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FY 2024 Crop Protection & Seed Company Results: A Deep Dive into Themes, Highlights and Analysis

Author

Shane Thomas
March 08, 2025 • Read Time: 5 minutes

Over the last month, I have read dozens of earnings call transcripts along with quarterly crop protection and seed earnings results, working to synthesize the themes, trends and key takeaways across the crop protection manufacturers segment of the agriculture industry.

This report is an aggregation of those materials and includes:

(Note: blue links in the below index will take you directly to that section)

Note: Syngenta is not publicly traded. They do release high level results, historically towards the end of March. Syngenta results will be added once they become available.

Upstream Ag Insights FY 2024 Crop Protection and Seed Comparison

Syngenta and UPL will added and BASF will be updated once full financial materials are released.

Themes

Crop Protection Revenue Down ~5%

  • FMC revenue was down 5% year over year.

  • Bayer Crop Science crop protection segment was down 4%.

  • Corteva crop protection segment was down 5%.

  • Nufarm crop protection revenue was down 5%.

  • BASF crop protection was down 5.5%.

There were generally more positive most Q4’s from all entities on the crop protection side of things, however, there are mixed outlooks for early 2025— Corteva and UPL are more optimistic, while FMC and Bayer are forecasting a tighter Q1/H1 and hoping for a better 2nd half.

BASF executives on crop protection:

The positive price effect was predominantly on the seed side, so predominantly field crop seeds. But I'd say also in the herbicides, we had a positive price effect. So on the crop protection side, the mix picture, some price losses but also some price gains.

Bayer AG CEO Bill Anderson:

Our Crop Science business is home to outstanding assets, exceptional global platforms, including a highly profitable Seeds business, an industry-leading pipeline and excellent people, but our business is exposed to cost pressures in ways that are both unique to our business, and general to our industry, the biggest factor being generic pricing pressure on our leading crop protection business. This is eroded earnings, specifically in Crop Protection that a leading business simply can't accept.

FMC CEO Pierre Brondeau on the continued struggles:

After eight months in the role, I have modified my view of what needs to be done for FMC to fully benefit from the market upturn when it happens and the quality of the portfolio. The company needs a stronger reset than what I thought initially. We learned a lot in the fourth quarter and it has become clear that we need to take more aggressive actions to reposition FMC. Above all, we need to significantly lower FMC inventory in the channel much beyond what we were expecting.

Corteva CEO Chuck Magro on the momentum gained in Q4:

To ensure we had good momentum coming into 2025, it was important that we finished the year strong, which we did, particularly in Crop Protection, where we drove double-digit organic sales growth and 800 basis points of margin improvement in the fourth quarter, which was largely attributable to demand for our technology in Brazil.

Supply Chain and Go-to-Market

Destocking impacts have been a drag on crop protection companies earnings the last 2 years. When companies go through pain, they tend to be incentivized to alleviate that pain in the short term and find ways to mitigate it arising in the future.

There are multiple ways to improve on supply chain management: better demand generation, better relationships with customers/partners, better process, improved systems, new routes to market and more. During earnings season it was emphasized that there are changes being made to manage costs and improve market demand signals and ability to execute in the market.

Corteva stated for the first time publicly (to my knowledge) their route to market with biologicals in North America:

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