From the Rodeo to the Field: Listening to the Customer Like in the Arena

Have you ever noticed that a rodeo is much more than music and bull riding? In the heat of the arena, the crowd shows — in the rawest way — what they truly value: proximity, emotion, experience. In agribusiness, the same principle applies. Farmers want to be heard, recognized, and supported according to their real needs — not based on laboratory assumptions.

Agricultural R&D innovation doesn’t begin under a microscope or in the code of an AI algorithm. It begins in fence-line conversations, technical field visits, and face-to-face dialogue. As Clayton Christensen reminds us, a product succeeds when it solves the job-to-be-done — the task the farmer truly needs to accomplish daily, whether reducing losses from Spodoptera frugiperda, optimizing NPK use, or expanding the soybean planting window.

The rodeo arena teaches us that intimacy with the audience creates loyalty and generates insights. The crowd returns because they feel part of the show. A farmer will return to your solution only when they perceive it was built from their reality — not from a PowerPoint slide. In market development terms, this means validating hypotheses in the field, measuring market fit with robust agronomic data, and adjusting quickly: test, learn, pivot.

👉 Your practical action: on your next field visit or ag expo, listen more than you talk. Write down the problems customers describe in simple language. Then translate those stories into product hypotheses. Prototype, validate, and only then scale. Innovation that truly transforms agriculture is born from the same energy that fills a rodeo arena: genuine connection with the people in the stands — or in the field.