Upstream Ag Insights - April 14th 2025

Essential news and analysis for agribusiness leaders.

Author

Shane Thomas
April 14, 2025 • Read Time: 17 minutes

Welcome to the 259th edition of Upstream Ag Insights—the most trusted resource for strategic insights by over 20,000 agribusiness leaders. Upstream Ag Insights is written by agribusiness professionals, for agribusiness professionals. Below you’ll find critical industry news, strategic frameworks, and detailed analysis designed to give you a competitive edge and satiate your curiosity.

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Index:

  1. DunhamTrimmer 2024 Global Value-Added Fertilizer Report Highlights and Analysis

  2. The Power of Constraints: What Ag Retail Can Learn from Switzerland

  3. Who should own the future of Ag Tech?

  4. Carbon Robotics Lawsuit Follow up

  5. Deere Wins. Farmers Lose.

  6. Bushel's 2025 State of the Farm Report

    • Agtech is facing challenges, but the strong will survive

  7. Loveland Products and Ascribe Bioscience Expand Collaboration to Develop Biofungicide for US Row Crops

  8. Soil scans: What is possible and what is the benefit?

  9. Nobody Knows (Yet Again)

  10. Other Interesting Ag Articles (10 this week)

This week’s edition of Upstream Ag Insights is brought to you in partnership with Headstorm:

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1. DunhamTrimmer 2024 Global Value-Added Fertilizer Report Highlights and Analysis - Upstream Ag Professional

The ag industry is experiencing increased integration of Value-Added Fertilizers (VAFs) into crop production, a category DunhamTrimmer combines together that includes biostimulant technologies with fertilizers.

This week I looked at the DunhamTrimmer® 2024 Global Value-Added Fertilizer Report, which comprehensively outlines key market dynamics, growth drivers, regional insights and influential companies.

The full Upstream Ag Professional breakdown includes exclusive images, and looks at data from Dunham Trimmer in sizing the market, sizing the regions and digs into the future of Value-Added Fertilizers, including the convergence of other technology:

  1. Overview of the DunhamTrimmer® 2024 Global Value-Added Fertilizer Report

  2. Challenges and Opportunities: For Farmers and Agribusinesses

  3. What is a Value Added Fertilizer: Foundational Overview

  4. Current Global Market Insights

  5. North American Dynamics

  6. The Future of Value-Added Fertilizers (VAFs)

  7. Final Thoughts

2. The Power of Constraints: What Ag Retail Can Learn from Switzerland - Upstream Ag Professional

Constraints can be powerful for innovation and success in business.

Constraints tend to be framed as a reason for not excelling or an excuse not to try new things. There is plenty of research that shows inverting this mindset can have a meaningful impact on people and businesses. Constraints can empower us to think in novel ways, focus differently, and be more creative.

David vs. Goliath

I was first introduced to the concept of constraints by Malcolm Gladwell in reading David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants in 2014. In the book Gladwell brought up the examples of wildly successful entrepreneurs who had dyslexia, an obvious constraint to overcome for anyone wishing to educate themselves, let alone build a successful business.

Interestingly, a much larger percentage of successful entrepreneurs are dyslexic than in the general population: Richard Branson, Paul Orfalea, Charles Schwab, John Chambers at Cisco, David Neeleman at JetBlue as a few examples.

In the book, he explains that these individuals don't think they succeeded in spite of their disability. They think they succeeded because of it. From here Gladwell brings up the fact that because these individuals knew they were with challenged reading that they focused more on learning to read people or publicly speak with conviction. Important skills for anyone wanting to build multi-million or billion dollar companies.

In these individuals minds, those specific skills would not have been built up had they had the fortuity of being able to more easily read.

Why Switzerland?

Switzerland has always been a fascinating country to me. As much as I love chocolate, cheese, mountainous views and fancy watches, that’s not what has driven my interest in the country.

It stems from their economic strength. On a per capita basis Switzerland has the 9th largest GDP per capita and the 20th largest GDP in totality across the globe.

