The ERP Solution for the Year” 2025 in Agtech Breakthrough Awards 2025
AgriERP vs Traction Ag: Should Conservis and Granular Business Users Stay or Migrate in 2026?
Key Takeaways
If you only have a minute, this is the gist:
- Traction Ag now owns both products. It bought Granular Business in November 2022 and Conservis in December 2023, and its Advanced Farm Management tier is built from the two.
- “Stay” is a migration too. Traction says it plans to fold both products into its own platform. No date has been published, but staying means moving onto Advanced Farm Management, and leaving means moving somewhere else.
- The case for staying is strong if grain is your business. Traction’s platform is ag-first and covers grain positions, deliveries, settlements and crop planning in one place.
- The case for migrating gets stronger as finance and handling grow. AgriERP, built on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central and Oracle NetSuite, tends to fit when multiple entities, packing and traceability are the bigger strain.
- Decide on what hurts most. Grain settlement errors point one way; a slow close and lots you can’t trace point the other.
- Either move is manageable if you plan it. Get Traction’s terms in writing, get full data exports, pick a quiet window and run the old and new systems side by side.
Introduction
If you run your operation on Conservis or Granular Business, you’re facing a decision you didn’t ask for. Both products now belong to Traction Ag, Traction has said it plans to fold them into its own platform, and no date has been given. So the question isn’t whether things change, it’s where you want to end up when they do. Staying with Traction means moving onto its Advanced Farm Management tier, with new pricing and quite possibly a new data model. Migrating means moving somewhere else. Either way, you’re re-implementing.
This guide is built around that stay-or-migrate decision. We’ll recap what happened, lay out what it means for each product’s customers, make the honest case for staying with Traction, make the case for migrating, with AgriERP as the example we know best, and then give you a way to decide that’s based on your operation rather than ours.
How Conservis and Granular Business Ended Up Under Traction Ag
Traction Ag is young, and most of its growth has come through acquisition. Here is the sequence, as the companies and the trade press reported it, with the dates that matter for anyone trying to read the roadmap.
| Date | What happened |
|---|---|
| March 2020 | Traction Ag is founded in Indiana, according to its own history. Its first accounting tools launch in late 2021. |
| November 10, 2022 | Traction buys Granular Business from Corteva. Farm Progress reports the product is renamed Traction Enterprise Operations and, at first, runs as a separate service from Traction’s accounting. |
| December 2023 | Traction acquires Conservis, a Minneapolis company founded in 2009 that was owned by a Rabobank and Telus joint venture from 2021, per Conservis’s history and Traction’s timeline. |
| May 21, 2024 | Traction announces a $10 million Series A led by Cooperative Ventures, the CHS and GROWMARK fund. It says it has recently acquired and integrated solutions from both companies. |
| Today | Traction’s Advanced Farm Management page describes the tier as built from Conservis and Granular Business, “now part of Traction,” and says it plans to bring that functionality into its core Farm Accounting System. |
A few details are worth separating from the headline. Granular Business was the financial and operations product; Corteva shut down its separate Granular Agronomy service on August 31, 2022, before the sale. And as of mid-October 2026, we couldn’t find a published retirement date for either legacy product, or a statement that existing customers must move.
That gap is the real source of unease. Nothing is being switched off, but the direction is clear and the timing isn’t, and the practical effect is the same for every customer: at some point you’ll be moving onto something new.
Why This Is a Stay-or-Migrate Decision, Not a Wait-and-See
It’s tempting to sit tight until Traction announces something. The trouble is that the move is already underway on the vendor’s side, and waiting just means you make the decision later with less time. Here’s what it looks like from each seat.
If you’re on Conservis
Conservis is the clearest ancestor of the grain positions, deliveries and settlements work in Traction’s Advanced Farm Management tier, and Traction says it plans to bring that functionality into its core Farm Accounting System. So the path for a Conservis customer runs toward Traction’s own platform, on Traction’s timetable. Nothing changes on Monday, but your renewal, your data model and your reporting will eventually be Traction’s, not Conservis’s.
If you’re on Granular Business
After the November 2022 purchase, Traction renamed it Traction Enterprise Operations and took over support, according to Farm Progress. It ran separately from Traction’s accounting at first, and the Advanced Farm Management page now names it as one of the tier’s two foundations. The question for you is the same as for Conservis: when the merge happens, what moves, what changes, and what it costs.
