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Learn more about global customers, says farmer

By SHELLY STRAUTZ-SPRINGBORN
Michigan Correspondent

GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. — When Steve Pueppke was a youngster on his family’s 600-acre cash crop farm on the border of North Dakota and Minnesota, he knew his neighbors as friends, as well as customers.

“We hauled grain and sold cattle locally at the same places down the road,” he said. “I remember the names of our customers from 40 years ago. I remember their names because they were also our neighbors.”

During the Great Lakes Expo at DeVos Place in Grand Rapids last week, Pueppke – director of the Michigan Agricultural Experiment Station at Michigan State University – reminisced about those days in the 1960s to a room full of industry officials, fruit and vegetable growers, as the keynote speaker during the expo’s annual Industry Outlook Luncheon.

“All of us in 1968 knew what agriculture was all about,” Pueppke said. “At the time we understood who our markets were and how to meet the needs of our stakeholders.”

But, Pueppke said, globalization has changed everything. “At the time, it was inconceivable that diners in exotic places around the world would have anything to do with what we were doing on our farm,” he said.

Today, however, farmers must be more aware than ever of the changing world and responsive to its needs.

“We left the world where it was profitable for producers to simply grow stuff,” Pueppke said. “Suddenly, global matters.” Growers internationally “can deliver to our customers sometimes better than we can do ourselves.”

A challenge is that “few of us can speak their language,” he said. According to Pueppke, in order to remain competitive in a global marketplace, farmers need to “understand their politics, their social systems an their customs.

“They know about us. We need to learn to speak to them in their language,” he said. “If we can truly understand who our customer is, then we have opportunities.”

Pueppke said the agricultural industry is grappling with a new breed of customer who wants to know where their food is coming from, how it is grown and harvested, if it is organic and more. He shared a story about a trip he took to Stockholm, Sweden. While there, the group visited a farm and toured a broccoli field. The grower produced both conventional and organic broccoli because that’s what the processor required.

“The processor would only accept conventional broccoli if they could get organic broccoli, too,” Pueppke said. “That’s an example of changes in the supply chain in response to customer demand.”
To be successful in the future, he said farmers cannot continue to rely on the old markets he and his family knew back in the 1960s.
“We have to know as much as we can about our global customers,” he said. “And we have to ensure that our processors are better prepared to cope with globalization.

“Knowledge, goods and talent are moving around more freely today than they have in the past. We can’t confine Michigan knowledge, goods and talent to Michigan, and we can’t keep those goods out of the state when they come from other places.

“In Michigan, we have to think about what we have that they don’t have, or what could we have,” he said. “A farmer needs to know what people need, what they want and what they’re willing to pay for it.

“The question now is how we in Michigan position our industry to meet those needs.”

The Great Lakes Expo is one of the largest trade shows for fruit and vegetable growers, featuring more than 300 exhibitors and dozens of educational workshops.

12/17/2008