On the surface, it’s not that impressive.

However, there are significant constraints to Switzerland having a thriving GDP. Switzerland has not only overcame them, they have thrived in spite of them. These constraints forced Switzerland to carve its own path.

I look at ag retail in much the same way.

Some of the constraints in ag retail are acute, while others are chronic.

I think there is a lot that can be learned from what has made Switzerland a prosperous country and applied as a framework for ag retailers, or other businesses, to thrive.

What is Switzerland’s Secret Sauce and What Can Ag Ag Retailers learn?

For the full article expanding on the secret sauce of Switzerland and applying to what agribusinesses and ag retailers can learn to improve their business, become an Upstream Ag Professional member today:

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3. Who should own the future of Ag Tech? - Matt Waits Linkedin

Matt Waits shared an insightful post this week that had a few points to highlight surrounding who invests in, develops and ultimately owns agronomic software moving forward.

First, he highlighted the potential for retailers like Nutrien, CHS, Wilbur-Ellis, Growmark, and Helena coming together to build an open-source agronomy platform:

Come together and build an open-source agronomy platform. A common GIS and data model. A shared codebase maintained by a non-profit. Something retailers could build on, tailor, integrate—but without each one reinventing the wheel. They could differentiate where it matters—through services, analytics, and integrations—while protecting the core infrastructure they all rely on.

Worried about different tech stacks or internal dev capabilities? AI is already reducing those barriers. Tools are becoming more interoperable, development more democratized. This kind of collaboration is far more feasible today than it was even five years ago.

As Matt highlights, the concept is feasible, but I wonder if it is practical. Meaning, the logic holds that open source can work, but it’s interesting to consider the shortcomings of open source that challenge it.

Open source software is like a recipe that's shared indiscriminately — anyone can see how it's made, use it, tweak it, or even improve it. Open source projects make their code public, so anyone with the skills can contribute, fix bugs, or build something new from it. Including large companies, like Matt is suggesting. 

The key is that as an open source product, it would present a baseline product, but then all retails for example would require an in-house development team to tweak, adjust, customize etc the open source system to deliver a specific agronomic software product to their teams and customers. This is much more feasible today because of AI coding, proliferation of coding talent etc. but I don’t think that’s the biggest issue for retailers in deploying software.

If we look at core competencies, culture, historical expectations and where success has come from in ag software, it paints a picture.

For a full look at shortcomings of open source in ag software and a look at important considerations for becoming a business control point, become an Upstream Ag Professional member:

4. Carbon Robotics Lawsuit Follow up

This week, Laudando & Associates founder and CEO Chris Laudando shared the following on Linkedin:

Today, I'm publicly disclosing that L&A has placed our core laser weeding IP - including source code, hardware schematics & BOM, work instruction, and our pending patent - into decentralized encrypted escrow. This system is governed by a public blockchain smart contract. If Carbon Robotics files any motion for preliminary injunction against us in this case, the contract will trigger a 48-hour timed release of the decryption key, and the L&Aser™ will be open-sourced to the world - 𝙞𝙧𝙧𝙚𝙫𝙚𝙧𝙨𝙞𝙗𝙡𝙮 𝙖𝙣𝙙 𝙥𝙚𝙧𝙢𝙖𝙣𝙚𝙣𝙩𝙡𝙮.

Carbon Robotics did file a motion on April 8th. And the smart contract did trigger. The Laudando & Associates technology details are now available on GitHub, making the details of their technology publicly available for any one to access.

If Carbon Robotics were to win the suit, most would likely want to avoid the technology. However, with some brains and budget, a company could find the way to be different enough to get around the Carbon Robotics patent.

