Viewpoint collision: Is there any living space for traditional dealers?

Author: Wu Yan

During the Spring Festival, the author visited the countryside and deeply felt the urgency of rural land circulation. Taking a small village adjacent to the Yangtze River in Anhui Province as an example, hundreds of acres of cultivated land are now only cultivated by five 60-year-old farmers, a considerable number of which are abandoned. According to local people, a large planter will enter the village after the year and contract the farmland of the village at a price of 100 yuan per mu. At present, the concentration of cultivated land is irresistible, and the agricultural production mode is undergoing great changes. Under the new situation, does the traditional distributor still have room for survival?

Party A's dealers should follow the trend

As far as the industrial chain is concerned, the agricultural materials dealer is a channel connecting industry and agriculture. The agricultural production mode has changed, and the role of the agricultural materials dealer must also be adjusted. If the agricultural production model of one household corresponds to a large number of agricultural materials dealers that are spread all over the villages and towns, then the scale of agriculture corresponds to comprehensive service providers that provide products, technology, management, etc.

On the one hand, based on the increasing concentration of arable land and the continuous transfer of rural labor, the number of agricultural production entities will be significantly reduced in the future. For agricultural materials dealers, this also means the shrinking of service objects. Therefore, it can be predicted that in the future, some dealers who do not adapt to the new situation and lack of new ideas will withdraw from the stage of agricultural means circulation.

On the one hand, the new agricultural production situation is breeding new development opportunities. Among them, agricultural socialized service organizations are particularly eye-catching. Taking rice as an example, socialized services can cover the whole process from seedling cultivation to machine farming, machine transplanting, machine defense and machine harvest. For agricultural means dealers, if a similar service organization is established, it can not only implant product sales into it, but also obtain value-added benefits through services.

In a word, in the general situation of the rapid promotion of agricultural intensification, the scale of agricultural materials dealers will be reduced, and the business model will be transformed to service providers. It will be difficult to have a foothold in the future market simply relying on selling products.

Party B will never change

No matter how the organizational form of agricultural production will change in the future, the group of agricultural materials dealers will not disappear. As a social division of labor, they do not conflict with each other in terms of products, services or both. In other words, with the rise of large-scale agriculture, it can be predicted that some traditional dealers will transform to service providers, while others will continue to play the role of distributors of agricultural products.

The transportation, storage and distribution of fertilizer products also need professional enterprises to operate, which is difficult to replace by ordinary agricultural technology service providers. Therefore, from the perspective of the industrial chain, the future agricultural materials dealers will not only take charge of marketing and services, but on the contrary, the distributors will be more professional, and the division of service and circulation will be more detailed. Of course, due to the progress of science and technology, the form and format of distribution of agricultural materials may change. For example, the emerging e-commerce is worthy of attention.

Based on this, the transformation path of agricultural means distributors is not limited to service. It is a choice to be professional agricultural means distributors to improve circulation efficiency and service quality through intensive cultivation network and brand operation.

(Sina Agriculture)