Tracking Retail Biostimulant Engagement: Highlights and Analysis of Stratus Ag Research Survey Data

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 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.

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, the percentage of retailers selling biostimulants continued to increase:

The interest in the segment, and the opportunity to diversify margin, support other product segments (eg: biostimulant coating dry granular fertilizer) and evolve the agronomic conversation with farm customers is going to be crucial for ag retailers to continue to be successful as we look toward the 2030’s.

Retailer commitment to selling is growing because of that, and the growth is coming primarily out of the “neutral”retail segment:

I am always hesitant with survey data of any kind to take too much stock in what people say they are going to do. I am more interested in what they did. However, what stands out to me about biostimulant survey data from Stratus is that retailers that were “neutral” are seemingly moving towards committed to selling again, illustrating that companies are getting savvier at moving the status-quo and indifferent group, to having at least more interest in continuing to recommend biostimulants in the future.

Though, what stands out is that retailers general attitude towards biostimulants isn’t changing:

This stands out to me as a need for manufacturers to continue to do two things well:

I recently wrote Go-to-Market Strategy in Agriculture. It looks at how GTM shapes strategic decisions across the entirety of the company. Effective distribution and market access cannot be understated.

In previous coverage of Stratus Ag Research Biostimulant Survey data, I have highlighted that there are only a couple of companies, biological or otherwise, that have been able to successfully build out scaled, consistent and profitable market access beyond the traditional channel (eg: Meristem Crop Performance and BW Fusion).

This is reinforced by the fact that if we look at the products with the highest level of farmer satisfaction from 2024, it is dominated by companies that sell via (or are) traditional retail distribution: Mosaic, Novonesis, Helena, Rosens and Nutrien: