Tracking Biostimulants and Getting Growers Onside from Stratus Ag Research: Highlights and Analysis

Index:

Stratus Ag Research is an independent agricultural market research firm that delivers data-driven insights to support agribusiness strategy and decision-making.

Over the last four years, they have delivered a Tracking Biostimulants: Grower Insight Survey Report that provides a timely and nuanced look at how grower purchasing behaviors are evolving surrounding biostimulants in the United States and Canada (Note: The below ONLY covers the United States, however there is a separate Canada data set).

Stratus Ag Research is a collaborative partner of Upstream Ag Insights and has provided access to a dataset that further illustrates these takeaways that Upstream Ag Professional members gain access too.

Below you will find Six Takeaways from the Stratus Report along with a breakdown of of thoughts, and implications from the data delivered.

Please contact Sarah Healy at [email protected] from Stratus Ag Research to learn more about how you can access the Biostimulant report to inform your strategic business decisions.

For more publicly available data from Stratus Ag Research, check out their Insights Page.

Next week, a second breakdown will appear that highlights how Retailers perceive biostimulants, how that influences shed space, whether they are recommending more biostimulants, and which kind, and whether they are improving their understanding of the segment or not.

A big thank you to Stratus Ag Research for their continued partnership and providing Upstream Ag Insights with access to their materials, and allowing us to openly share data sets, images and insights from their material.

Unsurprisingly, farmer usage of biostimulants continues to grow:

Of note, 5.6% of the increase in use is due to the inclusion of PGRs in the 2025 study.

It is still not clear if farmers are growing the percentage of their farm that gets treated with biostimulants. In the instance of N-fixing products there was an explicit question asked surrounding the percentage of acres being treated by farmers that are using those products, and on average (across all N-fixing products) it is only on 40% of their acres.

I am optimistic that given some of the attitudes towards biostimulants, combined with the commitment to use in the future, it seems likely that the number of acres grew year over year, too.

What a poor yielding year does to that commitment in this coming years survey will be interesting to see next year.

What is most notable to me is that satisfaction with biostimulants grew drastically year over year: