Upstream Ag Professional - April 6th 2025

Welcome to the 87th Edition of Upstream Ag Professional!

Index

1. The Insight is the Edge: Vive Crop Protection

2. Carbon Robotics Introduces Tractor Autonomy Solution: An Illustration of Complements

3. The $1B Lie: Why Agtech Doesn’t Fit the VC Fantasy

4. 2024 Global Crop Protection Market Review and 2025 Outlook

5. Stratus Ag Research: Evolution of Channel Influence Study 2024 Highlights and Analysis

6. UPL Corp and Provivi Join Forces 

7. 10-Years of Integrating Geospatial, Transactional and Agronomic Information

8. Lindsay Q2 2025 Highlights

9. Deere, AGCO face deeper slump from tariff tensions

10. Audio Edition

11. Pure Independence

12. Other Interesting Ag Articles (6 this week)

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1. The Insight is the Edge: Vive Crop Protection - Upstream Ag Professional

True strategic advantage rarely begins with technology or talent. It begins with insight.

An insight is more than a piece of data or an observation. 

It is the ability to see clearly, often counterintuitively, into a market, a customer, or a capability. And when acted upon, it becomes the foundation of a differentiated strategy.

As Michael Porter famously argued, competitive advantage is a function of choice: a firm must not only decide where to compete but how it will do so differently. The worst outcome is strategic ambiguity— being stuck in the middle, pursuing multiple directions at once and achieving none.

Insight is what prevents that. It clarifies direction. It exposes opportunities that others overlook. And it provides the conviction to commit.

In today’s ag input sector, an industry long driven by blockbuster chemical discovery and global-scale product launches, one example of a company demonstrating the power of insight-led strategy is Vive Crop Protection.

Rather than chase billion-dollar molecules, Vive is rethinking the very structure of crop protection product development. Its model is not built on invention, but on a sharper understanding of where value is being lost and how it can be recaptured through formulation, delivery, and customer-centric design.

As I wrote in The Insight is the Edge:

Vive Crop Protection is putting that principle into practice and in doing so, reimagining what innovation looks like in crop inputs.

Historical Product Development is Discovery Led

For decades, the crop protection industry has operated under a high-capital, long-cycle model of product development. As recently as the early 2000s, the best return on an R&D dollar came from discovering novel active ingredients that addressed broad agronomic challenges. Companies that uncovered these new molecules could command a premium, protected by patents, regulatory exclusivity, and reinforced their dominant market access. Everything else, formulation — even regulatory navigation — was viewed as either a cost of doing business or a technical necessity to enable the molecule’s launch.

In crop protection, a company’s period of exclusivity was essentially the length of its patent and regulatory data protections, such as the U.S. EPA’s data exclusivity period, minus the length of time the molecule spent in development. The result? A 10-to-15 year window of limited competition, pricing power, and high-margin.

But the landscape has fundamentally changed.

In line with Eroom’s Law — the observation that in pharmaceuticals, discovery is becoming slower and more expensive — can be appropriately applied to crop protection molecules too. The low-hanging fruit has been picked. Regulatory scrutiny has intensified. The cost of bringing a new active ingredient to market has soared, as has competition from generics, part of the challenges with crop protection manufacturers’ margins (with restocking being a major contributor to recent declines):

The full Upstream Ag Professional article includes a look at:

1. The Insight is the Edge

2. Historical Product Development is Discovery Led

3. Rethinking Product Development

4. Lessons from Pharma

5. “Riches are in the Niches”

6. Counterintuitive Belief

7. Explicit vs. Implicit Needs

8. Final Thoughts

Link to article in the heading.

2. Carbon Robotics Introduces Autonomy Solution - Yahoo Finance

Key Takeaways

• Strategic Complement: Carbon Robotics’ autonomous tractor system strengthens its core LaserWeeder offering by improving weeding efficiency, reducing labor demand, and increasing the likelihood of timely field operations—positioning it as a complementary product more than any unique standalone product.

This product expansion from Carbon Robotics (CR) is a smart expansion for their business.

In February when I covered CRs G2 product launch and what is needed to improve the value proposition I stated the following:

Autonomy is a complement to CRs laser weeding system. 

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