Fierce competition in agricultural input retail: where does the's transformation path lie?

In the past two years, as competition in agricultural input retail has intensified and large-scale growers and cooperatives have risen, retailers' sales channels have been hit to varying degrees, and dealers need to rethink and transform. The existing agricultural input, agricultural machinery and agricultural technology service systems are no longer capable of supporting large-scale agriculture. Even though some large-scale growers and cooperatives have purchased some modern agricultural machinery, the utilization rate is not high, and their operating costs are even higher than those of traditional agriculture. Under such circumstances, the author believes that a more refined social service system is needed for support, and suggests that dealers who want to transform can shift toward becoming plant protection service providers.

The editor believes that the professionalization and socialization of plant protection services can, while greatly improving production efficiency, also greatly reduce the use cost of agricultural machinery and the circulation costs of consumable agricultural inputs. Taking wheat harvesting as an example, professional "wheat harvesters" carrying out cross-regional harvesting operations can improve harvesting efficiency and at the same time greatly reduce labor costs.

At present, pest and disease control in the production of rice, wheat, corn, fruit trees, sugarcane and vegetables, as well as rice seedling raising and transplanting, fruit trees, and the harvesting of sugarcane and vegetables, are basically still carried out by manpower or simple tools. When small farmers purchase seeds, pesticides, fertilizers and agricultural machinery in a scattered manner, prices are marked up layer by layer through the operating links, pushing up the prices of agricultural input products and raising the overall planting cost. Apart from the fact that harvesting of some crops has basically achieved cross-regional operations, most agricultural services still have no large-scale service providers participating. For example, the socialization, full-process and cross-regional operations of agricultural tasks such as rice seedling raising and transplanting, fertilization, plant protection and drying have not yet emerged. Rice-growing areas in the south still rely on manual planting. Under the trend of increasingly higher labor prices, the planting benefits of this traditional agriculture are completely uncompetitive.

For large-scale growers and cooperatives, due to the lack of socialized, full-process plant protection service organizations, they are forced to invest themselves in purchasing expensive agricultural machinery with extremely low utilization rates, which means agricultural production not only bears heavy machinery depreciation costs, investment financial costs, storage costs and the wage costs of professional machinery operators, so it is naturally difficult for large-scale growers and cooperatives to elevate their profits to a higher level.

In the future, comprehensive plant protection service industries will provide convenience for agricultural operations such as pesticides, seeds, fertilizers, cultivation, management and protection, harvesting and drying, helping farmers greatly save agricultural input costs. The market space involved is very large, and it is one of the directions for dealers seeking transformation.