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Blog by Bill Schmidtgall, former FEMA Board Member and Past President (1995-1996) – reprinted with permission from Lessiter Media.

Today’s industry owes to those who perceived the need and took the actions to create the template that has transformed agriculture innovation in ways that are unable to be measured. Like so many other things, it can be taken for granted until it’s lacking.

I’ll lend a perspective from having grown up on a farm before entering the equipment industry with DMI Inc. (1976-1998) as CFO after years with Price Waterhouse auditing Fortune 500 companies. We all did what we would do given the chance — protect our dealer organizations, but we also hated it when trying to shoe-horn budding ideas into a skeptical distribution channel and asking them to swim upstream against their bread-and-butter major line.

I joined FEMA to network and learn the who, what and how of the specialty farm equipment industry. Participating as a member was invaluable.

FEMA created the environment of a “loose team of independents” who, while often competing with each other, loved agriculture and shared the common interests and complexity of gaining traction for budding innovation, communicating marketing information, finding affordable distribution channels, developing business practices and supplier relationships, and scaling critical affordable functions such as insurance, transportation and legislative engagement, to survive, and for some, to thrive.

The member companies often competed, but we all also had a common purpose — to thrive as the minnows among the sharks.

‘Heartbeat of Commercial Innovation Success’

FEMA was the “lifeblood interrelated circulatory system” of so much innovation that it’s impossible to conceive of what agriculture would look like today had FEMA not provided the template.

Innovation was conceived locally and, over time, spread regionally. Manufacturers built upon their successes and became the catalyst whereby majors eventually adopted and “legitimized” practices that have proven economically and environmentally critical to all involved in crop production. And for that matter, all of us in consumption, too — all of us who eat. We all benefited from the proverbial 20 years of hard work for what was perceived as overnight success.

Business principles education enabled those budding companies to survive, finding affordable distribution networks to work with dealers to provide and launch innovations that bolstered the dealer’s and customer’s bottom lines as proof of concepts long before the “’critical mass’” adoption by the major lines, raising the bar of agronomic practices and knowledge.

Supplier and distribution networking; the people-to-people relationships enabled practical, efficient and effective forums to find partners willing to “push new ideas” long before they were of scalable interest to the major lines. This was in no small part because the people were as driven by their love of agriculture as they were for profits, especially in the idea infancy stage.

The Associate Section worked to optimize much of the “back room” practices such as insurance, safety, transportation and legislative interaction that benefited the whole. And the networking councils helped create industry standards.

FEMA became THE place for people who created agriculture innovation, not because it was easy, or immensely profitable, but because they loved agriculture. And we competed together as a “loose team of independents” to discover and nurture the future, which would not have otherwise existed as we know it today.

Join the Conversation! Email your answer to the question: “What would be the industry impact had FEMA never come to exist or perhaps failed to find traction and permanence?” to MLessiter@lessitermedia.com.

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