people-- pioneering a tree nursery business on the nation's frontier in order to meet a fast-growing demand for apple cider and vinegar.

Today, we're diving into Johnny Appleseed's story to understand:

• Why agricultural and food businesses are so unique
• How we went from intuitive management to formal agribusiness tools and strategies (and why it matters)
• And what all this means for the ag industry today, as the sector continues to be rocked by new tech like AI and robotics, an unpredictable policy landscape, and unprecedented supply chain disruptions

You'll walk away with an answer to the question, "Is food and ag really that different?" and deeper clarity on why strategies that work so well in other sectors fall flat in the agribusiness space. 

Agriculture is unlike any other industry. 

No other sector is so vital to human life, and so dependent on countless small businesses who contend daily with weather and natural variability, dozens of global markets, evolving technologies, and wild geopolitical uncertainty.

The businesses that operate in this unique and complex world are also unlike any other, and they didn’t get that way by accident. 

Agribusiness leaders have solved some of the hardest managerial problems on Earth.  To operate in this unconventional world, these leaders built one-of-a-kind tools that were influenced not just by economics and finance, but by industrial engineering, psychology, experimental economics, entrepreneurship, policy, and agricultural extension. Understanding how these tools were made, and how they shape the agribusiness world, is critical for those looking to stay relevant in the industry’s future. 

That’s what we’re doing here. Each episode, we’ll tackle a conceptual breakthrough and the people who made it possible, and share stories about how these breakthroughs are still working, and evolving, today.

You’ll hear familiar stories through new lenses, and emerging stories that will challenge what you think you know about the people and businesses that make food and agriculture work. Plus, you’ll meet entrepreneurs and thinkers who discovered and transformed agribusiness over the last 50 years, getting a crash course in how agribusiness works, what to do when it doesn’t, and where it's going from here. 

This is Agribusiness Blueprint. Season premiere coming Wednesday, April 8th, wherever you listen to podcasts.