Who will dig the first pot of gold in the agriculture industry?
In the past one or two years, countless investors and new farmers have plunged into agriculture for all kinds of purposes, but more than half of them can no longer keep going, either suffering from losses or having already announced their exit from agriculture, with truly profitable players being very few.
Who will dig the first pot of gold in the agriculture industry?
Without exaggeration, despite the hot investment, 2015 may be the coldest year for new agriculture. From a macro perspective, the slowdown in economic growth, the decline in consumers' purchasing power, the upcoming stricter Food Safety Law and the still-unclear rural land policy together constitute a less-than-optimistic external environment, which will have a considerable impact on the new agricultural economy.
From a meso perspective, the various forces that blindly plunged into the new agriculture movement amid the noise mostly do not understand the characteristics of the agricultural economy or are suffering from selective blindness. First, agriculture is greatly affected by natural factors, and thus carries greater risk, with cost control and quality control remaining unstable. Second, the cycle for generating returns is long. Because agricultural production cycles are long, ranging from a few months to several years, the formation of returns generally can only be completed at the end of an agricultural production cycle. For investments in agricultural infrastructure such as water conservancy facilities, land leveling and soil improvement, returns require many years of patient waiting. Furthermore, agricultural production responds slowly to the market and adapts poorly. Agricultural products have long production cycles and are greatly affected by natural conditions, so structural adjustments always appear strongly lagging, and the ability to adapt to market changes is very weak.
From a micro perspective, many enterprises entering new agriculture today are plagued by problems such as a weak management foundation, extremely scarce marketing capabilities, a severe shortage of specialized talent, and stretched follow-up funding. Compared with industrial and service-sector enterprises, agricultural enterprises' shortcomings in these areas are even more obvious.
So recently I have been repeatedly calling for this: new agriculture needs new thinking. We face many difficulties, but the changes and opportunities before us are even more numerous. Whether it is the greater capital and resources brought by globalization, the more business opportunities brought by urbanization, or especially the new opportunities created by the mobile internet, all of them may strike and change our thinking, giving us the ability to redesign from the top down.
At present, more and more people realize that agricultural product marketing is one of the biggest challenges in the new agricultural economy. In recent years, the abundant upstream capital has caused production capacity to become relatively saturated or even excessive, while overly extensive operations have made the problem of product homogenization especially serious. As a result, many agricultural products produced with great effort, labor and money cannot be sold, becoming a sword of Damocles hanging overhead. For example, at the end of 2014, many people were predicting that in the first half of 2015, a large amount of inventory would cause prices in China's apple market to plunge.
If that really happens, many enterprises will very likely fall in the final hundred meters, sacrificed in the darkness before dawn arrives. If so, no matter how beautiful the new agriculture phenomenon is, it will have nothing to do with us.
The most important changes may need to start from the following three aspects: replace production thinking with hit-product thinking, to avoid overproduction and homogenized competition - this is fundamental; replace advertising thinking with cultural and creative thinking, since agricultural product marketing cannot rely on large capital and heavy promotion, and the key lies in striking directly at people's hearts and creating higher added value - this is the key; finally, replace channel thinking with community thinking, because in the mobile internet era, we may already be able to skip intermediate channels and reduce layers, thereby creating our own consumer community power - this is the center of the change. So then, who will dig the first pot of gold in the agriculture industry? I hope we can soon see the person who digs the first pot of gold drive the agriculture industry into prosperity!