Lynsey McAnally:

Angus at Work, a podcast for the profit-minded cattleman. Brought to you by the Angus Beef Bulletin, we have news and information on health, nutrition, marketing, genetics and management. So let's get to work, shall we?

Hello and welcome back to Angus at Work. When it comes to the vehicles used on cattle operations, one could say they're the modern-day workhorse. But unlike nearly all the equipment we use in day-to-day operations, our pickups aren't always purchased from a salesman who understands the unique needs of farmers and ranchers. Enter the Certified Agriculture Group: an entity set on changing the landscape when it comes to purchasing your next farm or ranch vehicle.

I'm Lynsey McAnally and on today's episode, we’re joined by Pat Driscoll, CEO and founder of the Certified Agriculture Group, along with our very own Shauna Hermel to discuss the catalyst for forming the Certified Agriculture Group, the unique needs producers have when it comes to their vehicles, how a dealership-driven model similar to that of tractor dealerships could work for producers and the exciting new vehicle developed by farmers and ranchers for farmers and ranchers. So, let's dive in!

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Pat Driscoll:

I grew up milking cows, baling hay, picking stones, hoeing soybeans and all those things Midwest farm kids do. And went from that into farm broadcast and agricultural communications, agricultural PR. And then after my dad passed away, he and I had been working for years together on several projects, and I just lost my heart for all the things we had worked on. And I went a whole different direction. I went into consumer marketing and consumer communications before coming back home to agriculture.

Shauna Hermel:

Could you explain a little bit to me about what the Certified Ag Dealer program is, how it originated and what you're hoping to accomplish there?

Pat Driscoll:

Yeah, so the history on Certified Agriculture Dealer program, which is how we started. Now we're of course the Certified Agriculture Group because we have all these other pieces, but the Certified Agriculture Dealership program, which is still our heart and soul, was spawned from the RAM “God Made a Farmer” Super Bowl commercial that aired, I believe 12 years ago. Now — because of the work that I had been doing, Shauna, and other spaces in major music festivals, special events and those kinds of things — I had worked closely with a lot of field guys for Daimler Chrysler at that time. And they had all graduated. By the time that Super Bowl ad ran, they had all graduated to the fourth floor in Auburn Hills, Mi. That's the floor of the headquarters that is the RAM floor. And so when that commercial aired, I literally texted a couple of the guys and said, ‘This is amazing. I had no idea you guys were going to do this. And as a farmer, as a friend, I just wanted to say thank you. But the business side of me is asking, it's probably the best call to action I've ever seen in agriculture. What do you want me to do? Because it's not clear to me.’ Shauna, there was no answer. There was an incredible call to action, but there was no action. And this is a text conversation going on during the Super Bowl.

Shauna Hermel:

And I remember the ad, I don't remember who played in the Super Bowl.

Pat Driscoll:

Yeah, I don't either. After that ad it's like the rest of it's a blur. That ad is the clarity. But I kind of concluded it by saying, ‘When you guys have figured out that you've opened up something that is much bigger than you expected, give me a call.’ And it didn't take a week to get a call to say, ‘What in the hell did we do?’ That was the question because we've never had a response to anything like we've had to that ad. And so went down to Auburn Hills to spend time with the RAM executive team talking about the impact that had on agriculture. And in short, they had made a promise to farmers and ranchers and they needed to deliver on the promise. And the question was, well, how do we do that? And we went back, our team went back at that point and came up with several ideas for them over the course of that spring and summer and went back in the middle of the summer, went back and gave them three ideas.

And the one that immediately surfaced as the favorite was this concept for an elite network of truck dealers that would specialize in taking care of agricultural customers. And that was the beginning of the Certified Agriculture Dealership program. By June of the next year after that Super Bowl ad is when it officially launched, and it was a RAM exclusive program for several years. It was about two and a half years ago that we went brand neutral. We worked with Toyota dealers and Nissan dealers as well. And the whole idea behind this is as farmers and ranchers, pretty much everything we buy for our operations, we work with dealers who only work with farmers and ranchers. Our dealer experience is a very different dealer experience. In some ways it's kind of a spoiled experience seriously, because we have the luxury of working with dealers who only work with us.

