Upstream Ag Insights - April 21st 2025

Essential news and analysis for agribusiness leaders.

Author

Shane Thomas
April 21, 2025 • Read Time: 15 minutes

Welcome to the 260th 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.

Thank-you for being an Upstream Ag Insights subscriber!

Index:

  1. Are Ag Inputs More like Wine or Diamonds? - Guest Article

  2. The Theory of Innovation Adoption in Agriculture

  3. Farmers’ Favorite Weedkiller Nears Its End, Bayer Warns

  4. Cultura Emphasizing Supply Chain Connectivity: A look at Constellation Software and their Approach in Agriculture

    • Private Equity and Ag Software

  5. FMC Corporation receives first product registration in Brazil for Sofero™ Fall pheromone

  6. Indigo approaches a megaton of carbon removals stored in US cropland

  7. What’s next for precision spraying technology in battling weeds?

  8. The Rise of Production Capital

  9. Other Interesting Ag Articles (10 this week)

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

Environmental stress doesn’t just impact fruit quality—it affects your bottom line. In 2024, major disasters and severe weather led to an estimated $2.1 billion in crop losses for fruit and nut growers, according to the American Farm Bureau.

Heat, sun exposure, and moisture fluctuations weaken the plant cuticle, resulting in increased water loss, fruit cracking, and reduced quality. This leads to both direct costs like lower marketable yields and increased culls, and indirect costs from reduced tree vigor and long-term productivity declines.

Parka® strengthens the cuticle, reducing stress-related damage and delivering a strong ROI.

  • Reduce apple culls by 7%.

  • Minimize sunburn by 42% in apples.

  • Cut cracking in cherries by 50%

  • Reduce cherry doubling and spurs by 64%.

  • Increase almond nut meat weight by 10%.

Don’t let unseen plant stress diminish your profits. Invest in cuticle health to maximize crop resilience and marketability.

1. Are Ag Inputs More like Wine or Diamonds? - Upstream Ag Insights Guest Post by Dan Northrup of Galvanize Climate Solutions

This is a guest post written by Dan Northrup of Galvanize Climate Solutions LLC.

Note: Dan included full references for statements made in his article. I have removed them in the e-mail body to manage sizing and deliverability constraints, however, the full sourcing and list is available in the article at the above link.

Wine and diamonds have major differences in how they are priced and in consumer buying motivations.  For wine, 85% of people buy based on the label, with less consideration of the quality of the bottle’s content.  Diamonds are priced based on the 4 C's – clarity, cut, carats, and color – quantifiable quality attributes.  

Although ag input decisions appear to be diamond like transactions, purchasing is nuanced, and decisions vary by input category (fertilizers, seeds, crop protection).  Price is a primary reason for choosing fertilizers.  Fertilizers are tested for nutrient composition and unbiased public sector testing ensures product quality.  The correlation between crop yield and fertilizers is reasonably well characterized and supports price-based decisions.

For seeds and crop protection performance is reported as a key reason for purchase, and this attribute takes multiple forms: yield response, weed control, pest control, etc.  Unfortunately, the complexity of these responses and the difficulty in making accurate comparisons between products makes it challenging to achieve the same degree of rigor in ROI calculations at the time of purchase.  This is a challenge to an unproven product and is important for product developers because observability of outcomes is one of the key drivers of adoption.

The datasets that are available to farmers at the point of decision making also vary by input category.  Plant breeders benefit from extensive testing networks.  Commercial varieties and hybrids are typically tested for 4 or more years in 100s of locations before they are advanced to the market.  The result of this testing is a small set of geographically targeted products characterized by extensive datasets that support diamond like, ROI based decision making. 

The 3rd major category of agronomic inputs – chemistries, biologics, stimulants – has a more limited infrastructure for generating performance data.  Unlike seeds, these inputs are expected to perform across wider geographic ranges and conditions even though this may not be a valid assumption.  Without datasets to characterize the performance variation farmers and agronomists do not have the information they need to assess a product’s ROI and this can discourage the adoption of new products and product categories.

The full article is available to all subscribers at the link above.

Broadly speaking, there are three sources of consumer-driven adoption - interest, sign, and hedonic.

Interest concerns the performance of the product or activity in utilitarian, economic and functional terms. Sign concerns the contribution of the product or activity to how they view themselves and impression management (signaling). Hedonic is the extent to which the product or activity satisfies pleasure or experiential goals.

This can similarly be applied to farmers. Farming is not purely B2b.

In The Adoption of Agricultural Innovations, Kaine introduces five important considerations from previous research that can be used to identify a farmers willingness to adopt:

  1. The relative advantage of the innovation over the current standard or other options.

  2. Compatibility of the technology within the farmer's operational context.

  3. The level of complexity of the innovation.

  4. Trialability of the innovation.

  5. Observability of the result.

I would add a 6th, based on the work of Ron Adner— adoption chain risk, or value chain incentives that considers how an innovation makes it to the farm.

