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Upstream Ag Insights: Foundations Series
The articles that give ambitious professionals the foundational frameworks and tools they need to thrive in a complex industry.
Shane Thomas
February 04, 2026 • Read Time: 19 minutes
The agricultural industry is always evolving — supply chains shift, new technologies emerge, companies rise and fall, and societal trends reshape what the market values.
Today, keeping up with the news isn't enough.
What will separate the professionals who navigate these shifts from those caught off guard is a foundational understanding of the industries structure combined with frameworks and models for interpreting what's happening, anticipating what comes next, and deciding what to do about it with conviction.
With that in mind I wanted to share the Upstream Ag Insights Foundation Series — a starting point for agribusiness professionals at any experience level, grounded in structural thinking that applies directly to the decisions you're making today.
The articles below offer the tools required for driving business success and catalyzing your career.
Upstream Ag Professional members have access to all of the articles below (unless otherwise noted). For full access to every article beyond the summary, become an Upstream Ag Professional member today:
Index
The Four Forces Reshaping the Crop Protection Industry and What Comes Next
Mapping Power in the Seed Value Chain: Who Wins, Who Loses, and Why
AI and Agribusiness Software: From Systems of Record to Systems of Action
Agribusiness Guide: Navigating Precision Spraying Impacts on the Crop Input Market
The Rise of Biologicals and Specialty Fertilizer: A Report on Agribusiness Strategy, Progress and Initiatives
The Precision Revolution: Foundations of Precision Spraying in Agriculture
Mindware: 33 Mental Models for The Modern Agribusiness Leader
Navigating Strategic Development, Strategy Tax and the Opportunity in Uncertainty in Agribusiness
The Insight is the Edge: How Insights Drive Agribusiness Performance
The Great Unbundling of Agribusiness
Customer Experience > 'Clicks and Mortar': What Retails Miss About Digital Enablement
Precision ≠ Less: Rethinking AgTech’s Impact on Input Demand
The Nuance of Biostimulants
The Theory of Innovation Adoption in Agriculture
Winning in the Ag Machinery Space: Integrated Tech Stacks and Precision Technology
Influence Erosion in Ag Retail
Mindware: 25 Concepts for Improved Career Outcomes in Agribusiness
Synthetics, Biologicals, Systems Agronomy and Weak Link Problems
The AgTech Paradox: What Biology and Historians Can Teach Us About the Agriculture Industry
Innovation Theatre: Shackles to Progress in Agribusiness
Monopolistic Inertia in Agribusiness
Finding Asymmetric Upside in Ag Retail and Agribusiness
The Upstream Ag Professional Visualization Hub has more than 100 proprietary images that are accessible to use in presentations, for understanding segments of the industry, or sharing a complex idea with colleagues. It is an essential resource for agribusiness professionals.
Become an Upstream Ag Professional member today and access all of the images:
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It allows you to interact with the Upstream Ag Insights archive in a dynamic and engaging way, enabling you to find the topics and concepts crucial to optimizing your understanding of the agriculture industry.
The crop protection industry is experiencing structural shifts.
Four forces are converging, including:
generic manufacturing dynamics
the innovation pipeline stagnating
regulatory pressures and antitrust scrutiny
and precision application technology is shifting value dynamics
For agribusiness professionals, understanding these dynamics is critical whether you're on the manufacturing, distribution, or retail side of the value chain.
The article draws parallels from other industries to illustrate where crop protection may be headed and what strategic moves are already underway from Corteva, Bayer, Syngenta, and emerging players.
Gene editing has generated excitement as a disruptor in the seed industry, but the reality is more nuanced.
Elite germplasm remains crucial, and that source of power is often misunderstood.
This piece unpacks the seed value chain:
germplasm
trait discovery
production
distribution
and examines where competitive advantage actually resides, using examples like Corteva along with Monsanto and what it means for agtech start ups.
For agribusiness professionals operating in the seed industry this breakdown clarifies where durable value lives, and where it doesn't.
Great agribusiness software is evolving from basic systems that just store records to systems that take action. The strategy surrounding software is adapting to that reality.
The Upstream Ag Insights white paper examines what that shift means for ag retailers and the software vendors serving them, drawing lessons from vertical SaaS leaders in construction, restaurants, and services.
The thesis is that vertical AI embedded in industry-specific workflows will capture disproportionate value and agribusinesses and software players need to act accordingly.