If you’re evaluating Advanced Farm Management
You’re looking at a tier that is still being assembled from two products with different histories. That isn’t a reason to rule it out, since Traction says it has integrated them, but it’s a reason to ask what you would be running on day one and what changes in year two. Pricing is quote-based and the page gives no implementation timeline, so start there.
Before you weigh anything, ask Traction what staying involves: how long your product is supported, what Advanced Farm Management costs against what you pay today, whether your data and reports change, and what the migration plan looks like. Get it in writing. If the answer is “not much changes,” staying is an easy call and you can stop reading. If it’s a real re-implementation, you’re choosing between two re-implementations, and both sides deserve a fair hearing.
The Case for Staying With Traction Ag
It would be easy to treat a consolidation as a reason to leave, and that wouldn’t be fair. Conservis and Granular Business were chosen by serious operations for good reasons, and several of those reasons carry through to Traction’s Advanced Farm Management tier. If these describe your operation, staying is a strong default.
Built around farming from day one
Traction’s own platform ties field activity to the books, tracks breakevens per bushel and per acre as inputs hit the field, and produces CPA-ready, crop-year-accurate financials along with Schedule F and 1099s. For an operation that has fought generic accounting software, that ag-first logic matters.
Real row-crop and grain depth
The Advanced Farm Management page says it tracks “positions, deliveries, settlements, and grain contracts in one place,” with settlement matching so every load is accounted for. That is the heritage of Conservis, and it’s the work a grain-heavy operation does all season.
Field-level planning
Crop planning covers field, crop, input and scenario, with profitability analysis on top, and the tier is aimed at large, multi-entity farms with big teams. Granular Business brought Corteva’s farm management technology into the mix.
Connections to field data and payroll
Traction cites integrations with Climate FieldView and John Deere Operations Center, plus an integrated payroll add-on powered by Paylocity.
Public entry pricing
The plans page lists Basic at $95 a month, Plus at $195 and Pro at $395. Advanced Farm Management is quote-based, with no price shown.
For a US grain operation that wants one ag-native system for accounting and field operations, those are real strengths, and for plenty of Conservis and Granular customers they’ll be reason enough to move onto Traction’s tier and get on with the season. The case for migrating starts where those strengths stop.
The Case for Migrating
The case for migrating isn’t that Traction is weak. It’s that you’re about to pay for a re-implementation either way, and that’s the one moment when moving to a different kind of system costs no more than staying. If you move onto Advanced Farm Management, you’ll map your data, retrain your team and rebuild your reports. If you move somewhere else, you’ll do the same work once. The question is whether a farm accounting platform is still the right shape for your business, or whether you’ve outgrown it.
A few signs usually tell you. The month-end close takes weeks because entities are consolidated in spreadsheets. Product is received, packed, labeled and shipped, and the system that tracks the field isn’t the one that tracks the pallet. Lenders or auditors are asking for a ledger they recognize. The finance team lives in Excel and Power BI and re-keys numbers to get there. Any one of these is manageable; two or three together are the point where a farm accounting tool starts costing more than it saves.
There’s also the matter of control. After a consolidation, your product’s roadmap and your pricing are set by a vendor whose own platform is still taking shape. Some operations are comfortable with that. Others would rather their financial system sat on a platform with a long roadmap of its own and a large partner network behind it, so that the next change of ownership in agtech doesn’t land on their books.
If that’s where you are, the next question is what you’d actually move to.
Viable Options to Migrate To
Broadly, there are three kinds of system a Conservis or Granular Business operation can land on, and the right one depends on where your pain is.
Another ag-native farm management platform
Closest in feel to what you have now, usually quickest to learn, and best if grain operations are still the center of the business. The trade-off is that you’re buying another vendor’s roadmap, and the field is consolidating. Our guide to the best farm management software covers this group.
A general ERP on its own
Business Central, NetSuite or similar, implemented without an agriculture layer. You get the enterprise ledger and the partner ecosystem, and then you build crop years, harvest tickets, grower contracts and field costing yourself or do without them.
An agriculture ERP built on one of those platforms
This is where AgriERP sits. It runs on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central and Oracle NetSuite, so the ledger, dimensions and consolidation come from the platform, while the farm-specific pieces come built in. For a COO or CFO weighing it against Traction’s tier, three differences matter most.
