Smart bets in uncertain ag markets

Uncertainty in agriculture is hitting differently right now, not because we have never dealt with risk, but because so many forces are moving at the same time. Commodity price volatility, stubborn input costs, geopolitical shocks, tighter regulation, and fast-changing farm technology are stacking up and making it harder to know what to do next. So we sit down with Emily Sword, Vice President at Inspire, to get practical about how farms and agribusiness leaders can plan without pretending the chaos is going away. 

Emily brings both sides of the story: a fifth-generation farm background and years leading brand strategy in the corporate world. We talk risk management and business planning that actually works in a choppy agriculture market, including three anchors we keep coming back to: focus on what you can control, stay relentlessly close to customer needs, and decide what you want your business to look like on the other side of this cycle. When you have that long-term vision, short-term choices get clearer. 

We also dig into making change feel less like a gamble by treating it as a series of small experiments. That means setting a hypothesis, defining success, running a pilot, and scaling only what proves out, whether that’s biologics, new seed approaches, precision ag tools, or drone application methods. On the communications side, Emily breaks down how to learn what customers really think through interviews, focus groups, segmentation, personas, and then validating themes with surveys at scale. 

If you’re trying to stay steady, build brand trust, and make smarter bets in an uncertain ag economy, this conversation will give you a grounded playbook. Subscribe, share this with a colleague, and leave a review, then tell us what experiment you’re running next.

Transcript

Uncertainty Hits The Ag Market

SPEAKER_01 0:08

Call it a downturn, an inflection point, or a systematic shift. However you want to label it, there's unprecedented uncertainty right now in the agriculture market. Welcome to Feedstuffs in Focus, our podcast taking a look at the big issues affecting the livestock, poultry, grain, and animal feed industries. I'm your host, Sarah Muirhead. This episode of Feedstuffs in Focus is sponsored by United Animal Health, a leader in animal health and nutrition. You can learn more about United Animal Health and how they're working to advance animal science worldwide by visiting their website at unitedanh.com. Joining us to discuss the current state of the ag market is Emily Sword, Vice President of Inspire. So, Emily, let's start by having you give us a bit of uh background on yourself as well as some details on Inspire and how your company assists food and agribusinesses and cooperatives and trade organizations.

SPEAKER_00 1:08

Sure. Well, I will start with the personal side. Um I am part of the fifth generation of a dairy farm. We started as a dairy farm. We are now a crop farm, row crops, mostly corn and soybeans. We run about 4,000 acres in northeast Ohio. We spread across six different counties to get those acres. So it's a large operation. And of course, when I say we, I mean it's there's a lot of family members involved. My husband's full-time on the farm. So born and re and raised farm girl, and it's always been very close to my heart. So from a professional standpoint, I started my career in agricultural communications. I interned at the Ohio Department of Agriculture, wanted to go into ag, but my career really took me outside of ag to the agency world in marketing and advertising, eventually to the corporate side, power equipment, brands like Cub Cadet, Troy built. I worked for many years building those brands and helping to work through our retailers to drive those brands. And then I also moved to Power Tools. So I had the privilege of leading the DeWalt brand of Power Tools at a global level for brand strategy. And I learned a ton about marketing, communications, brand strategy, also just how business works and how communications can really drive growth within organizations. So I got to the point though where that love of agriculture, that passion, really the personal side, it's still what I live and breathe every day. And so I had the opportunity to kind of marry up my professional life with my personal life by going to Inspire, which is a strategic communications firm. We're based out of Columbus, Ohio. And we really help businesses. We have about half of our businesses in food and agriculture. So we have a pretty large practice. We help organizations really use communications to influence stakeholders, earn trust for their brands, and ultimately drive growth. So it's been kind of a dream come true to marry up that professional experience on the corporate side with the chance to impact the ag industry that's so near and dear to me.

What’s Driving Volatility Right Now

SPEAKER_01 3:26

Very good. Now, there seems to be many forces at play at this time when we talk about the agriculture market, some of which kind of feel beyond our control. Talk with us about some of the current market factors and what it is that agriculture is currently facing.

SPEAKER_00 3:40

Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, I'm sure your audience knows well all of the factors that are in play right now, whether that is um, you know, volatile commodity prices, high input costs, geopolitical activity, um, increased regulatory activity, which is leading to scrutiny from government, from consumers. Um, you know, these are all things. It's not that they haven't been there in the past. It's not that these are forces we haven't dealt with as an industry, but the speed and the pace of change really is making this feel like a very uncertain time. Also, the fact that, you know, these are all at play together. So you may feel like you solve for one in your business plan and another one starts to rear its head or you know, has a fall-on effect. So it's the combination of these, that speed, that change, and also the fact that in the midst of all of that, we also have incredible technology changes that are impacting our practices and how we run our businesses, a lot of pressure to understand that technology and put it to good use. So it's really that combination that's just making um for a lot of the organizations that we work with, also for my family farm, for us as an agency, I think across the board is just making it feel like an uncertain time right now.

