Farmers will offer you a fair shot to win their business if you give them believable reasons why they should trust what you’re saying. These “reasons to believe” are what compel customers to trust that you can deliver on your brand promise—and if you aren’t effectively articulating those reasons, they’ll simply move on to whoever is next. Farmers know what you’re offering and how it works.…

Our sense of competitive pressure is based on intuition. In an age where data is revolutionizing production economics, as marketers why are we not using data to augment intuition? Recent mergers will require all marketers to consider how their territory realignment needs to change. Entira’s Competitive Index blends the granular market analysis features of Enspire™ with our vast retailer database.…

It's a common pitfall in business to get so caught up in the weeds that you cannot fully and strategically visualize the entire landscape around you. And if you’re not looking at the whole forest, there might be hidden surprises tucked away in blind spots behind the trees. Seemingly harmless threats can quietly and discreetly siphon away your success in small bits at a time, and by the time you realize…

The greatest part of a consultant’s job is seeing your clients win. Recent news from the world’s largest pork producer, Smithfield Foods, brought to light a winning strategy when the company announced in September its purchase of two grain elevators in Ohio—a move that supports a strategy that originated back in 2011, when Smithfield Grain, a unit of Smithfield Foods, embarked on an initiative…

Succession plans may be the most important piece of a farm’s strategic plan, yet very few farm operators have documented strategic plans. Recent Entira market research in the corn belt revealed that 25% of farms were expecting a primary operator change in the next five years. That number jumps to 50% when including farms expecting transition in the next 10 years. But no matter how long the “transition…

While we’re worried about fine-tuning our systems and practices—figuring out how to tie it all together and make it more efficient—there are places in the world, like I saw on a recent trip to Morocco, where modern manufacturing and irrigation equipment and systems are not even used yet, much less tied together.