Upstream Ag Professional - April 13th 2025

Welcome to the 88th Edition of Upstream Ag Professional!

I am travelling this week which has led to an inability to record the audio so there is no audio edition this week. It will be back next week.

Surrounding audio, it has also come to my attention that for some, the audio embed has not been working within the email. My apologies about this. I want to highlight that there is an archive of audio editions on the new website that is updated every week for anyone wanting to access the audio any time. As an Upstream Ag Professional member, you have full access to it here.

Index:

1. DunhamTrimmer 2024 Global Value-Added Fertilizer Report Highlights and Analysis

2. The Power of Constraints: What Ag Retail Can Learn from Switzerland

3. Who should own the future of Ag Tech?

4. Carbon Robotics Lawsuit Follow up

5. Deere Wins. Farmers Lose.

6. Bushel's 2025 State of the Farm Report

   • Agtech is facing challenges, but the strong will survive

7. Loveland Products and Ascribe Bioscience Expand Collaboration to Develop Biofungicide for US Row Crops

8. Soil scans: What is possible and what is the benefit?

9. Nobody Knows (Yet Again)

10. Other Interesting Ag Articles (10 this week)

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1. DunhamTrimmer 2024 Global Value-Added Fertilizer Report Highlights and Analysis - Upstream Ag Professional

Key Insights

• 75% of biostimulants are sold in combination with with nutrients or other crop performance enhancing molecules, forming the value added fertilizer category (VAF).

• The global VAF market is a $19.86 billion global category on track to hit $30.59 billion by 2030, growing at a steady 5.5% CAGR — with more than 1.7 billion applications made per season.

  • Row Crops lead by volume (~55% share, $11 billion), Specialty Crops lead on growth (~45% share, $9 billion and growing faster)

• The North America market is the third largest at $3.16 billion, has the highest VAF penetration globally—59% of hectares see at least one application.

The ag industry is experiencing increased integration of Value-Added Fertilizers (VAFs) into crop production, a category DunhamTrimmer combines together that includes biostimulant technologies with fertilizers.

This week I looked at the DunhamTrimmer® 2024 Global Value-Added Fertilizer Report, which comprehensively outlines key market dynamics, growth drivers, regional insights and influential companies.

The full Upstream Ag Professional breakdown includes exclusive images and the following:

1. Overview of the DunhamTrimmer® 2024 Global Value-Added Fertilizer Report

2. Challenges and Opportunities: For Farmers and Agribusinesses

3. What is a Value Added Fertilizer: Foundational Overview

4. Current Global Market Insights

5. North American Dynamics

6. The Future of Value-Added Fertilizers (VAFs)

7. Final Thoughts

2. The Power of Constraints: What Ag Retail Can Learn from Switzerland - Upstream Ag Professional

Key Takeaways

• Constraints can be a catalyst for innovation — businesses and individuals often succeed not despite limitations, but because of the creative adaptations those limitations require.

• Ag retailers can thrive by applying Switzerland’s “secret sauce” — prioritize continuous learning, build deep trust quickly, think in multi-year horizons, and collaborate beyond traditional partners.

Constraints can be powerful for innovation and success in business.

Constraints tend to be framed as a reason for not excelling or an excuse not to try new things. There is plenty of research that shows inverting this mindset can have a meaningful impact on people and businesses. Constraints can empower us to think in novel ways, focus differently, and be more creative.

David vs. Goliath

I was first introduced to the concept of constraints by Malcolm Gladwell in reading David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants in 2014. In the book Gladwell brought up the examples of wildly successful entrepreneurs who had dyslexia, an obvious constraint to overcome for anyone wishing to educate themselves, let alone build a successful business.

Interestingly, a much larger percentage of successful entrepreneurs are dyslexic than in the general population: Richard Branson, Paul Orfalea, Charles Schwab, John Chambers at Cisco, David Neeleman at JetBlue as a few examples.

In the book, he explains that these individuals don't think they succeeded in spite of their disability. They think they succeeded because of it. From here Gladwell brings up the fact that because these individuals knew they were with challenged reading that they focused more on learning to read people or publicly speak with conviction. Important skills for anyone wanting to build multi-million or billion dollar companies.

In these individuals minds, those specific skills would not have been built up had they had the fortuity of being able to more easily read.

Why Switzerland?

Switzerland has always been a fascinating country to me. As much as I love chocolate, cheese, mountainous views and fancy watches, that’s not what has driven my interest in the country.

It stems from their economic strength. On a per capita basis Switzerland has the 9th largest GDP per capita and the 20th largest GDP in totality across the globe.

On the surface, it’s not that impressive.

However, there are significant constraints to Switzerland having a thriving GDP. Switzerland has not only overcame them, they have thrived in spite of them. These constraints forced Switzerland to carve it’s own path.

I look at ag retail in much the same way.

Some of the constraints in ag retail are acute, while others are chronic.

I think there is a lot that can be learned from what has made Switzerland a prosperous country and applied as a framework for ag retailers, or other businesses, to thrive.

What is Switzerland’s Secret Sauce?

1. Education & Innovation

2. Widely Established Trust

3. Long Time Horizons

4. Collaboration: Externally and Internally

For the full article, expanding on the four components of the secret sauce and applying to what agribusinesses and ag retailers can learn, check out the link above.

3. Who should own the future of Ag Tech? - Matt Waits Linkedin

Key Takeaways

• An open-source agronomy platform built by ag retailers is now more technically feasible thanks to AI and developer tools, but practical challenges remain—especially around internal capabilities, support, and cultural alignment.

• While agronomic platforms could become the control point for ag retailers, current business models still prioritize ERP and transactional software, limiting how central agronomy tech can be—unless service offerings grow significantly.

Matt Waits shared an insightful post this week that had a few points to highlight surrounding who invests in, develops and ultimately owns agronomic software moving forward.

First, he highlighted the potential for retailers like Nutrien, CHS, Wilbur-Ellis, Growmark, and Helena coming together to build an open-source agronomy platform:

As Matt highlights, the concept is feasible, but I wonder if it is practical. Meaning, the logic holds that open source can work, but it’s interesting to consider the shortcomings of open source that challenge it.

Open source software is like a recipe that's shared indiscriminately — anyone can see how it's made, use it, tweak it, or even improve it. Open source projects make their code public, so anyone with the skills can contribute, fix bugs, or build something new from it. Including large companies, like Matt is suggesting. 

The key is that as an open source product, it would present a baseline product, but then all retails for example would require an in-house development team to tweak, adjust, customize etc the open source system to deliver a specific agronomic software product to their teams and customers. This is much more feasible today because of AI coding, proliferation of coding talent etc. but I don’t think that’s the biggest issue for retailers in deploying software.

If we look at core competencies, culture, historical expectations and where success has come from in ag software, it paints a picture.

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