So they know us and except when we go to buy a truck, we're usually stuck with a minivan salesperson. So the whole idea behind Certified Agriculture Dealerships are to have truck dealers out there of any truck manufacturer that feel more like a tractor dealership and implement dealership, feed, seed, gates, whatever. We're buying from the kinds of dealers that we're used to working with. So we want those dealers to feel more like that, more familiar and to offer us the kind of value that we want that we need from that truck. And so that's why we've got Ag Pack, CAD 5, Certified Agriculture Dealer truck financing. We've got CAD Protect, which is an agricultural service contract product that only Certified Agriculture Dealers can offer.

Shauna Hermel:

And have you been able to structure that to where only those Ag Dealers can be able to offer those programs and services?

Pat Driscoll:

So really it's the dealers themselves enroll in the program. They have to go through our training. We require a minimum of three from the dealership to go through our training, one each again minimally from sales, Parts and Services. So no matter where the agricultural customer goes in that store, they've got at least one agriculture specialist that they can talk with. Once those three people at minimum go through our training so that they understand who the agriculture customer is, what our business model is, some of the basic language that we use in agriculture, for example, ‘Why is this guy a farmer and this guy a rancher?’ We walk through some of those language nuances and whatnot so that they're knowledgeable about this customer and who we are and what we need and why we need it, the seasonality of our business, all those things. So we've got at least those three people that understand the customer. Once those three are complete with the training, then the dealer becomes a Certified Agriculture Dealer. We maintain contact with our dealers. People come into the business and they leave the business. And as they leave the business, if we need to replace that person with another agriculture specialist, we make sure we stay on that to the best that we can and get a new person trained up in that department to make sure there's always somebody there that knows agriculture.

Shauna Hermel:

Okay. And then through that, you said you offer services and financing?

Pat Driscoll:

Yeah, so the big one that we do, we call Ag Pack. Ag Pack is a collaboration with now 24 different agricultural companies that put an exclusive rebate or discount on a truck sale. And so aggregated, we call that Ag Pack. We've got Michelin, BF Goodrich tires, we've got Gallagher Livestock equipment, Tartar Farm and Ranch Equipment, Agro liquid fertilizer, Valent crop protection, Penultimate pin hitches.  Again, 24 different partners. You aggregate their rebates and benefits. If a farmer or rancher uses every one of the rebates and benefits to its maximum value, it's worth about $40,000 in savings on things you got to buy anyway.

Shauna Hermel:

So that $40,000, is that annually or would that be kind of a one-time? Once you get the rebate, you're done?

Pat Driscoll:

So it's a combination. Some of them are a one-time rebate or discount. Some of them are use it as many times as you want for the next 12 months. The Michelin-BF Goodrich rebates, they allow you to use those for up to two years and it’s the whole tire line. It's tractor tires, implement tires, even the airless tires. It's their whole product line and it's about $5,000 in tire rebates from Michelin-BF Goodrich. You've got up to two years to use those rebates. It doesn't have to be on the truck you just bought. You have another truck sitting on the farm that needs new tires. Well, you can use the rebates for that truck. There's no limitation on it. So it depends on the partner, whether it's a one time or inside 12 or 24 months. They're all a little bit different.

But we explain all of that. It's interesting, Shauna, because our second, I've got a post-it note right here on my computer, and it's our Top Three challenges. It's handwritten, our Top Three challenges. Number one: awareness. We work every day, and thanks to your interest in what we do, you're helping us with awareness. We want agriculture to know we're here, we're farmers and ranchers too. We built this so that we could provide a return on the truck investment and value on our truck purchase that we've never been able to get. But our second biggest challenge is disbelief. Ag Pack has gotten so big, it's hard for farmers and ranchers to believe it's true.

