Upstream Ag Insights - May 19th 2025

Essential news and analysis for agribusiness leaders.

Author

Shane Thomas
May 19, 2025 • Read Time: 15 minutes

Welcome to the 263rd edition of Upstream Ag Insights— the most trusted resource for strategic insights by over 20,000 agribusiness leaders.

Below you’ll find critical ag 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. Q1 2025 Agribusiness Results Highlights and Analysis: Bayer, TELUS, Deere, and UPL

  2. AgTech Collaboration Through a Wide Lens

  3. Bayer Crop Science Strategy Update Highlights and Analysis

  4. TerraBlaster Raises $3 million from Khosla Ventures

  5. Carbon Robotics Laser Weeder Sells for ~40% of New Price 2 Years Later

  6. Phospholutions Expands Distribution through Partnership with The Andersons

  7. In an AI World, we need to stop talking about the 'Human in the Loop'

  8. CNH expands connectivity solutions with SpaceX’s Starlink

  9. Everything is Technology

  10. Other Interesting Ag Articles (11 this week)

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

Post-Harvest Productivity: Closing the Loop with Carryover Benefits

The impact of harvest doesn’t end when the fruit leaves the tree—it sets the stage for next season’s success. Post-harvest stress can weaken trees, reducing bloom potential, fruit set, and overall productivity in the following year.

Parka® helps growers close the loop on orchard management by reinforcing the plant cuticle after harvest. Strengthening the cuticle during this critical period mitigates environmental stress, enhances physiological processes and supports healthier trees heading into dormancy.

The result?

- Improved plant tolerance to environmental extremes

- Stronger bud development for reduced doubles and spurs

- Higher marketable yields in the seasons to come

By investing in post-harvest cuticle care, growers can maximize both short-term returns and long-term orchard performance. Learn how to protect this season’s gains while setting up for next year’s success.

In Q1 2025, Bayer Crop Science saw a 4.1% drop in revenue, largely driven by declines in corn, soybean, and cotton seed sales, compounded by regulatory challenges and timing issues in herbicides and fungicides. While their outlook for Q2 is more optimistic, the company faces continued pressure in North America and significant tariff-related challenges.

Meanwhile, TELUS's Agriculture and Consumer Goods segment grew through acquisitions like Proagrica, but its organic growth in the agriculture vertical remains limited.

Deere & Co. Q2 results revealed a 21% sales decline in Production Agriculture, as tighter farmer budgets and slower equipment turnover weigh on their performance. However, their push into recurring revenue models like Precision Essentials is worth paying attention to, including retention numbers.

UPL achieved 11% revenue growth for FY 2025, largely driven by strong volume growth in North America and Europe, while making significant strides in its Sustainable & Differentiated Solutions segment.

To gain a deeper understanding of how these companies are navigating challenges and positioning themselves for future growth, from Bayer's product strategy to Deere's shift toward Solutions-as-a-service, to the specifics behind TELUS’s challenges, become an Upstream Ag Professional member for a comprehensive look at the latest industry trends and strategic moves shaping the future of agribusiness.

2. AgTech Collaboration Through a Wide Lens - Upstream Ag Professional

Last week, Dr. Ron Adner, a leading business strategist and professor at Tuck School of Business, who’s writing has had a significant influence on how I think about the world of business, joined InnerPlant co-founder and CEO Shely Aronov on an episode of Croptastic.

The discussion was compelling to me because the frameworks shared in those books has been instrumental in my thinking of ecosystems and business startegy, particularly as it pertains to InnerPlant (Disclosure: Upstream Ag Ventures Inc. is an investor in InnerPlant).

I wanted to go through and apply some of the frameworks from The Wide Lens to what the InnerPlant team is doing.

Winning Through Ecosystems

The back page of The Wide Lens states the following (emphasis mine):

How can great companies do everything right— identify customer needs, deliver excellent innovations, beat competitors to market— and still fail?

Many fail because they focus too intensely on their own innovations while neglecting the innovation ecosystems on which their success depends. In our increasingly interdependent world, winning requires more than just delivering on your own promises. It means ensuring that a host of partners—some visible, some hidden— deliver on their promises, too.

