Farming Seasons and Your Agribusiness Marketing Calendar

Plan your marketing around your customers’ buying decisions, regular purchases and urgent needs. Then factor in delivery lead times, EOFY and relevant events. The farming year shapes all of these, so it should shape your marketing calendar too.

Below, we explain what a marketing calendar is, show an example for a grain machinery dealer, and walk through how to build your own. For the bigger picture on how we approach rural marketing, explore our agricultural and rural marketing services.

Key Takeaways

A marketing calendar can be a simple month-by-month list of what you’ll promote, and why then. For agri suppliers, the farming seasons supply most of the “why”.

Sort purchases into planned upgrades, recurring buys and urgent needs. Each peaks at a different time.

Keep some marketing running between your main buying periods, then increase activity when customers are more likely to need what you sell.

Plan with triggers like opening rain, not just fixed dates.

What is a marketing calendar?

A marketing calendar is a month-by-month plan of what you’ll promote, who to, through which channels and, most importantly, why that month. For an agri supplier, most of the “why” comes from your customers’ farming seasons, with a few fixed dates such as EOFY and field days layered on top.

It doesn’t need to be complex. For a lot of businesses, a dot-point list in a shared document is plenty. Each month just needs four things:

What’s happening on farm, such as sowing, spraying, harvest or mustering
What customers are deciding, reordering or likely to need urgently
What you’ll run, meaning the message, offer and channel
What you need to start early, such as ordering lead times, bookings or stock

If you can’t explain why an activity belongs in a particular month, check whether its timing reflects your customers’ needs or simply repeats what you’ve done before.

What does one look like? An example for a grain machinery dealer

Here’s an illustrative calendar for a grain machinery dealer serving winter-cropping customers in southern NSW. It shows how upgrade campaigns, servicing reminders and breakdown support can fit together across the year.

December to January: harvest wraps up

Book post-harvest inspections while problems are fresh. Growers know exactly what went wrong a few weeks ago.
Start upgrade conversations early enough to meet manufacturer ordering deadlines. Growers have just spent weeks finding their machine’s limits.
Run: calls and email to existing customers, trade-in valuations.

February to March: before sowing

Close header orders for next harvest. Lead times can run to many months (see the note below).
Get seeding gear and parts ready. Growers are preparing rigs and locking in inputs ahead of sowing.
Run: search ads for seeding parts and service, a workshop open day, rural press.

April to May: sowing

Prioritise parts and breakdown support. Breakdowns on seeding rigs can’t wait. Keep search ads on, list your hours clearly on Google and make sure the phone gets answered.
Run: short brand reminders alongside your search ads. During sowing, keep messages brief and focus on the parts and support customers may need immediately.

June: end of financial year

Tax-planning conversations should already be under way. Start them in April, not the second week of June, because quotes, finance and delivery all take time.
Run: follow-ups on open quotes, with the machine’s benefit in the lead rather than the tax angle.

July to August: crop in the ground

Open pre-harvest service bookings. Machines ordered in summer start arriving, and the workshop fills up fast closer to harvest.
Run: a pre-harvest service campaign and invitations to your field day site.

September: field days and final checks

Make the most of Henty Machinery Field Days with booked meetings, proper lead capture and fast follow-up.
Stock harvest parts before the rush.

October to November: harvest starts

Prioritise breakdown support again. This is peak time for breakdowns, parts and hire. Use search and your Google Business Profile to help customers find you, publish after-hours contact numbers and keep essential parts in stock.
Make a note of who’s struggling with their gear. That’s your December upgrade list.

About the timing in this example: Southern NSW harvest generally runs through November and December, starting with canola and barley, based on GrainCorp’s harvest updates, and canola sowing has traditionally started around Anzac Day. Both shift with the season. Ordering deadlines vary by brand and year. As one example, Case IH’s ordering window for 2025 combines ran from December 2024 to February 2025, so check current timing with your manufacturer before you set dates.

The dealer is planning for three types of purchase. Planned header upgrades are ordered in summer. Recurring service and parts follow each season. Urgent needs land right in the middle of sowing and harvest. That’s the core of building your own calendar.

How do you build a marketing calendar around the farming year?

Build your calendar around the customer groups you serve. A cotton grower, grain grower and cattle producer can need the same product at different times, depending on their region and farming activities. These five steps will get you there.

If you’re still working out how to communicate with your audience, start with how to market a business to farmers and rural customers.

Step 1: Map your customers’ seasons

Start with when your customers are flat out. Cotton Australia’s regional growing calendar shows October-November planting and March-June picking for most regions, with different timing in northern Australia and the Emerald and Dawson Valley areas. Other enterprises look quite different:

Winter crops (wheat, barley, canola) are sown in autumn and harvested in spring or summer.
Sugarcane crushing traditionally runs from about June to November.
Northern beef works around the wet season, roughly December to April, with mustering starting in earnest after Easter.

Then build around the region you actually serve. “Irrigated cotton, Darling Downs” and “dryland grain, Wimmera” need separate calendars, even if you sell both the same product.

