Upstream Ag Insights - July 31st 2023

Essential news highlights for agribusiness professionals.

July 31, 2023 • Read Time: 12 minutes

Welcome to the 179th Edition of Upstream Ag Insights!

Index for the week:

  1. Navigating Strategic Development, Strategy Tax, and the Opportunity in Uncertainty in Agribusiness

  2. Yara Launches Two Adapt-N Agreements with Proagrica and EverAg: What it entails, Why it matters, and What happens next?

  3. AgVend Captures 20% of the North American Ag Input Retail Market and Why That Matters

  4. Bushel® Transforms Farm Management Software with the Launch of Automated Entry of Grain Contracts

  5. “Farmers Unaware of the Invaluable Value of Their Collective Data” - Why this isn’t quite right.

  6. High-Tech Weed Control to Give Farmers a Look Into How Precise Spraying Can Be

  7. Venture Capital Takes Risk in Ag Technology So Farmers Don’t Have To

  8. PepsiCo and Walmart Aim to Support Regenerative Agriculture Across More than 2 Million Acres of Farmland

  9. Thermal Data Startup Constellr Extends Seed Round to €17M

This week’s edition of Upstream Ag Insights is brought to you by:

Upstream Ag Professional: Your Competitive Edge in Agribusiness

Are you tired of grappling with complex agribusiness news and press releases, struggling to decipher their implications for your team and business?

Do you covet a comprehensive understanding of the ever-evolving agribusiness and agtech landscape?

Are you seeking powerful frameworks and expert agribusiness insights to fuel your strategic decision-making?

Look no further! Upstream Ag Professional is your ultimate resource, providing timely access to new, research and analysis to give you a decisive advantage over 99% of agribusiness professionals.

Whether you're an ag industry consultant, a senior ag retail leader, a leading marketer in crop input manufacturing, or driving strategy for an agricultural equipment company, our frameworks, data points, and actionable insights will propel both you and your career to new heights.

Unlock your full potential with Upstream Ag Professional on your side.

What does an Upstream Ag Professional Subscription Include versus the Free Upstream Ag Insights Edition?

For those interested in subscriptions for multiple team members or company-wide access, please email me at [email protected]

For more on what you are missing out on by only being a free subscriber and not an Upstream Ag Professional Member, see below:

Want to expense Upstream Ag Professional? 

You can use this customizable expense request template to streamline a message to your manager.

Become an Upstream Ag Professional Member Today.

Your Competitors Already Are.

This week I read an article from Ken Zuckerberg, who always brings a unique perspective to the industry.

In Who’s On Your Digital Dance Card? Ken astutely suggests to retailers the need to have “a way to engage digitally with the farmer ..that helps reduce the timing constraints and stress involved with input purchases.”

This view is aligned with the concept I talk about frequently in having a friction reduction mindset at the heart of what you are doing as an ag retailer or any agribusiness:

Ken goes on to say that one of the biggest risks to retailers is inaction, and there is a need to explore options to service your customer effectively today. I agree.

But I think there is still a need for thoughtful contemplation.

I would suggest taking a step back before making these leaps— not because it is inherently bad to post prices online, but because all decisions need to be thought of in a more coherent, all-encompassing strategy for an ag retailer or as an agribusiness.

Tactical efforts are like a Rubik’s cube— a move in one direction means a new challenge to overcome in another.

There are always trade-offs.

The example in the article from Ken is having prices easily accessible online. This effort isn’t as simple as posting them online and seeing if it works. That endeavor will affect the rest of a retailer’s offering.

It creates a chain reaction that needs to be considered in the context of staff incentives, who the target customer is, product sourcing, margin targets, what your differentiators are, and more.

To effectively navigate this chain reaction, there is a need to build a structured strategy, plus lean into the strategy tax and uncertainty. 

The dynamics of these three areas are covered in this Upstream Ag Professional member-only article.

2. Yara Launches Two Adapt-N Agreements - Upstream Ag Professional

In the full article in the link for Upstream Ag Professional members-only, I go through the two new partnerships: one between Yara and Proagrica and one between Yara and EverAg.

