Upstream Ag Insights - February 17th 2025

Essential news and analysis for agribusiness leaders

February 17, 2025 • Read Time: 17 minutes

Welcome to the 251st edition of Upstream Ag Insights—the most trusted resource for strategic insights by over 19,950 agribusiness leaders. Below you’ll find the most 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. Crop Protection Company Patent Analysis: Formulation Technology

  2. Carbon Robotics Introduces G2 Product Line, First Systems Capable in Soybean and Corn: Will Laser Weeding Eliminate Herbicides in Row Crops?

  3. InnerPlant and Cooperative Producers, Inc. Partner to Bring CropVoice™ to Nebraska Soybean Growers

  4. Biochemical Crop Protection: IBI Ag Secures $6.1 Million in Funding Round Led by Corteva

  5. Solinftec Grows 20% YoY

  6. John Deere

    1. John Deere Q1 2025 Results

    2. Deere Dealer GroeNoord Files For Bankruptcy

    3. John Deere Unveils Revamp of Planter Precision Upgrade lineup

    4. Understanding John Deere's New License Model for Technology

    5. Meeting Farmers Evolving Expectations with Doug Sauder

    6. FY 2024 Ag Equipment Manufacturer Earnings Highlights and Analysis

  7. Is Agtech Broken for Venture Capital—or Are We Asking the Wrong Question?

  8. Which Economic Tasks are Performed with AI? Evidence from Millions of Claude Conversations

  9. Other Interesting Ag Articles (9 this week)

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Index

  1. Corteva Polymer Patent

    1. Competitive Dimensions Between Fertilizer and Crop Protection Companies

  2. Syngenta Micro Encapsulation Technology Patent

  3. AgroSpheres Mini-Cell Technology Patent

  4. UPL Folcysteine Patent

Overview

This week, a look at interesting patents from Corteva, Syngenta, AgroSpheres, and UPL—each signalling a push towards more advanced formulation technologies and biological integration, including how it might change competitive dynamics between crop protection and fertilizer companies, how formulation technology is becoming the biggest edge and considerations for what commercial products might look like in North America.

Become an Upstream Ag Professional member for a deep dive into each patent and the commercial implications:

Carbon Robotics, today debuted LaserWeeder G2, its new product line that combines the latest AI, computer vision, robotics and laser technology for precision weed control. LaserWeeder G2’s faster, lighter and modular design makes precision weeding available to more farm sizes, field configurations, crop types and farm budgets around the world. By eliminating the need for hand labor, herbicides and mechanical weed control, the LaserWeeder G2 reduces farmers’ weed control costs by up to 80%, increases crop yields and boosts farm profitability.

The LaserWeeder G2 product line delivers significant efficiency improvements, operating up to twice as fast as its predecessor to maximize laser-weeded acres per hour. New models are lighter, and the 20-foot model is 25% lighter than the original LaserWeeder. This enables LaserWeeder G2 models to be paired with lighter and less expensive tractors, reducing soil compaction and allowing for earlier field entry.

Index

  1. Overview

  2. Pricing

  3. Speed

  4. Weed Control

  5. Laser Resistance?

  6. Other Interventions: Light-based Crop Protection

  7. Distribution, Service and Support

  8. Competitor Overview

  9. Final Thoughts

This week Carbon Robotics released its new G2 line-up of laser weeding systems. What stood out to me was that they announced their first foray into row crops, specifically soybean and corn— specifically emphasizing organic production with the G2 1200 (40 foot width) and G2 1800 (60 foot width).

I was surprised.

Much like Tesla started in high value cars and moved to lower value cars as Wrights Law and production scaled, Carbon Robotics started in high value crops, but they are entering row crops faster than I anticipated.

For the full breakdown including the viability of Carbon Robotics laser weeding systems in soybean and corn based on price and performance, along with what the implications of laser weeding could mean for weed resistance, a look at Carbon Robotics competitors and novel laser “modes of action,” become an Upstream Ag Professional member today:

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InnerPlant today announced a partnership with Cooperative Producers, Inc. (CPI) to establish a demonstration field showcasing the CropVoice™ disease alert network.