SPEAKER_01 5:04

Indeed, there's a there's a lot going on and a lot of things at play. Um, business planning, you mentioned that, and it's always been a big part of agriculture, and and it can it can help to minimize risk. That's certainly a factor, but it can't remove all risk. What should those of us involved in agriculture be thinking about and keeping in mind when it comes to the current level of risk in the market? How should we be planning for that? Is there a way to do that?

Three Practical Planning Priorities

SPEAKER_00 5:30

Yeah, yeah. There are some, there are definitely some practices that we can think about when we're thinking about business planning in this type of an environment. And like you said, we're never going to remove all risk, especially in agriculture. Um, it can always feel like we're kind of betting on things that are totally out of our control. In fact, um, one of my favorite quotes, my grandma Jean always used to say, I never have to go to Vegas because farming is the biggest gamble there is. And there's a lot of truth to that, even you know, outside of production, as we go upstream, a lot of uncertainty. But when we when we bring it back to business planning and we kind of focus in on what you can do when there's this much uncertainty, we really focus our clients around kind of three core things. The first one is what are those problems or those opportunities that are within your control that you can address? Um, how do you how do you look holistically at where those sort of spaces exist where you can put some practices in place to deal with some of what you're facing? The second area is how are you meeting your customers' needs? If you're continually focused on understanding your customer, making sure that you're adapting your business and prioritizing the things within your business that match what your customer is facing right now, that's always going to be a safe bet. And then the third piece is really thinking about where do you want to be on the other side of all of this change? When all of this shakes out, how do you want to show up? And what kind of decisions are going to help get you closer to that ultimate vision?

SPEAKER_01 7:10

So, in times like these, how important is it to think out of the box, right? And uh versus doing things the way we've always done it.

SPEAKER_00 7:18

Yeah, yeah, that's it's very important. I know you know sometimes it can feel tempting to um go to the safe safe space and just kind of hunker down, but really, you know, digging in your heels, uh putting your head in the sand, whatever euphemism you want to use, that's it's going to land you on the wrong side of this change at the end of the day. That's pretty much a certainty. So you really have to think about change and change in the context of experimentation. That's kind of how we like to break down this scary notion of change and sort of compartmentalize it into thinking about some experiments that you can run within your organization, getting back to that point number one. What are some problems or some opportunities that are within your control? Um, that or at least that you could put some experiments in place to determine how you could address those problems or capitalize on those opportunities. For example, um, in our row crop business, we think about things like you know, experimenting with biologics and bringing those into the practice, or maybe different seed varieties. My husband co-owns a drone application business. So that's that's diversification for our operation, but it's also, you know, farmers are looking at experimenting with a few of their fields or some of their property for that type of application method and comparing it versus conventional applications. Um, you know, for your audience, that could look like different precision systems or different data platforms. The key is how do you sort of start small and design it like any other experiment where you have a hypothesis, you know what good looks like at the end of the day. And so you already have decided ahead of time, this is what I need to see to determine that this is gonna be a good change for me to make on a larger scale, and then roll it out and repeat it. And that's really gonna help you evolve and change and stay ahead of the curve. And for especially for our clients, those are the kind of stories that we love to tell to the audience, um to your customers, to show that you are adapting, you are changing, and ultimately you're future-proof in your business.

SPEAKER_01 9:35

Kind of start small, see how it works, and then um, if it makes sense, then you can jump in on in a bigger way.

SPEAKER_00 9:41

Yeah, absolutely. It's it's a great way to learn and to grow and to to make change feel a lot less like a big gamble.

Get Closer To Customer Reality

SPEAKER_01 9:53

Exactly. So for agribusinesses and those serving serving farmers and ranchers, it's it's important to have that understanding of you know of where your customers are. If you're an agribusiness company, you need to say, hey, this is what what challenge and what pressure my customer is under. And and you know, what do I need to do to help address that? How how best to approach that? Do you go out and talk to customers or or what do you recommend when it comes to just developing that that understanding and probably not making some assumptions?

