For the better part of 2 and ½ days the AGS / Silver Fern booth was full. Our team was deeply engaged with a continuous stream of customers and prospective customers. The visitors wanted to discuss software and how growers can improve operational results with the right software system.

Through these many conversations, themes emerge that give us a ‘micro-survey’ on what a small tranche of the grower community is thinking about regarding software.

Based on the many conversations I had with our customers and prospects here are my top 5 software takeaways from Cultivate ’25.

5. Software Systems Evolution and Support

AGS / Silver Fern CEO Adam van Wingerden emphasized how ‘persistent economic uncertainty’ is driving strategic conversations in his recent blog on our Cultivate 2025 takeaways.

Many of those conversations centered around the grower’s software systems. Growers want to know how software can provide added benefits, greater flexibility with changing business needs and automation to improve a grower’s operation.  Growers are also keen to fully leverage the technology to improve efficiencies amid a very uncertain environment for predicting future sales, costs and profits. 

It was clear from these discussions that growers need and desire a true strategic partner in their software provider. One who will provide competent, reliable support and one who will work to continuously evolve software systems with new capabilities, better protections and deeper insights.

4. Data and Analytics

Growers operate in a complex environment driven by weather, perishability, and consumer sentiment. A grower’s operation creates many data points that can drive better decision making through all phases of the seasonal life cycle. Production planning, inventory, crop maintenance, availability distribution, order fulfillment, and logistics are big data sources for insights and improvement potential with the right data analytics and automation.

Growers want to leverage data for better insights into issues and opportunities. They want their employees to spend less time manually creating the data story to derive an ‘answer’ and more time working on the business needs and opportunities. They expect the system to do the analytic work for them. Automation, insights, and analysis are all becoming expected services of software systems.

3. Production Planning and Inventory

Production planning and the requisite raw material sourcing is still, even in 2025, a huge source of inefficiency in our industry.

Growers continue to labor under the difficulties of balancing managing the data, vendor communications and operational constraints to build a production plan that is achievable and can bring them financial success.

Many growers, even many of the larger marquis growers in our industry, are still firmly mired in the Excel Labyrinth for their production planning, space analysis, and sourcing and procurement activities.

Many growers voiced a need and desire for a true production planning system like our PRODUCE product that will allow them to have one system of record. They also want a system that will allow them to iterate and adjust plans and see results.

For our greenhouse operators space utilization and planning is also a felt need.

The growers expressed the need to have automated aggregations and rollups for raw material need calculations for plugs, cuttings, containers, soils and other raw materials associated with the production process.

Our team was able to have many conversations showing growers how a true production planning system can improve their business, reduce back office labor, reduce costs and improve the probability of achieving a plan.

2. Demand Planning and Replenishment

Because AGS / Silver Fern has a large customer base, many of our customers sell to “Big Box Retailers”.

There are two drivers of impact to our growers and customer prospects that provide plant material to these retail outlets.

The first driver is the continued spread and adoption of the “Pay by Scan” model.

More retailers are adopting this model which forces the grower participating to be much more diligent regarding retail metrics like store inventory levels, sales velocity, sell through, price erosion, and margin. Pricing of items also becomes crucial since the grower bears ALL costs for 100% of delivered product but only gets revenue on the sold through product.

Growers want software and data tools that help improve retail visibility, data management and financial analytics like our DTS product.

The second driver is that many customers are seeing market expansion with their retail partners. Some are taking over markets of other growers due to a variety of reasons. Others are seeing the popularity of programs they provide to one region to be expanded to markets or regions.

As store and SKU counts increase the need for automation in writing store replenishment orders is magnified.

Growers specifically want analytic support to improve kitting availability (to help optimize labor costs) and algorithmic support to suggest the best distribution of product to store to ‘get the right product in the right store at the right time’. And they want automated integration to back-end systems for fulfilling orders.

Software to support both drivers is necessary if a grower is to be financially successful in a pay by scan program.

1. AI

Most of the conversations we had at some point went to AI, or Artificial Intelligence. Questions such as “How can AI help our operation?”, “What will AI do in our industry?”, “How can AI drive better forecasting or replenishment?”, and many like it were common among the conversations.

As Adam said in his blog post, “AI is here – and its everywhere”. And AI is certainly on the minds of many growers.

One central issue of AI is the difficulty to separate hype from reality and to discern the best tool, approach, and process for a given business area. These technologies are evolving at a very rapid pace. Keeping up with day-to-day releases and announcements is challenging.

Growers need a strategic partner to help them leverage these tools in their business.

I have already written about how Large Language Models like Chat GPT with their generative capabilities can vastly improve creative activities like writing marketing materials, sales copy and customer correspondence. They can also greatly reduce research time when learning new things. These tools are also being used in other professions like Accounting, Legal and supply chain.

Further as the improvements and systemization occur in ‘Agentic AI’ more human like manual processes can be fully automated and simulated reasoning and intelligence.

And as the Large Language Models can now be augmented with local data, new, bespoke capabilities can be built.

Further, as combinations of these AI related technologies are used, greater data automation, insights, and nuanced pattern recognition are available across disparate systems to spot potential problems and opportunities much sooner.

Growers need all these capabilities.

Our team is dedicated to leveraging AI capabilities in our business, and in our tools. We are working to both use and deploy AI related capabilities to give growers measurable advantage in their business.

The Takeaway

Adroit software systems are no longer a ‘nice to have’ or ‘maybe someday’. Growers who continue to resist are at a disadvantage to other who adopt and leverage these technologies.

Software and data are now required, integral parts of successful operations. Software impacts every area of a grower’s operation and without an efficacious software system growers are literally flying blind in many aspects of their operation.

Our company’s strategic planning theme for this quarter is ‘force multiplication’. We understand just what a force multiplier software and data can be, and we are working to bring that leverage to all growers.

Our team is the best in the industry at helping growers use software to solve complex problems. Contact us to find out how our software tools can propel your business.