When looking at the InnerPlant technology— a biotech trait that enables plants to fluoresce when they encounter stresses such as fungal disease, it becomes apparent that there is an array of other technologies necessary for InnerPlant to be successful— sensors that can interpret the plant signal, sensors inexpensive and ubiquitous enough to deliver frequent insight, pieces of equipment (drone, tractor etc) in a field with the ability to interpret the signals and act on them, germplasm to place the trait, and crop protection companies that want to leverage that novel signal to deliver a better outcome to farmers as just some of the examples.

Some of this can be done in an integrated fashion by InnerPlant itself. However, there is a need to collaborate with various influential players, increase value delivery throughout the supply chain, and embed itself within the fabric of industry best practices and leading companies.

Ecosystem Risks

In the book, Dr. Adner introduces three core interdependent risks that innovators often overlook when deploying innovation:

  1. Execution risks — the challenges you face in bringing your innovation to the required specification within the time necessary.

  2. Co-innovation risks — the extent to which the successful commercialization of your innovation depends on the successful commercialization of other innovations.

  3. Adoption chain risks — the extent to which partners will need to adopt your innovation before end consumers can assess the whole value proposition.

All of these risks need to be solved for, or an innovation fails.

For the full breakdown of and application of co-innovation risk and adoption chain risk to agtech, including a detailed breakdown of frameworks for becoming the best co-innovation collaborator, become an Upstream Ag Professional member:

Your Unfair Advantage in Ag Retail 

AGpilot is an app that utilizes Gen AI to seamlessly integrate grower-advisor interactions with vast troves of both external and internal data. Leveraging sources such as Microsoft's ADMA solution for external data, and proprietary data repositories developed by ag retailers, AGpilot transforms raw information into actionable insights in real-time. By automating research tasks and consolidating relevant data, AGpilot empowers advisors to perform their duties more efficiently and effectively. 

AGpilot enables your organization to: 

- Increase Revenue: Acquire more customers, expand customer share, and avoid displacement. 

- Improve Productivity: Quickly view customer info, data, and tailored insights across systems. 

- Reduce Attrition: Provide best-in-class tools to improve agronomist value, income, and relationships. 

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

This week Bayer Crop Science executives held a Crop Science Investor Update to address the direction for the business.

After continued challenges from the cyclicality of the market, to pricing dynamics, to regulatory, to litigation, the business has been in constant uncertainty for more than 5 years.

The company is trying to reign in challenges, signaling a sharpened focus on operational discipline, pipeline execution, and long-term value creation.

The session served three key purposes:

  1. Restore Confidence in the Core Business - With profitability under pressure and market skepticism mounting around glyphosate exposure, Bayer aimed to demonstrate the underlying strength of its Seeds & Traits (S&T) and Crop Protection (CP) platforms.

  2. Showcase a Structured Turnaround Plan - The company laid out a five-year strategic framework to improve margins by €1 billion, release €1.5 billion in working capital, and drive €3.5 billion in incremental sales through innovation and geographic expansion—particularly in corn, soy, and biologicals.

  3. Reaffirm Leadership in Ag Innovation - Bayer emphasized its unmatched R&D engine, digital capabilities, and ability to scale new value pools such as biological crop inputs, and next-generation biofuels.

The session was a recalibration. Bayer is working to shift the narrative from short-term volatility to long-term leadership in the future of agriculture, leading to improved outcomes for farmers and shareholders. The session emphasized that this is to begin with cost rationalization and discipline in the next ~2 years, and then begin to ramp up from innovation starting around 2027 and beyond.

For the full detailed breakdown including a look at how Bayer is positioning it’s strengths in biologicals (and the opportunities I think they are missing), what their digital strategy is moving forward, how they are evolving their Go-to-Market strategy, including changing the countries and focus on and prioritize, plus more on their licensing business and seed and trait business, become an Upstream Ag Professional member:

4. TerraBlaster Raises $3 million from Khosla Ventures - Upstream Ag Professional

Jorge Heraud, the newly full-time CEO of TerraBlaster shared the following in a Linkedin post last week:

We’re rebranding to TerraBlaster, a reference to our revolutionary technology. It refers to our technology (developed by NASA for use on Mars) to “blast” the soil with lasers, break molecules into ions, and read soil composition instantly.

