Upstream Ag Insights - May 26th 2025

Essential news and analysis for agribusiness leaders.

Author

Shane Thomas
May 26, 2025 • Read Time: 18 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 Crop Protection and Seed Company Results: Themes, Highlights and Analysis

  2. What Agribusiness Executives Are Saying About Tariffs Right Now

  3. John Deere Acquires Sentera to Integrate Aerial Field Scouting

  4. Bayer weighs Chapter 11 to resolve Roundup lawsuits

  5. The Promise of GenAI: Invisible Technology That Fits How Agriculture Already Works

  6. ‘We know what we’re talking about’ – Syngenta Group Ventures spells out its benefits

  7. AI in Crop Protection Discovery

    a. Corteva: AI can transform crop protection to replace ‘randomness and chance’ with ‘prediction, specificity and design’

    b. Tom Meade on How Enko Leverages AI to Enhance Crop Protection

  8. Data and Defensibility

  9. Other Interesting Ag Articles (11 this week)

Correction

Last week I made two errors regarding the Carbon Robotics system auction coverage:

  1. The Laser Weeding System was for auction, and had a high bid, however, the unit did not officially “sell”. I was informed the farmer opted not to go through with the sale. I mistakingly assumed that a “final bid” indicated a sale price.

  2. My math was wrong. I had the total depreciation calculated accurately based on the assumptions made, however, I had the wrong depreciation value per acre off by a factor of 10. I should have caught this error before publishing.

My apologies to you as a subscriber for sharing incorrect information and to Carbon Robotics for the errors. Thank you to everyone who reached out highlighting the errors.

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

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This week I integrated all of the major crop protection and seed company results from the most recent quarter, all of which are available at the link above.

Additionally, I broke out some central themes and commentary from executives surrounding the quarter and the outlook for 2025.

For access to the full themes and breakdown, including executive quotes and commentary, become an Upstream Ag Professional member:

Index

  1. Themes

    a. Market Buying Habits and Channel Destocking

    b. Generic Pressure

    c. Innovation, New Products and Biologicals

    d. Other

    i. GTM Shifts

    ii. Seed Licensing: Bayer vs. Corteva

  2. Companies

    a. Bayer Crop Science

    b. Corteva

    c. FMC

    d. Syngenta

    e. BASF

    f. UPL

    g. Nufarm

A Few Highlights:

a. Market Buying Habits and Channel Destocking
Most major crop protection companies signaled a reversion to normalized buying behaviors.

  • UPL CEO Mike Frank had the most direct statement after positive results reported by UPL: “In FY '25, we saw the macro global crop protection market start a gradual rebound….Farmers and dealers, their buying patterns are now reset. We believe channel destocking is complete in most major markets. We see normalized ordering patterns from farmers, although they continue to order closer and closer to the use season….Further, active ingredient prices are stabilizing at the current level.”

Generic Pressure
Every major player is contending with growing generic competition, driven by ending patents and Chinese overcapacity.

  • Bayer Crop Science CEO Rodrigo Santos: “As key active ingredients have recently go off off patent, the pressure from generics has increased. And while the CP patent cliff is not as severe as in pharmaceuticals, competitive pressure is nevertheless strong. This has been further amplified by the Chinese generic producers who built significant production overcapacity. With supply chain for important active ingredients strongly above market demand, prices have been coming down significantly containing these AIs. This has pressured CP margins, and we believe these low price levels are here to stay. And the second major shift is the rising of production cost, especially in Europe and North America, where production cost has have rising compared to China, where production cost remained low.”

2. What Agribusiness Executives Are Saying About Tariffs Right Now - Upstream Ag Professional

Tariffs remain an unpredictable variable for global agribusiness, subject to shifting geopolitics, retaliatory policies, and rapid regulatory changes.