InnerPlant inserts a plant trait to emit distinct optical signals when soybean plants are under stress, such as when they are under fungal pressure or attack from insects. The signals are detectable via sensors, such as satellites or on tractors, and visualize stress as much as three weeks before the human eye can see (in case of disease), giving farmers an early warning system to proactively protect their crops.

What is CropVoice?

CropVoice is InnerPlant’s insights platform that integrates data from a network of sentinel plots featuring the InnerSoy trait.

Data is collected from the plots and analyzed using models to provide definitive detection of fungal infection. The data determines if there is infection and sends an alert to the farmer and retailer, enabling more informed fungicide recommendations and applications:

Source: InnerPlant

The CropVoice approach is grounded in sentinel efforts previously used by the USDA. The Value of Plant Disease Early-Warning Systems, where “sentinel” plots were planted across the United States and inspected regularly to provide early detection of soybean rust infection and then uploaded to a website to disperse the information, done in 2005:

We estimate that the information provided by the framework increased U.S. soybean producers’ profits by a total of $11-$299 million in 2005, or between 16 cents and $4.12 per acre.

InnerPlant aims to amplify the sentinel concept by removing human error, increasing the speed of insight delivered and offering a way to know of an infection before visual symptoms arise via the CropVoice platform to inform decisions on fungal pathogens and fungicide application.

Any retail or input manufacturer leveraging CropVoice enables its agronomists and sales team to have informed conversations with farmers and become more efficient with scouting, crop protection logistics, and marketing tactics. Today, the diseases include frog eye leaf spot and white mould.

CPI is not the first player to begin to leverage CropVoice— SunAg in Illinois along with CHS in Nebraska have actively begun to the sell the service to farmers for the 2025 season.

For a full breakdown on business models for the retailers and InnerPlant, how novel approaches could be delivered to farmers and potential considerations for crop protection manufacturers, become an Upstream Ag Professional member:

Disclosure: Upstream Ag Ventures Inc. is an investor in InnerPlant.

IBI Ag, a pioneering crop protection company developing a wide array of bio-insecticides with a lower ecological footprint, today announced it has successfully closed the first part of its Series A funding round with a $6.1 million investment. This round—led by Corteva through its Corteva Catalyst platform with the participation of The Trendlines Group, Iron Nation, Consensus Business Group and a grant from the Israel Innovation Authority.

IBI Ag is an Israel-based agricultural biotechnology company focused on biopesticide innovation, specifically insects. Leveraging a proprietary platform, IBI Ag develops nanobody-based insecticides, a unique concept for agriculture that has the potential to be useful in crop protection markets.

IBI Ag has a discovery platform which integrates a nanobody database with AI/ML-driven optimization, focused on identifying high-efficacy, insecticides.

Nanobodies belong in the novel biochemical space that includes other molecules like RNAi, peptides, enzymes and proteins:

Become an Upstream Ag Professional member for a full overview of nanobodies, IBI Ag opportunities and challenges:

Solinftec is a company I have talked about mutiple times in Upstream. Last year, an Agribiz article stated that they were raising capital at a ~$270 million USD pre-money.

The company continues to grow, too.

Solinftec has a strong foothold in crops like sugar cane in Brazil, where significant portions of their revenue come from by being the essential operating system for 90+% of the large operators in the region. They are present in 11 countries and have solutions for 13 million hectares, and 60,000 pieces of equipment online.

Solinftec had R$370 million in 2024 between Solix hardware, SaaS revenue and recurring revenue to power the Solix (Brazil only), a growth of 20% with a target for 2025 at R$450 million.

According to the AgFeed article above:

Solinftec’s main source of revenue is monitoring solutions, but Solix is a new product and is starting to become the company's flagship product

The bigger picture for Solinftec is the Solix Autonomous Platform.

For an exclusive breakdown of the number of Solix systems globally and in the United States, growth targets for next two years, what percentage of revenue comes from software vs. hardware for Solinftec, plus full access to one of the most popular articles published in Upstream, Solinftec and the Solix Autonomous Platform: Reimagining Farming from First Principles, become an Upstream Ag Professional member today.

