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28.02.2020 - Peer Leithold (Send email to Peer Leithold)

Success in the last mile

Precision farming is, at its core, solving an agronomic question. This challenge can best be met when agricultural technology is allied with agronomic expertise. This is the reason for Agricon's strategic cooperation with the US agricultural machinery manufacturer John Deere. It is a novel form of cooperation. It goes against the trend of centralised platform solutions, often financially supported by a corporation, with teams based in big cities - far removed from agricultural practice.

We operate in direct sales

Both Agricon and the medium-sized John Deere distributors work differently; they operate in direct sales. They are therefore directly involved in the problem - in the field, at the customer's location. The success of the digitalisation of agriculture is decided in the so-called last mile, i.e. during implementation on the farm. With the specialists of the John Deere sales partners and the Agricon technical advisors, competent teams are now being formed on site, which can offer viable overall solutions in a coordinated manner and from a single source. Each team member contributes expertise in his or her own field and assumes full responsibility for it.

John Deere and Agricon have agreed a strategic partnership in autumn 2019. Digital technologies can thus better play out their economic value for the user

Wireless data management

Especially in data management, we want to work one hundred percent wirelessly and also optimise further in the direction of "plug and play" when joining sensors, tractors and implements. The strategic cooperation continues to include our independence from manufacturers. We do not want to and must not exclude any customer who benefits from historically grown and successful business relationships with other agricultural machinery manufacturers. In our cooperation we want to realise cost-covering prices.

Trustee of our clients' data

We agree with our partner that the customer's data belongs to only one: the customer himself. Agricon has always hosted customer data on domestic servers and administers it in trust in the 'agriPORT' data portal. No data can be passed on to a third party without direct consent. In the interaction with agricultural technology, there is a clear customer desire to create open and standardised interfaces between the farmers' management systems and the technology. Together with John Deere, we will work on the necessary infrastructural transitions.

This text appeared in the Agrarzeitung on 28.02.2020. Author Peer Leithold founded Agricon in 1997 and is still Managing Director of the company today.