How Dealers and Distributors Will Make or Break Agricultural Robotics Adoption

The five panellists, a pioneer robotics distributor, an innovation manager from one of Spain's most historic wine groups, the sales director of John Deere Iberia, the CEO of one of the country's most forward-thinking dealership networks, and the general manager of AG Group, didn't agree on everything. But they converged on one thing: the distribution network is not a passive channel. It is, or it needs to become, an active driver of transformation.

Digital adoption in Spanish agriculture: where things actually stand

Javier Fernández opened the session with data from the Spanish Ministry of Agriculture's 2023 observatory on digitalisation. The numbers painted a more mature picture than many might expect: 86% of farmers already use digital tools for data collection, 32% have tractors equipped with Isobus, and another 32% are using some form of guidance system.

“We sometimes say the sector isn't ready,” Javier observed, “but there is already a foundation to build on. Robotics and autonomy are built on top of automation, and guidance systems, Isobus, these are already a level of automation in the field.” The journey to autonomy is not starting from zero.

Equally revealing was another finding: when farmers considering new technology were asked where they would go for support, they said their supply networks, cooperatives, and machinery dealerships. Not manufacturers or consultants, but the people they already trust. “That puts the distribution network in a very specific spotlight,” Javier said, “and it puts a responsibility on all of us to be ready.”

Cost, complexity and connectivity: the three real obstacles

José María Ayuso, Innovation Manager at González Byass, structured the adoption challenge around three obstacles. The first is technical usability: the question a farmer asks is not “is this impressive?” but “does this work in my specific conditions?” He was candid about the gap between demonstration and real operational delivery. “We're breaking a paradigm. What worked before was very efficient. What we're moving to has to be at least as good before we commit.”

The second challenge is economic return. “The machine is wonderful, but it speaks to me in English and I ask it: what return am I going to get?” The third is regulatory: agricultural robotics is moving faster than the legal frameworks governing it, with liability, insurance, and operating permissions still unresolved in most markets.

José María drew a pointed comparison with electric vehicles, which benefit from purchase incentives and established support infrastructure. “Why can't I have something equivalent when I invest in electric agricultural machinery?” His three obstacles form a picture not of a sector resistant to change, but of one that requires a more complete offer before it can move with confidence.

Still in the introduction phase: a distributor's honest assessment

Pascual Galindo, General Manager of AG Group and one of the Iberian Peninsula's earliest pioneers in agricultural robotics distribution, was candid: “We are still in the introduction phase. There is no scalability yet in the robotics market.” That is not defeatism. It is a clear-eyed reading of where the adoption curve actually sits.

AG Group's response has been to identify clients with genuine potential and work intensively with them to prove the model before broadening reach. “The second key point is ROI,” he said. “If it's not profitable and efficient, it's worthless.” It is a standard many technologies in the field have yet to meet consistently.

He drew an instructive parallel with garden robotics, where AG Group distributes Husqvarna's Automower across nearly 400 points of sale. Twenty years ago, the idea of a robot cutting your lawn met with the same scepticism agricultural robots face today. Around 6,000 garden robots are now sold in Spain every year. “It's directly comparable. Once the product is ready and the network is prepared, adoption follows.”

Preparation work: what dealers need to do first

Luis Fernando Zárate, CEO of Agrícola Castellana, argued that the dealer's job is to prepare the ground so that when robots arrive, conditions are already right. “You can't expect a farmer who doesn't use auto-guidance, who doesn't document what he does, to suddenly want a robot to save him money he doesn't even know he's spending.” The prerequisite for robotics adoption is a prior journey of digitalisation.

Agrícola Castellana operates two parallel teams: one selling machinery in the traditional sense, another of ten agronomic engineers accompanying clients through digitalisation. They have also acquired Agrae, a precision agriculture platform delivering fertilisation cost savings of 30 to 55% through data-driven prescription mapping.

Luis Fernando was also direct about reliability. “The machines today are not reliable enough. If a robot is truly replacing an operator, it has to replace them completely, during the entire operational window.” His message to the industry was clear: Agrícola Castellana is ready to move when a genuinely reliable solution arrives.

Why dealers are narrowing their focus

Jaime Muguiro, Sales Director at John Deere Iberia, brought the manufacturer's perspective. John Deere currently has 22,000 connected machines operating in Spain alone, with 30 million hectares in the cloud. That infrastructure was not built by the manufacturer. It was built by the dealer network, one farm visit at a time. “The dealer is everything. It is the only way our investment in R&D reaches the last corner of Spain and Portugal.”

Today, John Deere's network in Spain and Portugal includes 70 to 75 precision agriculture engineers whose sole function is to accompany producers through digitalisation. “The dealer of tomorrow will need to sell a robot, deploy it, train the farmer, and service it when something goes wrong. That requires a very different kind of team than selling a tractor did thirty years ago.”

On artificial intelligence, Jaime identified two fronts: machine intelligence, exemplified by the See & Spray system treating only where weeds are present, and predictive support, using data from connected machines to anticipate failures before they happen. Both depend entirely on a dealer network capable of translating their output into something a farmer can act on.

The cultural shift that adoption requires

Luis Fernando Zárate was frank about the mindset barrier. “Learning doesn't happen until the learner is ready. And I find it genuinely frustrating, because the solutions exist, they're delivering real results, and yet the mental shift isn't happening fast enough.” He described farmers with hundreds of hectares who remain disengaged from tools that could transform their economics, while a smaller producer with a motivated successor moves faster than anyone.

“It's not always about scale. It's about wanting to.” Readiness to change does not correlate neatly with farm size or financial capacity. It correlates with curiosity and with the quality of the relationship a farmer has with the advisors around him.

José María Ayuso framed the same challenge differently. The changes coming to agriculture are not incremental, he argued. They are disruptive. “We've clicked over into a new era. And the support, the accompaniment, the ecosystem around these technologies has to be equally disruptive in response.” What matters is building the trust and human capacity to make the transition well.

Building the ecosystem that makes deployment possible

The panel's central argument was this: agricultural technology adoption does not live or die with the technology itself. It lives or dies with the ecosystem around it, the dealers who understand a farmer's operation well enough to know what he needs next, the distributors who can service a robot at short notice, the agronomists who can translate data into a language a farmer trusts. Each of those roles exists today in partial form. The work ahead is to complete them.

What the Field Day Spain panel made visible is that the people closest to the ground already understand this. They are not waiting for manufacturers to tell them what comes next. They are building the competencies, the teams, and the relationships that will determine whether the next generation of agricultural technology delivers on its promise or stalls at the demonstration stage.

“Get yourself in the hands of a good advisor who will accompany you on the journey,” Jaime Muguiro said in his closing. It sounds simple. But building the networks, the competencies, and the relationships that make that advice genuinely valuable is the work of years, and as this panel made clear, it is already well underway.

Panel: “The Role of Dealers and Distributors in Ag Technology Adoption” — Field Day Spain, GOFAR | Moderator: Javier Fernández (John Deere) | Panellists: Pascual Galindo (AG Group), José María Ayuso (González Byass), Jaime Muguiro (John Deere Iberia), Luis Fernando Zárate (Agrícola Castellana)

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