We’re closing an oversubscribed $3m seed round led by Khosla Ventures. Soon I’ll be announcing additional amazing partners joining in this round too.

The company, and the news, is notable for three reasons:

  1. The problem the company is focused on solving.

  2. Who the CEO is

  3. Who is leading the round

What does TerraBlaster Do?

TerraBlaster (formerly SoilCode) is a startup bringing technology used by NASA to precision agriculture.

Its core innovation is a laser-based soil analysis system. The TerraBlaster sensor uses Laser-Induced Breakdown Spectroscopy (LIBS)– a technique that “blasts” the soil with laser pulses, vaporizing tiny soil particles into plasma, and then reads the emitted light spectrum to instantly determine elemental composition.

By breaking molecules into ions and detecting their spectral “fingerprints,” the system can test soil nutrients in real-time.

TerraBlaster has quickly become one of the most compelling companies within the industries because of their technology and application of that technology to solve one of the biggest problems in agronomy.

For a deeper look at where the TerraBlaster can be used, the soil testing problems that TerraBlaster solves, Jevons Paradox and friction reduction in inputs, potential collaborators and routes to market, along with why the CEO and investor group is so notable, become an Upstream Ag Professional member:

Phospholutions Inc., announced today a milestone in its United States expansion with a signed distribution agreement with The Andersons, Inc.

The agreement secures The Andersons as a distributor for the 2026 crop year, marking a major step forward in making RhizoSorb®, the Next Generation of Phosphorus Fertilizer TechnologyTM, more accessible to row crop producers. The agreement aligns and strengthens Phospholutions’ mission to deliver efficient and sustainable fertilizer solutions and supports continued growth in key markets.

Phosphorous efficiency remains a big agronomic opportunity.

Products like Penicillium bilaiae (Jumpstart) and AVAIL from Verdesian have targeted P availability, but Phospholutions takes a different approach by integrating its Rhizosorb technology, an ion-exchange mechanism, directly into the phosphorous manufacturing process.

For a deeper look at the Phospholutions product and model, including a look at why The Anderson’s makes sense and why others are likely to be interested in partnership, particularly with some of the forecasted growth for specialty fertilizers by Mosaic, become an Upstream Ag Professional member:

If you don’t follow Theo Marinos and you are interested in data and AI, I suggest following him and his Linkedin posts. He shares a lot of valuable insight on those areas and this week was no exception.

In the above post he dives into some important nuance around “human-in-the-loop” vs. AI supported experts.

This fits into a concept I was talking to a colleague about this week that thinks about adapting software and AI to your workflow, to designing products that invert that logic and seamlessly fit into the current softwares, systems and workflows being used by agribusiness professionals to ultimately deliver better outcomes. I’ll dig deeper into that next week.

CNH announces that it has signed an agreement with Starlink, a subsidiary of SpaceX, to bring industry-leading satellite connectivity to farmers. This collaboration will provide customers of CNH brands, Case IH, New Holland and STEYR, with robust and affordable high-speed connectivity – further unlocking the benefits of a fully connected fleet – even in the most remote rural locations around the world.

In April 2024, CNH announced a partnership with satellite connectivity provider, Intelsat.

I have not heard anything about it since.

The sentiment from the announcement was not that this was an augmentation of the Intelsat / CNH capabilities, but a replacement for a collaboration that did not work out.

John Deere originally announced a partnership with Starlink in January of 2024.

Non Ag Article

Software alone is not eating the world, technology – software, hardware, bio (for simplicity’s sake, pretty much anything that a VC can invest in) – is eating the world, and it’s doing so in two main ways: by eating someone else’s lunch or cooking up its own.

Other Interesting Ag Articles

Agrifood Economy Index - Dial Ventures