Upstream Ag Insights - March 10th 2025

Essential news and analysis for agribusiness leaders.

Author

Shane Thomas
March 10, 2025 • Read Time: 18 minutes

Welcome to the 254th edition of Upstream Ag Insights—the most trusted resource for strategic insights by over 20,000 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.

Upstream Ag Insights has transitioned to a new platform.

The aim is to deliver an improved subscriber experience and create more value for you through providing a “Hub” where all previous articles and editions can be searched, all images and resources can be found instantly, an audio library will be found and all industry reports live for simple access, along with more to come in the future.

Check out the new platform here:

Index:

  1. FY 2024 Crop Protection & Seed Company Results: A Deep Dive into Themes, Highlights and Analysis

  2. Bayer Crop Science FY 2024 Results Highlights and Analysis

    a. Glyphosate it’s Own Business Unit

    b. Dicamba and Glyphosate: Burn it to the Ground?

  3. Bayer Introduces Vyconic™ Soybeans, 5-way Herbicide Tolerance

  4. AgVend: Building an Industry Platform in Agriculture—And Why We’re All In

  5. Solving for Adoption and Channel in AgTech… So what? with Shane Thomas

  6. AgZen Raises $10M in Series A Funding to Enable Feedback Optimized Agriculture

    a. Foundations of Precision Spraying Report

  7. Signs of recovery in global agrifoodtech as funding levels out at $16bn

  8. BioLumic Launches World’s First Commercial Light-Activated Seed Traits

  9. AgronomyArena.com Launches

  10. What You’re Made For

  11. Other Notable Ag Articles (9 this week)

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Over the last month, I have read dozens of earnings call transcripts along with quarterly crop protection and seed earnings results, working to synthesize the themes, trends and key takeaways across the crop protection manufacturers segment of the agriculture industry.

This report is an aggregation of those materials and includes:

  • one financial comparison chart of major crop protection and seed companies

  • four macro areas of emphasis from FY 2024 leading into 2025, highlighting executive quotes and insights from earnings calls:

    • Crop Protection Revenue Down 5%

    • Supply Chain and Go-to-Market

    • Biologicals a Focus

    • Tariffs

  • three other notable comments and takeaways

    • Bayer and Glyphosate as a Stand Alone Business

    • Corteva M&A Priorities

    • Dicamba and Glyphosate: Burn it to the Ground? Can Bayer be successful with glyphosate? What do they need to consider?

  • highlights and key takeaways from six crop protection and seed manufacturers

    • Bayer Crop Science

    • BASF

    • Corteva

    • FMC

    • UPL

    • Nufarm

    • TELUS Ag and Consumer Goods (digital)

For the full breakdown, including a look at Corteva M&A targets and focus, a look at every company above’s fiscal 2024, trends and executive quotes,become an Upstream Ag Professional member today:

2. Bayer Crop Science FY 2024 Results Highlights and Analysis - Upstream Ag Professional

  1. 2024 Financial Overview

  2. 2025 Outlook

  3. Notable quotes and Executive Commentary

    a. Profitability Now a Priority?

    b. Crop Protection Challenges

    c. Glyphosate its Own Business Unit

    d. Five Year Framework and Margin: Inventory Management

    e. Dicamba and Glyphosate: Burn it to the Ground?

    f. DSO Update

  4. Final Thoughts

Highlights from the results and earnings call:

  • Bayer Crop Science reported a 2% decline in FY revenue, bringing total sales to €22.3 billion in 2024. EBITDA before special items decreased 14.2% to €4.3 billion, with the EBITDA margin falling to 19.4%.

  • Bayer aims to increase EBITDA margins back to the mid-20% range by 2029, but near-term profitability remains pressured by generic competition, regulatory hurdles, and price declines.

  • Glyphosate Business as a Drag on Margins: The glyphosate business experienced a 13% drop in pricing, though volume increased by 7%.

  • Pricing pressures are expected to continue in Q1 2025, forecasting revenues will decline mid-single digits in the quarter.

  • Bayer took a €3.78 billion impairment in 2024, with €3.27 billion in goodwill write-downs due to weaker market conditions and regulatory challenges including in cotton seed, soybean seed and glyphosate business segments.