At a high level, these all make sense, and they are worth breaking down to consider how agribusinesses and agribusiness professionals can leverage these insights as a framework for improving the uptake of their innovations.

For a deep dive breaking down the influences of adoption and applies the theory to agtechnology, become an Upstream Ag Professional member:

Your Unfair Advantage in Ag Retail 

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AGpilot enables your organization to: 

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Transform your advisors into loyal, productive, and trusted advisors at scale with AGpilot. 

This article from the WSJ received a significant coverage last week.

Over the last ~6 weeks, Bayer has been publicly stating that they may stop producing glyphosate and supporting the label. CEO Bill Anderson is going even further now and positioning the legal pressure as not just as an attack on glyphosate, but as an attack on innovation that benefits farmers and as anti-litigation industry:

The threat of future litigation could also factor into Bayer’s decision to invest in new herbicides, he said. “Would we really do that to ourselves again?”

For the full breakdown looking at how Bayer as a registrant impacts glyphosates future, whether a business can be built on top of so much litigation, the timeline to finding out what Bayer does with glyphosate, and other strategic implications on the seed business, become an Upstream Ag Professional member:

4. Cultura Emphasizing Supply Chain Connectivity - Linkedin

I believe that if our industry comes together to link production and the values that the consumer really wants with the value chain – and be able to prove it – that's a completely new, proactive marketplace that doesn't exist today.

Jeff Schreiner, SVP of Global Collaboration at Cultura Technologies

I read this post from Jeff Schreiner, SVP of Global Collaboration at Cultura Technologies which got me thinking about Cultura’s position in the industry to support and enable “linked production to values.”

Cultura Technologies is apart of Constellation Software— a business which has a founder and CEO in Mark Leonard, that has a cult-like following because of the business he built (and his revered annual letters…Constellation Software is publicly traded on the Toronto Stock Exchange).

Constellation has six “operating” businesses including Volaris (where Cultura falls) that are broken out by industry.

Cultura’s software companies include Agiboo, ExtendAg, Solentra, Greenstone, Primetics, AgVision, and Agronomix to name some.

It’s important to look at Constellation as an overall entity.

For the full breakdown on why the business dynamics of Constellation Software position Cultura uniquely in agriculture and what that might mean for their internal and external focuses, become an Upstream Ag Professional member:

In a Linkedin post, Nathan Faleide talks about three ways PE has come/will come into ag. I think the first one is a poor approach for PE in ag. The second is idealistic. The highest likelihood of PE success in ag is to come in and build from a position of utility and workflow: the control point within the industry vertical. Related to the Constellation commentary above…many Constellation businesses would be the respective control point in their industry niche).

Nathan states the following:

They (PE) buy specific strategic assets from these groups and other private softwares while bringing together the experts needed to build a different vision.

What are experts often missing? What companies and individuals could make sense as a foundational software play for PE firms? Become an Upstream Ag Professional member for more:

FMC Corporation, a leading agricultural sciences company, today announced it has received registration in Brazil for Sofero™ Fall pheromone targeting fall armyworm (Spodoptera frugiperda). Sofero™ Fall is the first in the company’s lineup of distinctive pheromone products for row crops offering growers a novel approach to sustainably control pests, manage resistance and boost productivity.

FMC officially announced registration of its first sprayable pheromone product in Brazil. This comes after announcing they would launch a product in Brazil following their 9-figure acquisition of BioPhero in 2022.

For a look at the FMC strategy in Brazil on integrating all product segments at their disposal plus adding personnel and what it means for their business, become an Upstream Ag Professional member:

Indigo announced the issuance of its fourth carbon crop, consisting of over half a million independently verified carbon credits issued through the Climate Action Reserve. With nearly a megaton of carbon removals now stored in U.S. cropland and more than 64 billion gallons of water conserved, Indigo's carbon program has now seen nearly 1M credits issued over four carbon harvests.

With this year’s issuance of 630,000 MT of carbon credits, Indigo's Carbon program has sequestered or abated 927K MT of CO2e across 28 states since 2018.

For more on Indigo expected pricing, Indigo Carbon potential revenue and how this years issuance compares to the last 4 years, become an Upstream Ag Professional member:

“Just on the edible dry beans last year, we saved almost $40,000 on chemical costs,” he says. “You could invest that in a lot of places, like plant health. Forty grand in savings on just one crop is a big deal.”

This quote conveys the possibilities with precision spraying technology.

For a deep dive on precision spraying, check out the The Precision Revolution: Foundations of Precision Spraying in Agriculture.

Non Ag Article

“Today, we're standing at the edge of an opportunity so vast it's almost hard to grasp. By 2040, the global demand for new infrastructure investment is $68 trillion. To put that price tag in perspective, it’s roughly the equivalent of building the entire Interstate Highway System and the Transcontinental Railroad, start to finish, every six weeks – for the next 15 years.”

Other Interesting Ag Articles