You can read the specifics of some of the publicly available court documents in the attached document below:

Laser Weeding Lawsuit April 2025.pdf1.39 MB • File

The details are interesting to read. Carbon is asking the court to block L&A from selling their product until the lawsuit is resolved citing irreparable harm

Carbon Robotics does see itself have a monopoly on laser weeding:

In a two-player market, every sale gained by L&A is one lost by Carbon. The uniqueness and nascency of the relevant market, moreover, make it more fragile than most markets. Still further, L&A’s infringement, coupled with its social-media campaign, threatens to harm Carbon’s reputation as an innovator and market leader. If all that were not enough, L&A’s lower-priced products will undercut Carbon’s profit margin and lead to irreparable price erosion.

The price erosion comment is notable— The L&Aser modules have been publicly stated to be priced between $5,000 and $15,000 per module (multiple modules needed to be mounted onto an application system) whereas Carbon Robotics pricing is $1.4 million+ for a G2 system.

There is one thing that specifically stands out to me with this article:

It is a fantastic example of counter-positioning 

Counter-positioning is one of the 7 Powers identified by Hamilton Helmer in his book "7 Powers: The Foundations of Business Strategy."

For a full look at what counter-positioning is, how it can be used, what SwarmFarm does well and why, become an Upstream Ag Professional member today:

Bushel released their annual State of the Farm Report and it is worth checking out.

I wanted to briefly cross reference it with a line from Derek Norman recent article on Linkedin titled Agtech is facing challenges, but the strong will survive where he stated:

Dollars don’t accelerate success in agriculture (and don’t make plants grow faster) – it takes results in the field.

He’s right. On top of the inability to make plants grow faster grow faster, farmer trust is earned over years, not raised in rounds. And trust is crucial to driving why a farmer deals with a business, whether grain, input retailing, equipment dealership or agtech start-up:

Loveland Products, Inc., the proprietary products company for Nutrien Ag Solutions and a leading provider of crop input solutions, and Ascribe Bioscience, the developer of the biofungicide Phytalix, announced the expansion of their collaboration in the U.S. market to include additional proprietary Phytalix premixes. This strategic initiative with Ascribe is designed to further strengthen Loveland Products’ market leading biological platform.

In December 2023, Loveland and Ascribe initially announced a collaboration.

Ascribe Bio is known for their Phytalix molecule. Plants respond to Phytalix by priming their defense pathways (eg: SAR, ISR) to better overcome disease. Phytalix is a synthetically derived molecule that is the same (chemically) to a naturally-occurring molecule produced by nematodes in the soil.

Loveland is Nutrien’s proprietary product business. Notably, in the crop protection segment (they also have crop nutrition), most of their portfolio is with generic molecules. Nutrien and Loveland also spend a relatively tiny amount on R&D compared to crop protection players like Bayer or BASF for example, which means they are not focusing on discovery of new molecules.

The partnership with Ascribe offers an avenue to attain exclusive access to novel molecules to differentiate their product portfolio. It’s a win for Loveland and for Ascribe, which needs market access.

The questions in my mind become:

  1. What other companies will Nutrien collaborate with to build out their crop protection portfolio?

  2. Could Nutrien become a consolidator of biopesticide entities to build out their proprietary crop protection portfolio?

I am a fan of deeper soil knowledge.

Soil is complex and highly variable. Every inch, both vertically and horizontally, brings variation which means a potential shortcoming to optimizing yield and quality.

However, there are inherent shortcomings and constraints with soil testing at an inch by inch resolution currently, and likely in the future.

For a look at the 6 interconnecting variables, the ideal end state for soil testing, become an Upstream Ag Professional member:

Non Ag Article

Howard Marks is an investing legend. He is highly articulate and thoughtful. His frameworks and point of view are relevant for decision making beyond traditional investing and I find them particularly useful in my own thinking.

Recently he wrote on tariffs and the market, but I think his lens is useful and applicable beyond traditional investing.

I want to say right here about 2008 and the other crises I’ve invested through – as well as today – that I don’t reach my conclusions with confidence or act without trepidation. There’s absolutely no place for certainty in the world of investing, and that’s particularly true at turning points and during upheavals. I’m never sure my answers are right, but if I can reason out what’s most logical, I feel I have to move in that direction.

Howard Marks

Other Interesting Ag Articles