However, to make sense of the current landscape, I reviewed Q1 earnings calls, investor conference transcripts, and financial disclosures from the world’s leading agribusinesses to create an in-depth summary of how companies are experiencing and responding to tariff pressures as of early May 2025. The commentary is directional, not definitive— reflecting what executives shared during recent calls, knowing full well the tariff environment continues to evolve.

For the full breakdown, including quotes and images from various crop protection and seed, fertilizer and equipment manufacturers, check out the link above. 

Companies Covered Include

  • Bayer Crop Science

  • Corteva

  • BASF

  • FMC

  • UPL

  • Nufarm

  • AGCO

  • John Deere

  • CNH Industrial

  • Yara

  • Nutrien

  • Mosaic

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3. John Deere Acquires Sentera: Does it Make Sense? - Upstream Ag Professional

John Deere announced today the acquisition of Sentera, a leading provider of remote imagery solutions for agriculture. This acquisition will advance the capabilities of John Deere's existing technology offerings, providing farmers and ag service providers with a more comprehensive set of tools to generate and use data to make decisions that improve farm profitability.

There are a number of notable aspects to this acquisition, but I want to emphasize two:

  1. See & Spray Brand Ladder

  2. John Deere and Drones

See & Spray Brand Ladder

In Sentera to Launch Precision Weed Management Service: Is it a See and Spray Killer? I highlighted some of the bull and bear cases around Sentera’s recently rebranded SMARTSCRIPT Weeds precision weed management solution. The product uses aerial imaging (drone flight) and artificial intelligence to detect weeds and create a map to generate sprayer prescriptions for herbicide applications, with capabilities to do this in less than a 24 hour turn around from drone flight to prescription creation.

The positives for farmers using the Sentera solution relative to a full stack See & Spray system include:

  • better understanding of product volumes needed

  • lower up front cost

  • and improved speed per acre for the spray applicator.

There are however shortcomings to the system, including:

  • limited number of sprayers it can access (~15% of the market has individual nozzle control according to a previous conversation with the Sentera team)

  • risk of boom sway (integrated systems have reinforced booms to improve spray accuracy)

  • and ultimately turn-around time challenges (eg: rain in-between drone flight and map turn around).

Sentera as a stand alone company has these challenges while needing to acquire customers. These limitations were hinderances to long term success for Sentera with the SMARTSCRIPT offering. However, Sentera’s SMARTSCRIPT Weeds as part of a See & Spray brand ladder with dealer network access holds logic.

For full breakdown on the implications for John Deere’s See & Spray Brand Ladder, a look at whether drones are ready for primetime within agriculture, and a look at the Sentera capital raised and potential sales numbers, become an Upstream Ag Professional member:

Bayer is preparing a plan to settle some of its mass lawsuits over Roundup weedkiller in Missouri, and may also seek bankruptcy for its Monsanto unit if the effort fails.

The group has paid about $10 billion to settle disputed claims that Roundup, based on the herbicide glyphosate, causes cancer. About 67,000 further cases are pending for which the group has set aside $5.9 billion in legal provisions.

Last year, there were suggestions that Bayer should execute the “Texas Two-step” because of their litigation challenges regarding glyphosate (and PCBs).

The Texas Two-Step is type of legal initiative used by companies facing mass litigation to centralize liability and manage it through bankruptcy— without filing Chapter 11 for the entire company.

Under Texas law, a business can divide itself into two separate entities: one retaining most of the assets, and the other that contains only the legal liabilities. The liability-owned entity then files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, pausing litigation and aiming to resolve claims through a court-managed trust. For Bayer, that would mean placing the glyphosate assets into one spun out company while retaining all other assets and protecting their broader operations.

Company’s like Johnson & Johnson have attempted to use this strategy in their talc litigation.

However, in this instance, it is being suggested that Bayer file for Chapter 11 for the entire Monsanto US segment of the business.

