Industry Veteran Keith Whitaker Joins Performance Brokerage Services Equipment Division

May 23, 2024

Performance Brokerage Services, North America’s highest volume dealership brokerage firm, welcomes industry veteran Keith Whitaker to the team as Partner for the Equipment Division.

Keith received an engineering degree from Iowa State University and an MBA from the University of Minnesota. He comes to Performance Brokerage Services with 35 years of experience in the agricultural equipment industry.

Keith began his career at John Deere, focusing on tractor design and testing. He later held management positions at Case Corporation, gaining M&A experience, and leading post-integration efforts. As VP of Sales & Marketing at an equipment OEM, he expanded dealer distribution and introduced retail financing, facilitating a successful transition to a strategic buyer, Kuhn, where Keith served as President of the new company. Keith transitioned to retail, serving as an interim CFO and General Manager for two John Deere dealership groups. Thereafter, he joined AGCO and became CEO of AGCO-Amity JV, leading its operational performance and strategic acquisition by Vaderstad in 2021.

Recently, Keith obtained his Florida real estate license, and is using his past M&A experience to help businesses create value through improvement in operational performance and preparation for ownership transition, including supporting them throughout the process. Performance Brokerage Services is proud to have Keith on the team and excited to work alongside him in the future.

Over the last 5 years, Performance Brokerage Services has advised on the sale of over 300 dealerships, making it the highest volume dealership brokerage firm in North America.

Source : Farm Equipment

Video: Seeing the Whole Season: How Continuous Crop Modeling Is Changing Breeding

Plant breeding has long been shaped by snapshots. A walk through a plot. A single set of notes. A yield check at the end of the season. But crops do not grow in moments. They change every day.

In this conversation, Gary Nijak of AerialPLOT explains how continuous crop modeling is changing the way breeders see, measure, and select plants by capturing growth, stress, and recovery across the entire season, not just at isolated points in time.

Nijak breaks down why point-in-time observations can miss critical performance signals, how repeated, season-long data collection removes the human bottleneck in breeding, and what becomes possible when every plot is treated as a living data set. He also explores how continuous modeling allows breeding programs to move beyond vague descriptors and toward measurable, repeatable insights that connect directly to on-farm outcomes.

This conversation explores:

• What continuous crop modeling is and how it works

• Why traditional field observations fall short over a full growing season

• How scale and repeated measurement change breeding decisions

• What “digital twins” of plots mean for selection and performance

• Why data, not hardware, is driving the next shift in breeding innovation As data-driven breeding moves from research into real-world programs, this discussion offers a clear look at how seeing the whole season is reshaping value for breeders, seed companies, and farmers, and why this may be only the beginning.