An enterprise-grade financial foundation
AgriERP runs on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central and on Oracle NetSuite, so your general ledger, dimensions, intercompany and reporting come from platforms that large, multi-entity businesses already trust, with native multi-entity consolidation. Grant 4D, a potato grower on AgriERP, describes consolidation across eight entities dropping from weeks to 1.5 hours. Our guide to multi-entity farm accounting shows how that structure works.
Native handler and packing operations
If your operation receives, stores, packs or ships product, AgriERP supports lot control and GS1-128 labeling as part of the system rather than a bolt-on, so a lot can be traced from a sold pallet back to the field. Harvest tickets from the field post straight to Business Central as purchase orders, sales orders and inventory updates, which you can read more about in harvest management.
Built inside the Microsoft ecosystem
Excel, Power BI and Copilot sit on the same Microsoft foundation as AgriERP, which suits finance teams that already work there. AgriERP on Business Central keeps the Microsoft ledger and reporting, and the NetSuite option serves groups that have standardized on Oracle.
There’s one trade-off to know about. Field-equipment data such as Climate FieldView or Trimble stays in those platforms unless an integration is built, so if you want machine data inside the same system as your books, scope that early. To see how all of this lines up against Traction’s tier, here is a side-by-side.
Traction Ag Advanced Farm Management and AgriERP Side by Side
Here are the six areas that matter most when a COO or CFO compares the two. The table draws on each vendor’s public pages as of October 2026. Where Traction hasn’t published a detail, we’ve said so instead of guessing, and a call with either vendor is the way to confirm it.
| Area | Traction Ag Advanced Farm Management | AgriERP |
|---|---|---|
| Grain contracting | Tracks positions, deliveries, settlements and grain contracts in one place, with settlement matching for every load | Contract management for growers, suppliers and buyers with price management, plus harvest tickets and pool accounting. Not built around load-by-load grain position tracking |
| Financials | Ag-native accounting with crop-year, CPA-ready reports, Schedule F and 1099s. Traction says it plans to fold the tier’s functionality into its core accounting system | General ledger, dimensions and reporting on Dynamics 365 Business Central or Oracle NetSuite |
| Multi-entity consolidation | Built for large, multi-entity farms. The page doesn’t describe how consolidation works | Native multi-entity consolidation and intercompany on the Microsoft or Oracle platform |
| Mobile and offline | Work tracked from nearly any mobile device, with iOS and Android apps. Offline use isn’t stated | Mobile apps for field capture of labor attendance, harvest yields and material consumption |
| Implementation length | Not published. Traction offers a trial and optional professional services for data entry | Partner-led and begins with a fit/gap analysis. An AppSource implementation offer runs 10 weeks, and our implementation process runs in phases of 6 to 12, 8 to 14 and 10 to 16 weeks |
| Integration ecosystem | Climate FieldView, John Deere Operations Center, bank and billing feeds, and a Paylocity payroll add-on | The Microsoft ecosystem, including Excel, Power BI and Copilot. Equipment data integrations are built as needed |
No column wins every row, and that’s the point. Which row matters most depends on how your operation makes money and where it feels the strain, which is what the next section sorts out.
How to Decide: Stay or Migrate
There isn’t a universal answer, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling. The decision comes down to what your operation does all day and what’s likely to strain your systems next.
Stay if your business is grain and row crops at heart
If your daily work is positions, deliveries and settlements, if you want accounting and field operations in one ag-native tool, and if Traction’s direction suits you, staying in its ecosystem is a sensible choice. Published entry pricing and farm-specific tax reporting are real advantages, and moving always costs something.
Migrate if finance and handling have outgrown a farm accounting tool
That usually shows up as several legal entities that need true consolidation, product that is received, packed, labeled and traced, a finance team that works in Microsoft tools, or lenders and auditors who expect an enterprise ledger. It also suits groups that want their financial system on a platform, Business Central or NetSuite, with its own roadmap and a large partner network.
If you’re somewhere in between
A mixed operation with a strong grain side and a growing handling business should ask which problem costs more: grain settlement errors, or a slow close and lots you can’t trace. Whichever hurts more points to the right tool.
If you land on migrating, the next section covers how a move off Conservis or Granular Business works in practice. Most of it applies whichever direction you go.
If You Migrate: Planning the Move
Switching systems midstream is a big decision, and the safest way to make it is in stages. You’re not committing to anything in the first two steps, and they’re worth doing even if you end up staying where you are.