The partnerships are surrounding Adapt-N integrations into their farm management software systems. The article includes what Adapt-N is, its challenges as a standalone product, the upside in these integration announcements, the potential business model, and the future integrations we could see from Yara.

AgVend Captures 20% of North American Ag Input Retail Market

Being 20% of the North American ag retail market means that all of AgVend’s customer sales rolled up equates to roughly 20% of the sales across North America annually.

Upstream Ag Professional members gain background on what this means for AgVend partners, the AgVend business model and digital product market access.

Related: Digital Transformation - Speed, Scope, and Scale - Software is Feeding the World

4. Bushel Creates Automated Contract Entry in their Farm Management Software: What it means for their strategy, their customers and the future of their business - Upstream Ag Professional

Bushel has officially announced what their CEO Jake Joraanstad shared on Twitter a few weeks ago:

Big step today at Bushel - Bushel Farm users that are in our business tier are getting early access to automated contracts! This means if you do business with an agribusiness powered by Bushel your account syncs up automatically into your Farm account.

We believe this is the most significant automation of farmer data to happen since you could integrate your machine data. As a farmer you can view multiple contracts across multiple companies in the Bushel network in one place. Think of it like the Mint of ag.

As it happens, you can see your crop marketing efforts show up automatically alongside other positions you've taken. It doesn't get easier than that. You'll get notifications of your profit and loss per crop or field as the market moves as well.

In this Upstream Ag Professional member-only article, I dive into what the announcement means for their strategy, their grain business customers, farmers and the future of their business.

I am not sure the title is accurate. I am certain most farmers are familiar with the concept that their data is valuable.

I dove into this off the back of Matthew Pryor’s article on Farm Data Fears last year, where he talked about the over-indexing of farmer fear of harm surrounding misuse of their data and for Upstream Ag Professional members, broke down further what is important to consider as we think about moving the value of data along within the industry.

The predictive power of the Geco Engineering tool comes from data supplied by satellites, drones and farm equipment. Combined with artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques, this data is used to drive complex agronomic models on population dynamics that show how weeds grow and spread within fields.

Geco Engineering delivers predictive insight into weeds.

In the Upstream Ag Professional breakdown, I dive into what this means for precision spraying along with variable rate application of other inputs and how it ties into enabling regenerative agriculture.

This is a very well-done article by Neal Gutterson, CTO at Radicle Growth, regarding how venture capital reduces risk for farmers.

Generally, the more an article gets me thinking, the more I like it. This article was great and had me thinking in a few different directions.

PepsiCo and Walmart today announced a 7-year collaboration to pursue $120 million worth of investments focused on supporting U.S. and Canadian farmers in their pursuit to improve soil health and water quality. By establishing and scaling financial, agronomic and social programs, it aims to enable and accelerate the adoption of regenerative agriculture practices on more than 2 million acres of farmland.

I talked about the challenges of the likes of PepsiCo and Nestle will run into last week in What CPG Companies Can Learn From Precision Ag Companies. This week I talked about whether these efforts can be successful.

Constellr plans to utilize a constellation of thermal imaging satellites to offer “scalable high-precision smart farming services” to the agricultural sector. The company launched its first system into space aboard a Northrop Grumman resupply mission to the International Space Station in February 2022. The launch of the first HiVE (High-Precision Versatile Exosphere Monitoring) satellite is expected in 2024.

Non-Ag Article

I listened to this podcast recently with Ford CEO Jim Farley and I think it provides some really interesting insights into why it is hard for incumbents to adapt to a digital world.

Some quick quotes from Farley:

We’ve farmed out the software modules that control the vehicles to our suppliers because we could bid them against each other…the problem is the software is all written by 150 different companies and they don’t talk to each other…we can’t even understand it all.

So that’s why at Ford, we decided in the second generation product to completely in-source the electrical architecture. To do that, you need to write all the software yourself, but just remember, car companies haven’t written software like this ever…We’re literally writing the software to operate the vehicle for the first time.

Other Ag Articles

Cultivating Relationships and Nurturing Knowledge: Why Large Language Models will Transform Agriculture - vispro.ai