Shauna Hermel:

Oh, really?

Pat Driscoll:

Yeah. And it's interesting, but it is true. This aggregated value is actual, and if it weren't, they wouldn't be a partner. So we're constantly trying to get over the hurdle of getting folks to believe that it's legit. It's really true.

Shauna Hermel:

Wondering what's the catch?

Pat Driscoll:

Well, what's the catch? But the way it works for the customer is when you buy your truck from the Certified Agriculture Dealer, ideally you've already got your Ag Pack ID number. Go to agtrucktrader.com, get your Ag Pack ID number. You can use it at any Certified Ag Dealer in the country for any of their trucks, and that's new or used trucks. You get an Ag Pack, whether it's a new truck or a used truck, and you get an Ag Pack for every truck. It's not per customer. Now, a lot of these guys will buy two or three trucks in a year and they'll get an Ag Pack for every one of them. So now that $5,000 in Michelin rebates and discounts is $15,000. So you buy that truck, you give them your Ag Pack ID number, they will punch that number into the system and then that comes back to us.

We actually are the lead on the redemption process. That farmer or rancher will get a personal phone call from a real live human being based in the United States that is there as a resource for them, walk through each one of the offers, how it redeems, what can we help you to do to redeem them, and then when do you want me to call you? I will set up a schedule. I'll call you every other month or every quarter. When do you want me to call you to remind you you still have these benefits to use? So you don't have to keep track of what you've used or don't or what you've forgotten you had. I'll be your reminder. So that truck customer actually gets ownership in the callbacks and the reminders and everything else that happens throughout, so they don't have to remember. They've got a personal Ag Pack assistant that'll remind them. And we do that really intentionally because we know how busy things are and we really want our agricultural brethren to be able to get all this value

Shauna Hermel:

As that system works. Have you gotten a pretty favorable response from the ag community and having those reminders or, I know sometimes producers can be a little bit resistant to having somebody pop up on their telemarketers or however you'd like to say it, but calling them if they don't know that person.

Pat Driscoll:

No, and usually after that first phone call, our Ag Pack redemption team, every one of them comes from a farm. They understand agriculture, they can talk agriculture, and the response has been really overwhelming. People really enjoy talking with their Ag Pack redemption specialists. I can't tell you how many times they're talking about kids, weddings that are coming up, anniversaries, birthdays. It becomes a very personal relationship. And a lot of guys are busy and they may say, ‘Look, on the next call, I know I'm going to be in calving season. I'm probably not going to be able to take your call. Can you text me?’ Yeah, so they'll text or email. So they'll set up whatever communication process works best for them at any given time of the year, and that's how it'll play out.

Shauna Hermel:

Now, $40,000 is kind of the opportunity for rebates you mentioned. What would be kind of an average or what do you expect people to make use of

Pat Driscoll:

And we throw that $40,000 number out there. Again, it's if you use every benefit and every discount and rebate to its maximum value, we know not every farmer and rancher is going to use every one of those, but they're going to use some combination. So what we know from actual redemption data in 2023 is that the average farmer and rancher entered into the Ag Pack system saved $14,828. That's an actual number from real redemption data.

Shauna Hermel:

That could buy a couple cows.

Pat Driscoll:

They got that just because they bought the truck from an Ag Dealer. That is a return on investment, Shauna. And the truck, I always talk about this with folks, the truck is kind of like a hammer. You go to Lowe's, you go to Home Depot, you buy the hammer because you need the hammer. It's the most used tool in the tool chest, but I cannot show a return on that hammer. There's no return on investment, but it's the one I use the most. The truck is kind of like that tool in the equipment tool chest. I go out and I spend 80 grand on a truck and I can't show any return on investment, but I spend a million and a half on a combine and I can show you return on investment all day long. The truck is a hammer with Ag Pack, we actually can get you a return on the truck investment just by doing business at a different dealership.

