I work for a small family owned business, we operate on the serviced distribution model that is apparently hated here. And believe me, I can understand why, because I have seen a lot of distributor agronomists who rip farmers off.
Of course like any business we are seeking to make money. That said, I have colleagues who used to work for larger national concerns where they were expected to sell X packs of product Y in a season in order to obtain a bonus, to my mind that is wholly wrong and we don't operate that way, nor would I ever use a product unless I was sure it would be worthwhile for the farmer to use it.
I do not make decisions for farmers. I can only tell them what I have seen and how we best go about managing it. It is and always will be up to the client to decide how to spend his money.
I am salaried so it makes no difference whatsoever if people decide to use a lot of product or seed or fertiliser or whatever.
I have 2 friends who work as independents in the East of the UK. They both work for larger farms that usually grow a lot of roots and cereals. I believe they would charge 8-9 GBP per acre per season and they both have about 10,000 acres to walk and look after. They both think I am nuts. They walk each farm every two weeks send recommendations and the farmer goes and sources his product. Easy peasy with average farm size being in excess of 500 acres and big fields all farmed in blocks.
Not so in my area, where we have mixed farms, mostly dairy, who have 300-400 acres of grass, maybe 80 acres of maize and 50 acres of wheat. You could pay someone to look after the maize and wheat, but if you want your grass looked out to?
Not only that but the field sizes are much smaller and farms more spread geographically. I have an idiot independent chap in my area trying to do the 10,000 acres, but he charges £5 an acre, and guess what? All the recommendations I see from him are near uniform. He tells folk to chuck on fertiliser like no tomorrow. It is textbook, 150 units on wheat, 100 units on barley and so on. The reality is that he isn't walking these crops anything like as often as the rest of us, because unless is he superman, it can't be physically done. Still he is well received of course because he will flog you a can of product £20 less than me. Whether or not you needed that product of course you won't know because all you will see is an email telling you to put it on.
I'm collecting customers (usually the smaller ones who do less acres) from this guy at a regular pace. They call him the invisible man. Because you never see him.
I might charge more money per acre in the long run, maybe not, but at least I'm not doing drive by agronomy- my own conscience won't let me, after all, every time I do a recommendation on my computer the cost of that application is staring me right in the face. As an independent I wouldn't have that problem.
And as for soil cores, I don't do those, I use a spade.