For the full breakdown, including a look at Bayer’s new glyphosate segment and why it makes sense, but then a consideration: Should Bayer get out of glyphosate? What does that look like? Why would they do it? What are the upsides for their business? For all of this and more, become an Upstream Ag Professional member:

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Today, the Crop Science division of Bayer announced the introduction of Vyconic™ soybeans, a new trait technology that will be the first to feature five herbicide tolerances all in one breakthrough trait

Bayer has a track record of aiming to reshape crop production with innovations like pod shatter canola, Preceon short corn, and attempting new business models like performance guarantees tied to FieldView.

Now they're tackling herbicide resistance with 5-way herbicide-tolerant soybeans — but innovation alone isn't enough.

The real challenge? Getting farmers to consistently use multi-mode-of-action (MoA) herbicides despite higher costs and short-term economic disincentives.

Could Bayer re-think their approach, making multi-MoA products economically compelling and easy to adopt?

Become an Upstream Ag Professional member for more:

Index:

  1. Overview

  2. Rationale

  3. Potential Acquisitions

  4. The Perfect Partner

  5. Control Points: The Crucial Need to Understand for Agribusiness Software

  6. Coasian Views and Product Expansion

  7. Market Size

  8. Final Thoughts

Overview

AgVend has raised $42.7 million, including from growth equity firm Tidemark Capital, a group that specializes in vertical SaaS investing. Their portfolio includes prominent SaaS companies like Toast, Kajabi, Karbon and ServiceTitan.

There are several notable components here.

Rationale

The first is the rationale behind the raise. I reached out to AgVend co-founder and CEO Alexander Reichert to learn about how they are thinking about deploying the funds:

Capital efficiency has always been central to our operating model. We built AgVend brick by brick to stand on its own—without relying on outside capital to subsidize growth or sustain operations. Because of that foundation, we weren’t actively fundraising. This round came together organically in just a few months at the end of last year.

Our primary goal was to remove exit pressure by offering early shareholders the option for liquidity. Building the digital infrastructure for the physical ag supply chain is our long-term mission, and we need partners who are committed for the journey ahead. At the same time, we saw an opportunity to strengthen our balance sheet to ensures we can stay agile—whether that means investing in key initiatives internally or pursuing strategic acquisitions.

Alexander Reichert, co-founder and CEO of AgVend

Capitalization of startups and VC returns in ag is commonly discussed. Providing liquidity (that is not a company sale) for early investors may be necessary for companies getting close to a decade old— I have talked to other prominent start-ups looking to do the same for their early investors.

Acquisitions

The other notable comment from Alexander’s comment is on openness to acquisitions.

There are acquisition opportunities for AgVend in getting deeper into the grain and trading component to better support co-operatives and integrated ag retailers in managing that aspect of their business (eg: where Barchart, DTN etc have a hold).

There are bolt ons to AgVends core business today surrounding program management (eg: Smartwyre), or fintech companies for example, too.

There is also another option: acquiring an ERP.

For a full breakdown on pro’s and cons of acquiring an ERP, a look at control points and why they are important in agribusiness software, why Tidemark investment makes sense, future product expansion and how AgVend could become the operating system for agribusinesses beyond ag retail, become an Upstream Ag Professional member today:

5. Solving for Adoption and Channel in AgTech… So what? with Shane Thomas - AgTech So What

There are a few topics in agtech (and in the tech startup world more broadly) that are truly perennial– problems that must be solved again and again in new and innovative ways as markets, customers, and businesses evolve. Adoption is one of those challenges, and go-to-market strategies are another. We’ve been thinking about the challenge of adoption a lot recently, and also what changes in the marketplace will mean for the retail channel and product distribution for agtech in particular.

This week I sat down with Sarah Nolet and Matthew Pryor of Tenacious Ventures and we discussed:

  • What works (and what doesn’t) in terms of agtech adoption, and what startups and farmer organizations have learned from earlier adoption failures

  • Updates to our thinking around distribution of emerging technologies like Deere’s See and Spray, and what the rollout of these products could mean for other agribusiness sectors and the retail channel more broadly.

  • How resilient are incumbent players in world where technology is threatening to shave margin and disrupt business models, and how effectively are they scouting for tech to head off these threats

AgZen, a leader in agricultural technology, today announced the successful closing of a $10 million Series A funding round, led by DCVC Bio, alongside Material Impact, which led the previous $3.5 million seed round in 2022. This investment will support AgZen's mission to finally close the loop on chemical application in agriculture, leading to improved outcomes and reduced costs for every part of the direct-ag-inputs industry.