Shauna Hermel:

Have you had any resistance to maybe narrowing down options for where you go to buy?

Pat Driscoll:

What I will say is when we were RAM only we would very frequently be asked, Why is this not available at my Ford dealer or my Chevy dealer or my GMC or Nissan, Toyota, whatever it may be. And then we would explain, we built this with RAM as an answer to the Super Bowl ad that they did in 2012. People would go, ‘Oh, well that makes sense!’ But times change, leadership changed at RAM, and priorities changed. And we looked at that and said, ‘We've been getting these questions for all these years. It's time for us to change too.’ And so we actually adapted to the pushback that we were getting, and that is make it available at dealers of all of the truck companies, which is what we're doing now. We've got Ford, Chevy, GMC, Nissan, Toyota dealers that are Ag Dealers and, Shauna, we're growing the network all the time. So think about the timing of all of this and you'll get a little glimpse into our world of the last five years. So we went brand neutral two and a half years ago. That puts us back at the beginning of 2022. If you'll recall, in 2022, we were in the middle of pandemic and supply chain disruptions.

There were no trucks available. Dealers did not need help selling something they didn't have. And so we were not able quickly expand into the Ford, Chevy and GMC space from RAM. Now, here we sit in the middle of 2024. It's been in the last six months that we finally have seen inventory levels coming back to normal. And it's really just been in the last six months that we've started to blow up and start adding Ford, Chevy and GMC stores. Those numbers are literally, we just added a new Chevy store two days ago, Rocky Mount Chevrolet. What we share with folks is our number of non-RAM stores is growing. We are still primarily RAM right now, but it's starting to even up across all the manufacturers, and we're always looking to add new stores. So if your favorite store is not a Certified Agriculture store, you need to go in there and say, if you value me as an agricultural customer, you need to be a certified agriculture store and get the rest of your farmers and ranchers in that area to tell them the same thing and say, there's this Ag Pack thing, and I could be saving my farm or ranch thousands and thousands of dollars if you were a Certified Ag Dealer.

And we're out there with a team adding dealers in all the time, but there is nothing that speaks louder to a dealer than a customer.

Shauna Hermel:

So what does it mean to a dealership? What's their part of the process?

Pat Driscoll:

So they commit to being a Certified Ag Dealer. They have to go through the training. They have to agree that they're going to be awarding Ag Pack. They're not going to be charging for Ag Pack. They're going to be awarding it at no cost to farmers and ranchers who buy from them. And there's three different levels for them to participate in the program that are in the big scheme of the money they spend just on advertising. It is so minuscule that they wouldn't even notice it's there. So it's a monthly fee, but it is a year long commitment. So we don't want dealers just jumping in and jumping out of the program when they're committing for at least a year.

Shauna Hermel:

Before I forget, you had mentioned that there were three challenges that you had and you told me the first and the second. What's your third?

Pat Driscoll:

Number three is how do we make ourselves easier to understand?

Shauna Hermel:

We're kind of covering that,

Pat Driscoll:

And we're kind of covering that. And the reason we're so complex is because what we are doing has never been done before and we can't go out and hire people or secure services from third parties to support what we're doing because what we're doing has never been done before. So literally everything that we do, we created, we own, we operate. Agriculture really gets more than anybody else. We are vertically integrated because we own this thing and run this thing. As farmers and ranchers from top to bottom, there are no third parties involved. That makes us a complex story and we have to do better at making ourselves simpler to understand.

Shauna Hermel:

So now do you have a headquarters office or do you work with remote people or how are you structured as a company?