The paper maps the current agribusiness software landscape, explains where "control points" exist in the value chain, and introduces the concept of a "context graph.”
Precision spraying technology is often framed simply as volume reduction story — less product per acre and lower costs for farmers. But using the Job’s to be Done framework, along with Jevons Paradox suggests there could be different changes.
That application also leads to complement disruption. The more significant implication for agribusiness professionals to consider goes beyond volume towards product differentiation, and therefore margin structures.
Precision spraying shifts the locus of differentiation.
When a multi-spray tank system can identify weeds and selectively apply product, the value of traditional herbicide differentiators (tank mixability, crop safety, relative efficacy) diminishes. Classic disruption through complements.
For crop protection manufacturers, this challenges the traditional IP-driven business model. For ag retailers with sprayer fleets, it creates strategic questions about supplier relationships and service offerings. And for equipment companies like John Deere, it represents an opportunity to become the ultimate arbiter in crop protection decision-making.
Adoption won't happen overnight, but that’s what gives ample time to think thoughtfully through the implications that are already in motion.
A look at the drivers of bio-based product demand, and then a detailed breakdown of the strategies, partnerships, products, acquisitions and portfolio’s of major crop input companies, including:
Corteva
Bayer Crop Science
BASF
FMC
Syngenta
UPL
Nutrien
Yara International
ICL
Mosaic
*Note: Developed in partnership with a collaborator which means this report requires an additional purchase price even for Upstream Ag Professional members.
Precision Spraying, often termed "See & Spray,” represents a shift in weed management by using advanced sensors to target specific plants rather than broadcasting herbicides across entire fields.
While conceptually simple, its real-world utility depends on regional conditions and specific crop types.
In the most detailed report available on the market, Upstream Ag and AgTech Pro deliver a crucial understanding of where precision spraying is, and where it is headed.
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In a volatile and complex industry, the primary differentiator for high-performing professionals is "Mindware" — the mental models and reasoning strategies used to navigate complexity and make leading decisions.
Drawing from psychology, biology, and economics, the e-book consists of frameworks that function as a toolkit to help leaders interpret the world, solve problems, and avoid common cognitive biases.
This guide provides 33 practical lenses specifically adapted for the agricultural sector.
Ag retail is largely homogenous today. Most retailers compete on the same dimensions with similar offerings, differentiated mainly by relationships.
This piece gets into the tactical moves that without coherent strategy create chain reactions that ripple through staff incentives, margin structures, supplier relationships, and customer positioning.
The antidote is using Roger Martin's strategy framework, asking the crucial questions like:
Where will we play?
How will we win?
What capabilities must be in place?
The answers drive strategy and should drive differentiation.
The article uses two companies, Corteva and Meristem Crop Performance, as examples and introduces concepts like strategy tax.
Following the herd ensures mediocrity.
World-class companies lead their customers based on unique insights — accurate, deep understanding of a customer problem, technology, or market that competitors don't see or won't act on.
The piece illustrates this with examples: Jeff Bezos, Solinftec, Meristem and others.
For agribusiness professionals, this piece focuses on reframing strategic thinking. Waiting for customers to explicitly demand something means you're already competing in a low-margin game. The edge comes from identifying implicit needs, reasoning from first principles, and having the courage to act on insights that colleagues will initially dismiss.
The 2016 narrative that scale and integration would win is reversing. Capital markets now reward focus and penalize complexity, plus other industry incentives and changes, and the industry is unbundling accordingly.
A look at the changes by different companies.
Nutrien’s "clicks and mortar" announcement frames digital portals as differentiation itself. But that misses the point surrounding customer experience.
This article gets into backend enablement that empowers retail staff to better add value to customers.
The assumption that precision agriculture reduces input volumes is widely accepted —but arguably wrong as a base line assumption.
Precision capabilities will increase usage intensity for most inputs while reducing waste, not necessarily volumes altogether.
This article dives into the assumptions across various input categories, from seed, to crop protection to fertilizer and breaks down the logic with real world data.
Biostimulants don't fit neatly into existing input frameworks. They require a hybrid approach across multiple product types.
Companies that win in biostimulants and specialty nutrition are not retrofitting biostimulants into legacy frameworks and instead design positioning, education, and support structures that reflect the category's unique nature.
Includes a look at The Sauce Paradox and the Funnel of Specificity — key for positioning crop input products of any kind.
Ag tech adoption often gets over simplified down to just proving ROI.
However, there is a need for six factors across utilization and the value chain.
