Upstream Ag Professional - December 7th 2025

Welcome to the 122nd edition of Upstream Ag Professional

Index

1. Mapping Power in the Seed Value Chain: Who Wins, Who Loses, and Why

2. 2025 Crop Life 100 Report: Highlights and Analysis

3. Harvest Loss Technology

   1. New Partnership Unites Bushel Plus SmartPan™ System with John Deere Harvest Settings Automation Technology

   2. Farmwave Patent

4. Provivi, Syngenta strike major Brazil deal on pheromone pest control

5. Trump administration backs Bayer's bid to curb Roundup lawsuits

6. FMC at Goldman Sachs Industrials and Materials Conference 2025

7. The Last Human Edge

8. Other Interesting Ag Articles (8 this week)

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This week’s audio edition can be found here and covers the following:

1. Provivi, Syngenta strike major Brazil deal on pheromone pest control

2. FMC at Goldman Sachs Industrials and Materials Conference 2025

3. Harvest Loss Technology

4. 2025 Crop Life 100 Report: Highlights and Analysis

1. Mapping Power in the Seed Value Chain: Who Wins, Who Loses, and Why - Upstream Ag Professional

1. Introduction

2. Cornered Resources

3. Germplasm

4. The Seed Value Chain

5. Commoditize the Complement

6. Gene Editing Company Hurdles

7. Monsanto vs. Pioneer

8. Potential Avenues for Value Shifts?

9. Final Thoughts

Last month, I wrote about The Four Forces Reshaping the Crop Protection Industry, and the month before that I wrote about the The Danger of Dominant Logic and Pioneer’s Blind Spot.

It’s interesting to bring that together with a question to the Corteva executive team on their recent earnings call from an analyst:

The question to me represents an opportunity to unpack the components of the seed industry and how that impacts where competitive advantage comes from in the segment.

Cornered Resources

One of the most renowned books on strategy is Hamilton Helmers 7 Powers.

Helmer’s framework boils strategy down to a single core outcome: durable returns.

The book suggests that strategy is about identifying and building structural advantages that competitors can’t easily replicate, leading to better returns. Helmer calls this “power.”

He defines power as any mechanism that sustainably raises a firm’s long-term profitability, then categorizes the landscape into seven forms:

1. scale economies

2. network economies

3. counter-positioning

4. switching costs

5. branding

6. cornered resource, and

7. process power

Seed companies can likely cite several areas within those seven that give them a competitive advantage, but I want to focus on one: cornered resource. 

A cornered resource is an asset that others can’t access on comparable terms and that exclusivity translates into strategic advantage. It can be a proprietary technology, a long-term licensing agreement, unique data, or anything structurally difficult to acquire or substitute. That means, competitors can see the value but can’t replicate the resource at any reasonable cost.

Germplasm

Elite germplasm is a cornered resource in the seed world. Gene editing companies usually do not have access to it, at least not high quality germplasm.

Germplasm is the genetic base of seeds, breeding lines, and genomic libraries. It is the foundation behind every crop variety. Its value compounds over time because improvement is cumulative and path dependent, shaped by decades of breeding decisions, field trials, and data integration. Elite corn germplasm, for example, doesn’t materialize over night, it emerges from crossing inbred lines, evaluating hybrids across environments, and continuously refining traits like yield, standability, and stress tolerance. This process compounds over generations.

Pioneer Hi-Bred, now part of Corteva (and soon to be stand alone again), has been at it since 1926, building a library of corn genetics that companies cannot readily recreate, especially in a traditional venture cycle.

We see this reinforced with the consolidation in the seed industry, particularly in the 90’s and early 2000’s. Companies actively acquiring disparate lines and companies to not only build out germplasm, but distribution:

For the full break down check out the link in the heading.

Related: The Billion-Dollar Problem Big Ag Ignores - SFTW

2. 2025 Crop Life 100 Report - Crop Life

Highlights

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