Pat Driscoll:

We're decentralized. We do not own a piece of commercial real estate where people are housed and they're busy inside cubicles. We all work from our homes, our farms, our ranches. I got off on a little bit of a tangent there about Ag Pack and all of our partners, how that is of value, the kind of value agriculture will really appreciate in a truck purchase. But we also, you had asked about CAD 5 Certified Agriculture Dealer financing. That is a specialty finance product that only a Certified Ag Dealer can activate that gives farmers and ranchers payment terms on their truck just like they're used to getting on their equipment, annual payments, biannual payments, quarterly payments, whatever. Whatever the enterprise is that bought the truck within the operation. However that cashflow works, you can get an irregular payment term on your truck to match. We have CAD Protect.

What we've done is we've worked with ProGuard Warranty. They worked with us to create a service contract that is built specifically for agricultural trucks. Instead of excluding them, this policy caters to them and covers them. So again, only Certified Ag Dealers can offer CAD Protect. And then we've got another big one coming, Shauna, we're going to be announcing another product that only Certified Agriculture Dealers will be able to offer. It is a product that farmers and ranchers have always wanted, and that is a truck that is built to agricultural specifications. There's never been a purpose-built agriculture truck before, but this is huge.

Shauna Hermel:

Well, this sounds huge. And will it be a one-ton truck? Will it be a line of trucks or one special model? And do I get the first one?

Pat Driscoll:

We have a panel of 14 farmers and ranchers from around the country that have been providing input on what makes the perfect agricultural truck. And all 14 of them have already asked if they could have the first one too!

Shauna Hermel:

So I take it there's going to be a limited edition with each one numbered?

Pat Driscoll:

There's a long line of people wanting the first one. It is really, really exciting. It will not be limited to just one brand. And this will be a truck built by farmers and ranchers for farmers and ranchers. I give

Shauna Hermel:

You, you wouldn't know if any of those people on that committee would have been Angus breeders or commercial Angus breeders?

Pat Driscoll:

Yes. The tagline for the truck is going to be One Truck Built to Out Farm All the Others.

Shauna Hermel:

Oh, awesome. Now, one thing I know that will be important to producers and cattlemen of course, who like to protect their identity, they sign up for the Ag Pack number. How do you protect that information and how are you going to use that information?

Pat Driscoll:

That information is only used for our team to be able to communicate with them and help them redeem. We're the same way. We only use that once it's been activated to communicate with them about their redemptions. So they won't even hear from us until they've purchased a truck and use the ID number. And then they'll hear from us to help them redeem things and they won't hear from our Ag PAC partners either until they've chosen a product or one of the benefits. So you want to use the Michelin stuff. We don't do the redemption for Michelin. You tell us and then we'll let Michelin know that this particular producer has selected the Michelin benefit and Michelin needs to reach out. The producer will be told you'll be hearing from someone at Michelin. Okay. So we protect that stuff pretty aggressively.

Shauna Hermel:

And I take it for a current list of dealers. Then they can probably go to a website.

Pat Driscoll:

So we direct everybody to ag truck trader.com, and we use our trader.com different than everybody else does. Shauna, ours is not an open marketplace, so not anybody can list trucks for sale or trade or anything on there. And if you're not a certified agriculture dealer, you don't get to put inventory on there. We use agtrucktrader.com so farmers and ranchers can go to one place to find all the Certified Ag Dealers in the country and look at all of the Ag Pack-eligible inventory in the country in one spot.

Shauna Hermel:

Thank you for devoting so much time to me.

Pat Driscoll:

Well, Shauna, thank you so much for making time for us. We really appreciate it. You can help us with all three of those challenges on my computer awareness, disbelief, and complexity. Appreciate you taking the time to drill down and ask those questions.

Lynsey McAnally:

Listeners, for more information on making Angus work for you, check out the Angus Beef Bulletin and the Angus Beef Bulletin EXTRA. You can subscribe to both publications in the show notes. If you have questions or comments, let us know at abbeditorial@angus.org and we would appreciate it if you would leave us a review on Apple Podcast and share this episode with any other profit-minded cattlemen. Thanks for listening. This has been Angus at Work!