SPEAKER_00 10:25

Yeah, yeah. Um, it's so important to not make those assumptions and to really ask questions to research and to dig in. And there's um it's always important, not just in uncertain times. I think um, number one, because it's a competitive advantage for your organization. If you know your customer better, if you're making decisions with a deeper understanding of your customers' pain points and motivations and what they're accountable for, it's going to make everything, you know, from your messaging is going to be more relevant, your dollars are going to be better spent reaching them, but ultimately your product, your service, what the value that you bring to them is going to be better. One of the one of the favorite projects I've ever worked on was a customer segmentation, which means looking across uh your customer base, not every customer is created equal. So you you break them apart to understand why they're buying and what their unique path to purchase is. And then you take those customers and you create what we call personas. So you really put a story behind each of these people and you treat them as people. We actually even created life-size versions of each of these people. We gave them names and we put them in our meeting rooms, and we, you know, it just helped to really make that that customer feel real as you're making daily decisions, as you're, you know, you're you're architecting your business. That is a that's a kind of an extreme example, um, although it's it's something you can do on a large scale or a much smaller scale. But that's one way of understanding your customer, give them a face, give them a name, get to know them really well. But really, right now, it's a matter of just asking questions. Ask more questions than you normally would. If your world is changing, you can be certain that their world is also changing. So, what are their customers pressuring them for? What is keeping them up at night? Ask those questions. It's easier than ever to take all that information, bring it together, and summarize it to really help you and your whole organization, understand them better, and ultimately put them at the center of the decisions that you're making. And that again, if you put that customer and your deep understanding of them at the core of the decisions that you're making, that's going to be a much safer bet than guessing or making assumptions.

SPEAKER_01 13:02

Can it be done through a through a survey? How uh with your experience in the communication field, is there a way that people are going to give you probably more deeper information and better information?

Interviews Then Surveys For Confidence

SPEAKER_00 13:14

Yeah. Well, uh it's the best way to do it is really in combination. There's not um one silver bullet way to do it. Um, usually what we do is we start with a conversation. We start with either focus groups, one-on-one interviews, a combination of those. We start internally to understand, like, you know, how what the perception of the customer is. Then we go externally, we talk to the customers, and then you use that deep understanding to really to then create a quantitative, a survey method where you take some of the some of the themes that came out of the conversations and some of the overarching ideas, and you test that at scale with hundreds or thousands of respondents where you can see did this small sample size, did what I learned from the small sample size, prove out to be true when I talk to a much larger sample size? So the combination of those two things is really a way to have confidence that what you're learning and what you're hearing is true for the population and not just the few people you happen to talk to that day.

SPEAKER_01 14:25

And this is probably really good exercise to when you look at long-term planning, really, and and and thinking in uncertain periods like this. Uh, because it's important to go, I would imagine it's important to go beyond just thinking about next week. You have to go, you know, a year, two, maybe three out to say this is where we want to be, this is how we're going to get there, and this is why we need to get there.

Long-Term Vision And Brand Trust

Final Takeaways And Subscribe

SPEAKER_00 14:47

Yeah, absolutely. Um, you know, it's what that gives you in uncertain times, thinking out into the future is something to ground yourself in. Um, you know, we when we're floundering, we always need something to sort of come back to and ask ourselves is this aligning? Is this getting me in the right direction? And that's where really mapping your vision for your company, for your organization, for your farm, for your business, um, that's where knowing where you want to be 10 years from now, five years from now, three years from now, a year from now, if you think those things through and map out what that looks like, then you can measure every decision based on is it putting me in the right direction? Is it getting me a step closer to that? Um, and that's that's really why the short-term decisions can have really long-term effects. And often the mistake that we see organizations making is especially when margins are tight, when cost pressures are high, they cut things from the budget that feel like cost savings, but ultimately end up hurting them in the long term. And things that affect brand trust, things that affect brand perception, um, those are critical to invest in right now. There's study after study shows that organizations that invest during a recession have long have higher sales growth post-recession than other companies. So this is actually the time to kind of lean in, be more visible, put your value out there, tell your story, because it's going to help you, you know, not only get closer to your long-term vision, but it's going to help you set a foundation for growth once the uncertainty passes.

SPEAKER_01 16:37

Any final thoughts, words of wisdom that you'd like to leave our audience with today?

SPEAKER_00 16:43

Yeah, I would just like to say, you know, um, agribusiness, agriculture as an industry has always involved a high level of uncertainty. I think for some of us, that's actually what gets our blood pumping. That's what keeps us so um, you know, ingrained in the industry. So it's not a matter of avoiding risk. The organizations that are going to really come out ahead in all of this uncertainty are the ones that are making smart bets and really um making the value that they bring to the industry and to their customers clear during this time.

SPEAKER_01 17:18

Our thanks to Emily Sord, Vice President of Inspire, for joining us here today. I'm Sarah Muirhead, and you've been listening to Feedstuffs in Focus. If you would like to hear more conversations about some of the big issues affecting the livestock, poultry, grain, and animal feed industries, subscribe to this podcast on your favorite podcast channel. Until next time, have a great day and thank you for listening.