Step 2: Sort purchases into planned, recurring and urgent

Not every purchase happens in the quiet months. For breakdown repairs and replacement parts, the busy season can be exactly when customers need you. Different purchases follow different rhythms, so sort yours into three types:

Purchase type	When it’s decided	When it’s bought	What your calendar should do
Planned upgrades (headers, seeders, irrigation systems)	In the quieter windows, often straight after a season exposes a problem	Months ahead of when it’s needed, because of lead times	Run persuasion campaigns early, working back from the delivery date
Recurring purchases (inputs, parts, servicing)	Largely already decided, so the question is who and when	Just ahead of use, often as pre-orders	Send reminders and pre-season offers, timed ahead of each season
Urgent needs (breakdowns, pest outbreaks)	On the spot	During the busiest weeks	Be easy to find and quick to answer, with search campaigns running and service hours published

Inputs show how recurring timing works. A Victorian rural store manager told Grain Central that fertiliser has traditionally been sold in November and December for pick-up in February and March.

The trap is treating busy periods as “go quiet” time across the board. For planned upgrades, that’s often fair. For parts, service and urgent needs, harvest is your peak. Keep relevant search campaigns running, publish your service hours and make contacting you straightforward.

Step 3: Set an always-on base, then add seasonal bursts

Keep some marketing running between your main buying periods, then add activity when customers’ needs become more relevant. In practice, that’s two layers:

A steady base all year keeps you on the shortlist, through rural press, regional radio, social reach in your territory and a well-kept Google Business Profile.
Seasonal bursts add heavier spend in each window, through search, retargeting, direct mail and dealer follow-up.

Why pay for marketing when few people are buying? Ehrenberg-Bass research estimates up to 95% of business buyers aren’t in the market at any one time. When a farmer does come into the market, they’re far more likely to call a name they already know.

Step 4: Lock in the fixed dates: EOFY and field days

EOFY. June has historically been a strong month for machinery, especially when tax incentives apply. Farm press linked the June 2022 tractor rush to the Temporary Full Expensing program. It isn’t automatic, though. In 2026, carsales reported that “the usual end of financial year lift never materialised in June.”

So plan for EOFY, but don’t bet the year on it:

Check before you promote tax benefits. If your EOFY promotion mentions the instant asset write-off, check the ATO’s current eligibility guidance before publishing. Allow time for customers to get advice, arrange finance and meet delivery or installation deadlines.
In a good year, your EOFY competitor can be a bank account. Primary producers can put pre-tax income into a Farm Management Deposit and claim the deduction that year. “Save tax” alone won’t win against that. “Here’s what this does for next season” might.

Field days. AgQuip’s organisers report more than 50,000 visitors across the three-day event. If a field day attracts your customers, schedule invitations, booked meetings and follow-up around it.

Treat a field day as the middle of a campaign, not the whole thing:

Four to six weeks out: geo-targeted ads around the event region and invitations to book a time at your site.

On the day: capture each conversation properly, with name, enterprise, what they’re looking at and when they’d buy.

Two to six weeks after: follow up before customers enter their next busy period.

Before booking a stand, check whether the event attracts the customers you want to reach. If your customers aren’t in that region, you may be better off walking the event and booking meetings.

For the practical preparation and follow-up, see our guide to promoting your agribusiness at field days.

Step 5: Match your message to each window

Each window needs a different job from your marketing:

Before a busy period: persuade. Use comparisons, demonstrations, pre-orders and dealer visits.
During a busy period: prioritise messages customers can act on quickly, such as service availability, parts and booking reminders.
After a busy period: capture. Use follow-ups, trade-ins and “what would you change next year?” conversations.

Timing within the day matters too. ACM Agri’s 2024 readership research identified agricultural news reading peaks in the early morning, at lunchtime and in the evening, which is a useful guide for scheduling emails and ad delivery.

If you’re not sure where to start, this is how we’d typically map it:

If you sell…	Persuade (planned)	Remind and pre-order (recurring)	Be ready (urgent)
Grain harvest machinery	Dec-Mar, as order books open	Jul-Sep pre-harvest service	Oct-Dec harvest
Irrigation (cotton)	Jun-Aug, after picking	Pre-season checks before planting	Dec-Feb irrigation season
Sugar harvest equipment	Dec-May, outside the crush	Pre-crush servicing	Jun-Nov crush
Crop inputs and agronomy	Nov-Jan, program planning	Feb-Apr ahead of sowing, then top-dressing	In-season pest and disease pressure
Northern livestock services	Feb-Apr, late in the wet	Pre-muster bookings	May-Nov muster

Treat these as starting points. Your own sales history beats any table on a blog, including this one. If you’d rather have it mapped for you, here’s how our agricultural marketing work starts.

What if the season doesn’t follow the calendar?

Seasons rarely stick to the plan. ABARES’ September 2026 outlook forecast winter crop production down 12%, with conditions favourable in South Australia, Victoria and southern NSW but poor in northern NSW and Queensland. Those regional differences can change which products you promote and where you put your budget.

That’s why we’d build the calendar on triggers as well as dates:

Opening rain arrives: release the pre-season burst for that region.
Conditions turn dry: review demand by product and region. Some customers may postpone upgrades while needing more irrigation servicing, repairs or water-efficiency support. Adjust messaging and spend based on enquiries and customer conversations.
A big harvest comes in: bring upgrade conversations forward.

In practice, that means keeping some budget flexible until conditions are clearer. It also means having two versions of key creative ready, one for a good season and one for a tough one.

Want a calendar built around your customers’ year?

We help agri suppliers map their customers’ seasons, sort their purchase types and plan the media to match. If your sales data already shows clearly when people buy, you may not need us for the calendar itself, so start there. If it doesn’t, or you sell into several enterprises at once, talk to us about agricultural marketing.

You don’t necessarily need to spend more than other suppliers. Focus on reaching farmers when they’re deciding what to buy, preparing to reorder or need urgent help.