5 Trends in Grower Software Needs From Cultivate’25
July 25, 2025 
“What Are the Top 5 Software Trends from Cultivate 2025?” article graphic. | Advanced Grower Solutions
For the better part of two and a half days, the Advanced Grower Solutions/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 five 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 are 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 are 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.
For the last two software trend takeaways from Cultivate’25, please read the original article found on the Advanced Grower Solutions website.
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