6. John Deere News

Deere & Company reported first-quarter fiscal 2025 net income of $869 million, a 50% decrease from $1.751 billion in the same period last year. Net sales and revenues declined by 30% to $8.508 billion, with net sales falling to $6.8 billion from $10.49 billion in the previous year.

  • Production & Precision Agriculture — Sales decreased by 37% to $3.067 billion, and operating profit dropped by 68% to $338 million, primarily due to lower shipment volumes. In the segment for 2025, Deere also decreased it’s sales and operating margin expectations.

For full access to highlights from their investor call on how Precision Ag solutions are increasing their iron market share, their Brazillian precision ag adoption, expectations for Q2 and Q3 and specific insight into their digital acre growth and Upstream Ag Professional chart, become an Upstream Ag Professional member today.

One of the largest Deere dealerships (19 locations) in the Netherlands filed for bankruptcy this week.

Current estimates indicated GroeNoord was experiencing losses nearing €3 million, as it struggled to manage the rising operational costs associated with its extensive service network. Significant cost increases, primarily due to technology and labor, were cited as the primary challenges impacting the company's performance.

Given the challenging economic environment it brings up the question: One-off or start of a trend?

John Deere announced the release of new planter upgrade options, expanding ways farmers can upgrade their John Deere planters and increase productivity. MaxEmerge 5e and ExactEmerge meter upgrades are now available for John Deere planters, providing farmers the opportunity to update the meters on planters without replacing the entire row unit.

If you are looking to understand the specifics of how customers will be charged per acre fees on precision systems like See & Spray and ExactShot, this podcast gets into the details, including:

  • Timelines for billing

  • How bills are delivered to the farmer

  • What gets billed and what doesn’t

  • Plus more.

This is a great conversation with Doug Sauder who has extensive agtech experience and is very well respected within the industry.

According to AGCO CEO Eric Hansotia, 2024 was one of the worst on record for equipment manufacturers:

The North American industry decline in 2024 was the worst single year decline since the downturn in 2009, associated with the financial crisis.

My friend Sarah Nolet of Tenacious Ventures wrote a fantastic article on venture capital in agtech this week. I encourage you to read the whole thing, but the paragraphs that stood out to me were:

Agtech has characteristics that challenge the traditional VC model. Biological timelines don’t care about your funding runway. Farmers are discerning customers—neither fully B2B nor B2C—and aren’t easily dazzled by tech for tech’s sake. Scaling isn’t about adding servers or increasing ad spend; it’s about logistics, distribution, business model design, and navigating government policies.

But that doesn’t mean venture capital can’t work for agtech. It just doesn’t work when we apply a one-size-fits-all playbook, failing to design for the sector’s unique dynamics.

Venture capital was designed to fund specific kinds of risk: fast-scaling, disruptive technologies with the potential for massive returns. In agtech, we often see investors applying this playbook to companies that don’t fit that mold—and then blaming the sector when it doesn’t pan out.

AgTech gets talked about as a homogenous segment, yet there are businesses and technologies that fall into everything from software to biotech to robotics and more. To Sarah’s point, scaling looks very different across these various segments, which can make investing across these segments challenging.

Non Ag Articles

I was sent this article by Matt Foley this week.

An image stood out.

One of the most popularly cited images circa ~2020 was a McKinsey report illustrating agriculture as one of the least digitized industries.

Anthropic recently released data illustrating usage patterns by industry across their model infrastructure:

While ag shows up on the bottom primarily due to the size of the public working in the segment, what is notable is the ratio— 0.1% of Claude conversations and 0.3% of US workers. Not the largest gap, but illustrates a data point that today it is still not mainstream to use AI infrastructure for ag related knowledge work.

Other Interesting Ag Articles

Where are we with AI in Ag? - Linkedin (Informative images in here of how Bayer thinks about AI progression)

The FBN survey notes that in 2024, 100% of atrazine, 99% of glyphosate, 85% of glufosinate, 75% of clethodim, and 49% of 2,4-D were sourced from China.

J.R. Simplot: A billion the hard way - The Future of Agriculture