AgZen is a precision application technology company.

AgZen mounts camera’s directly onto the spray boom to monitor and enable optimized droplet coverage in real time, delivering insight to farmers about how to adjust their sprayer settings based on the number of spray droplets hitting and sticking to the target plant (eg: weed, or crop). Their product is called RealCoverage which leverages machine vision to assess how spray droplets are behaving in getting to the target (eg: crop) and allow for adjustment given parameters like sprayer settings, products in mix, water volumes, crop type and conditions.

AgZen calls this a Feedback Optimized approach.

AgZen states that growers have leased or bought RealCoverage systems for almost a million acres of spraying in 2025.

Their next product is an on sprayer system to improve droplet target adherence: EnhancedCoverage.

For a look at AgZen products, what enterprises should be interested in them and how they could impact areas of crop protection, become an Upstream Ag Professional member today:

For more on CNH, AgZen, and many more, check out:

Over the last 6 months Upstream Ag Insights and my friends at the AgTech Collective dove deeply into the precision spraying segment to create the definitive guide on what’s happening in the precision spraying segment—delivering insider intelligence that helps you understand what is happening in the realm of Precision Spraying.

If you’re in agribusiness—whether a crop input manufacturer, input retailer, agtech company, OEM, equipment dealer, or investor— understanding the companies, technology and where this market is headed is crucial.

To learn more about the report, check out the link above, or read the Preview Report:

PREVIEW - The Precision Revolution- Foundations of Precision Spraying in Agriculture.pdf487.40 KB • PDF File

AgFunder released it’s always anticipated global agtech funding report this week. Below are some highlights for the upstream agriculture segment:

  • Global agrifoodtech investment reached $16 billion in 2024, a 4% year-over-year decline.

  • Agrifoodtech’s share of the global venture capital market remained around 5%.

  • Funding to all downstream categories increased while upstream funding dropped 22% year over year.

  • Upstream categories continued to outpace those downstream, taking 51% of total agrifoodtech funding in 2024 over 1,265 deals (a 16% drop in deal count though).

  • Ag Biotechnology, with $1.9 billion, was the best-funded Upstream category in 2024 despite a 12% YoY drop in funding.

  • North America was the only region among developed markets to show a positive trend in total funding, growing 10% YoY.

BioLumic, the world’s only company programming seed traits with light, has launched its first commercial Trait Activation System at Gro Alliance’s seed production facility in Cuba City, Wisconsin. This milestone brings the BioLumic proprietary light-based Genetic Expression Trait (xTrait) technology to the global seed industry, enabling new opportunities for enhanced crop performance.

Seed companies can license BioLumic Genetic Expression Traits that are matched to their genetics and integrated into parent lines.

For a breakdown of the Biolumic concept and tech, check out this previous Upstream Ag Professional edition.

9. AgronomyArena.com Launches - Bailey Stockdale

After hearing feedback I decided to upgrade my Agronomy LLM Benchmarking. In arena style benchmarking, users can ask any question they want, see two random models answer side by side, and then vote to reveal which model is which. This is a subjective benchmark, which allows users to guide which model is best for their questions.

This is a really cool tool that Bailey Stockdale of Leaf Agriculture built.

I interacted with it for a while this week. There is definite nuance to answers by model— the thing that I continually had in the back of my mind though was still: Is this answer usable for recommendations? Or just for learning? The latter is still important, but less valuable. I constantly found myself leaning towards the latter.

I also have the opinion that there is more to a model than it’s absolute answering capability, including UX/UI, integrations and more.

Bayer Crop Science and Kissan AI have also started an initiative with the University of Illinois, which is a good initiative too, though brings up the questions of bias— not from any malintent, but I think about it like the company that build the battle chart comparing their product features to competitors, there becomes a tendency to over index on the features you are strongest in.

Non Ag Article

10. What You’re Made For - Six at 6

Do things that others overlook.

Other Interesting Ag Articles

Decibel Bio Raises $12M in financing lead by Breakthrough Energy Ventures with participation from Future Ventures, Leaps by Bayer, and Syngenta Group Ventures - Linkedin (Note: I haven’t had a chance to check Decibel Bio out deeply yet, but this asset was previously within Sound Ag and was spun out, likely because it was relatively unrelated to the core biostimulant business. It has all the same investors as Sound Ag. Epigenetics is a fascinating area.)