This article takes key research on technology adoption and farmer adoption, along with a view of the value chain to give a broad understanding of what companies do that achieve successful product adoption.
Modular systems offer flexibility and compatibility, but integrated tech stacks deliver superior performance because of their unique design and compatability.
Using Clayton Christensen's Conservation of Attractive Profits, the article explains why there is a need to think critically about integrated architectures in ag equipment.
The article looks at John Deere's ExactShot as an example and compares with efforts by the likes of AGCO on retrofit.
One of the biggest topics in ag retail over the past decade has been margins decreasing. Sales of crop input products have increased, but ag retail margins have been challenged across North America.
20 years ago there was an impenetrable moat at the retail level with their geographic location, physical assets, credit offerings, knowledge of the area along with their relationships.
Today, this previously impenetrable moat has begun to erode and it has been felt at the retail level not with a decrease in sales, but a decrease in margins and a loss of control.
What has driven this? What will drive it in the future? Can it be mitigated?
In this post an overview of the dynamics that are driving margins to decrease, stemming most directly from the changes in information flow and influence and what else it impacts within the ag retail business.
Since 2020, I have published an annual “professionals tips” article for new College grads entering the agriculture industry, aimed at amplifying their ability to get up to speed and improve professionally.
One of the most commonly cited pieces of feedback I receive around it has been that it shouldn’t be emphasized to just new grads, but all agribusiness professionals.
Taking that into account, the last four years I have positioned it beyond students and new grads towards agribusiness professionals of all experience levels.
Some of these concepts were stumbled on myself, others are borrowed from reading and listening to other much more experienced individuals.
Systems agronomy reframes how to think about biologicals.
Traditional agronomy optimizes individual elements in isolation.
Systems agronomy recognizes that changes in one component cascade through others, and seeks to optimize the whole.
This article looks at how biologicals and synthetics can be used synergistically for the best results.
The agtech industry has a lot of criticisms thrown at it.
In many cases, these are legitimate.
Businesses trying to solve a problem that doesn’t exist, a poor business model, a hyperbolic, unrealistic vision or sometimes just a plain and simple bad idea.
However, in order to have a thriving industry, in agriculture or otherwise, new ideas are necessary.
Not nice to have, not good some of the time, they are necessary to drive industry forward. Without new ideas and technology we lack the ability to progress, achieve economic growth, and solve big problems.
One of the most common questions I get or comments I read are around ag having too many start-ups, too grandiose of stories, too much venture capital, too high of valuations or not enough sustainable success to date.
There might be truth in all of this, but I believe those feelings, and realities, are part of the necessary roller coaster to go through in the agriculture industry and it can be viewed as such by looking at agriculture through an evolutionary biology lens.
Now more than ever, large agricultural companies have realized that in order to thrive for the long term they need to innovate. However, it’s not always obvious how to do that.
It has become a common practice to resort to “innovation activities” that seem to have worked for other companies or in other industries or to think linearly vs. systematically.
Not all companies were built the same and often practices from other entities don’t address the real barriers for innovation in yours. This is where innovation theatre begins to rear its ugly head without anybody even noticing.
Innovation is hard. Creating the illusion of innovation is easy. In this article, I go through what Innovation Theatre is, why it shows up and discuss how to overcome it in agribusiness.
Monopolistic Inertia refers to the phenomenon where oligopolistic firms, dominating sequential points in a value chain, develop a mutual reliance, reinforcement and benefit of their established roles, behaviors, and practices. This interconnected dependence discourages innovation or evolution within an industry, leading to only incremental improvements instead.
Economically, monopolistic inertia can be understood as a byproduct of market power combined with the "innovator’s dilemma," where dominant firms prioritize protecting a market position and existing revenue streams over pursuing change.
Oligopolies occur in many industries, but when they occur at multiple sequential points in the value chain, they make it even more difficult for change to occur.
Agriculture is an example of this.
In ag retail everyone is seeking out opportunities for improvement and to out compete. The ag retail business is traditionally low margin and eeking out a profit year to year often comes from smart supplier program management, astute management of working capital and finding a non-traditional customer to sell too. While these realities are unlikely to change anytime soon, there are other opportunities to look for upside in the ag retail business.
The opportunity for ag retails is not in only maxing out programs at the end of the year, or hoping it rains so they can sell fungicide.
The upside needs to come from being fundamentally different in the market place and identifying asymmetric opportunities to deliver in the market that will help accrue customers and profit to your business.
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