For a look at what the precedence is for this effort and whether it makes sense for Bayer to pursue, become an Upstream Ag Professional member:

GenAI won’t change agriculture by building new software platforms. But it can help by being embedding into the trusted relationships and workflows that already drive decisions on the farm.

That’s the core shared in Patrick Walther article— and it’s where we can see opportunity for agriculture with GenAi beyond having a digital assistant.

The first comment (emphasis mine):

Advice flows through trusted relationships, not technology platforms.

When making critical decisions, they turn to trusted advisors - their retailers and agronomists - not to standalone technology products.

Value is derived for the farmer in a relationship with their “trusted advisor” through mutual self interest.

The farmer wants ease of doing business and access to information.

The advisor wants to increase their business (sales of equipment, parts, inputs etc.) with that farmer.

If the advisor has influence, they have a better chance of increasing revenue with that farmer.

Influence is maximized if the farmer trusts, and can derive high quality information in a way that is convenient for the farmer, empowering better decision making.

This influence flows through traditional communication systems. Having to move a farmer to a new platform can be challenging, increasing time to influence and ultimately time to a valuable relationship and a convenient experience for both farmer and trusted advisor. We know that changing expectations and workflow has proven difficult in the B2F (eg: software company to farmer) scenarios, along with B2B (eg: software company to ag retailer) situations.

Combine the above with this point:

Capture information where it naturally flows.

Communication in agriculture happens through text messages, WhatsApp, phone calls, and in-field conversations. Our platforms must leverage AI to capture this information from existing channels rather than forcing users to enter it manually.

Imagine a farmer who takes a photo of crop damage and sends it to the agronomist. Our technology should automatically extract the relevant data from that interaction, categorize it, and make it available across platforms without either party having to manually log into a separate system.

For a full breakdown of how these insights can be applied to agribusiness software from agronomic to ERP to CRM, what outside companies have these sorts of GenAi capabilities and why it could be a benefit for agribusiness software, become an Upstream Ag Professional member:

In this article I looked at ways for trusted advisors to leverage GenAi— in it, Patrick Walther, the writer of the catalyst article linked above, also shared a video demo of his “CRM Caller Buddy” system that I think begins to get at this concept of building products that fit into current tools and work flows.

When Monsanto bought Climate Corporation for example, corn prices were unusually high at over $6 a bushel. This gave farmers extra cash to go the extra mile and try out some new technologies. Over $6 is a rarity – only happening about 20% of the time – yet is the greatest determiner of exits this industry has…. 'On the best data I can get, m&a values are 10-times higher when the corn price is above $7 a bushel.

This was an interesting quote in the article from Michael Lee, Managing Director at Syngenta Ventures. The “10x” comment is significant.

I took US corn pricing data over the last 18 years and plotted some of the largest agtech acquisitions, along with their prices paid below:

There are other factors in play here, but the image does illustrate that some of the largest acquisitions came at a time when Corn prices were highest.

7. AI in Crop Protection Discovery

I have been wanting to dive deeper into the topic of AI in discovery so next week I will dig into some of the initiatives from companies like Syngenta, Bayer, Corteva, UPL and others surrounding their use of AI for discovery and try to pull tangible examples of the positive implications

For more on this topic, check out the December 15th 2024 Edition of Upstream Ag Professional where I highlighted Enko and Syngenta and the risk of a reinforcement of Eroom’s Law, not an alleviation from it in regards to the impact of AI on discovery and commercialization.

This proof-of-concept study pioneers the use of PROTACs for agricultural applications and establishes this modality as a promising, disruptive alternative to traditional small molecule inhibitors.

Non Ag Article

As AI transforms how software is built and decisions are made, data is a leverage point. It drives defensibility, value capture, and sustained advantage, specifically in software. This deep dive cuts through the noise and unpacks what a real data moat looks like — how it’s built, when it matters, and why it’s becoming a bigger focus for operators. If you’re in agtech or agribusiness, I think this article is worth your time.

Other Interesting Ag Articles