- Get Traction’s answers in writing. How long your product is supported, what the combined tier costs, whether your data changes, and which exports you get. The answers tell you how much time you have and how big the move is if you stay.
- Take stock of what you really use. List the contracts, deliveries, settlements, field records, inventory, payroll and reports your team touches each month, and mark each one as essential or a habit. This is the list that vendors, including us, should be demoing against.
- Request full exports now. Ask for contracts, settlements, inventory, field and crop-year history, your chart of accounts, and your vendor and customer lists. Having them in hand removes the fear of being locked in, whatever you decide.
- Map your entities and accounts. Decide how your legal entities and cost structure will look in the new system. Conservis and Granular Business aren’t among the systems we’ve named for standard migration paths, such as QuickBooks, Xero, PcMars, Famous ERP and Dynamics NAV and GP, so we map those exports in scoping instead of assuming a standard route.
- Choose how much history comes across. Our suggestion is open balances and the current crop year in detail, with older years kept as archived exports your auditors can still reach. Your CPA’s view should shape this one.
- Pick a quiet window. Avoid planting and harvest peaks. A crop-year boundary, after settlements are closed, is usually the cleanest cutover point.
- Run both systems through a close. Keep the old system live until at least one month-end or quarter-end has tied out in the new one.
- Scope your field-data connections early. If you rely on equipment or field-data platforms, decide up front which integrations you need built.
Timelines depend on scope. Our implementation process runs in phases of 6 to 12, 8 to 14 and 10 to 16 weeks, and our guide to switching farm software covers the practical side in more detail. If you’re still comparing the wider field, the best farm management software guide is a good companion.
If you’d like to test any of this against your own operation, that’s what a comparison call is for.
Book a Comparison Call
You don’t need to have decided anything to start. Bring a list of what your team uses today, a rough picture of your entities and sites, and whatever Traction has told you about your product’s future. We’ll walk through the comparison on your own scenarios, show you where AgriERP fits and where it doesn’t, and tell you plainly if staying with Traction makes more sense for your operation.
Book a comparison call with the AgriERP team.
AgriERP is built on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central and Oracle NetSuite for farms, packers and processors.
Frequently Asked Questions
Not ready to book yet? These are the questions Conservis and Granular Business users ask most.
Is Conservis being discontinued?
Conservis as a standalone product is being absorbed into Traction. Traction acquired it in December 2023, its Advanced Farm Management page now describes the tier as built from Conservis and Granular Business, and it says it plans to bring that functionality into its core Farm Accounting System. Traction hasn’t published a shutdown date, so nothing is scheduled to be switched off today.
What happened to Granular Business?
Traction bought it from Corteva on November 10, 2022, and renamed it Traction Enterprise Operations, according to Farm Progress. It ran as a separate service at first, and Traction took over support.
What is Traction Ag Advanced Farm Management?
It’s Traction’s tier for complex, multi-entity operations with big acres and big teams. It covers grain positions, deliveries, settlements and contracts, crop planning and profitability analysis, and tax and regulatory reporting.
What are the best Conservis alternatives?
Traction’s own Advanced Farm Management tier is the closest like-for-like, since it’s built from Conservis. If your needs have moved toward multi-entity finance, packing and traceability, AgriERP on Business Central or NetSuite is the alternative we’d put forward. For a wider survey, see our guide to the best farm management software.
What are the best Granular Business alternatives?
Granular Business was farm financial and operations software, and Traction renamed it Traction Enterprise Operations in 2022. Within Traction, the Pro plan and Advanced Farm Management are the next steps. Outside it, AgriERP suits groups that want a Microsoft or Oracle ledger under their farm operations.
Does AgriERP replace Conservis’s grain contracting?
Not one for one. AgriERP covers contracts for growers, suppliers and buyers, pricing, harvest tickets and pool accounting, but it isn’t built around load-by-load grain position tracking. If that is your daily workflow, Traction’s Advanced tier fits it better today.
Is AgriERP the best enterprise farm management software?
For operations whose hardest problems are multi-entity finance, handling and traceability, it’s the one we’d choose, though we’re biased. For grain-position work, Traction’s Advanced tier is the stronger fit.
How long does it take to switch?
The shortest published option is a 10-week implementation offer on Microsoft AppSource. Our full implementation process runs in phases of 6 to 12, 8 to 14 and 10 to 16 weeks, depending on entities, history and integrations.
If your question isn’t covered here, bring it to the comparison call.
