Upstream Ag Professional - October 18th 2026

Index

Note: After some feedback from readers, I am going back to hyperlinking the Index so that if you see a topic you are interested in, you can jump right to it. Please note, not all email systems work, so yours may not. For example, Gmail typically works while Outlook often doesn’t.

Thank you for being an Upstream Ag Professional member!

The audio edition is taking one more week off while I finish moving the podcast to its new home. The aim is a smoother setup where each edition automatically loads in your podcast player rather than a janky website. It is on pace to be completed for next week.

Every quarter I read major public company filings so I can synthesize trends and interesting anecdotes to help understand convey what's actually happening at the companies that make products for farmers and what that means from a macro trend perspective, and for those of us working directly in the industry.

I have historically built out financial spreadsheets, patent databases in Airtable and manually built illustrative financial snapshots in Canva. It’s been too disparate for me, which has led to a suboptimal experience for you.

What I have wanted to do is integrate that all into one spot for anyone to go and interact with the data as they wish, with the ability to go directly to the source to dig deeper too. After a couple months of working with a dev team, and trying my hand at AI coding, I built a baseline system that allows any Upstream Ag Professional member to go and get a snapshot of relevant information regarding major agribusinesses and key indicators from them.

Today it becomes readily accessible to you all:

The system lives on www.upstream.ag and covers ~25 companies today:

The companies are grouped together for quick comparisons and then each company also has it’s own page with quarterly financials, segment mix, margins, and R&D/SG&A. It also has inventory, regional mix, capital expenditures, price:volume mix, and various other indicators. Where I think the most interesting aspect comes in is the integration of disparate data sources outside company financials, like recent EPA registrations, newly filed patents, recent acquisitions and investments, X sentiment ratings and recent posts about the company, key executive quotes from earnings calls plus company-specific KPIs like digitally engaged acres for John Deere, absorption rate trends for Titan Machinery, differentiated products as a percent of revenue for the likes of UPL and Corteva, or percent proprietary product margin for the likes of Nutrien.

Most information will be updated quarterly after each companies earnings are released (though some will be updated more regularly, like patents). The aim is to improve it over time through my own usage and your feedback, so please share any comments at any time. Note: It works on mobile, but it’s not a great experience at this time.

On Monday, Switch Bioworks announced a strategic collaboration with Bayer Crop Science:

I have went into detail on Switch Bioworks before, specifically in The Insight is the Edge: Switch Bioworks, but the simplest way to explain Switch, and the way it was framed to me specifically by Founder and CEO Tim Schnabel, is that they are fixing an energy problem inside a microbe.

Breaking the bond in atmospheric nitrogen takes a lot of energy, and in nature a microbe will often only fix as much as it needs for itself. Engineering a strain to overproduce ammonia and hand it to the plant means asking it to spend energy on something that does nothing for its own survival. An "always on" strain has that energy expenditure from the day it hits the soil, which can hinder its growth and its ability to compete in the soil with native microbes.

Acknowledging that tradeoff, and genetically engineering microbial strains to be able to manage it is the driver behind Switch, where their answer is a genetic “switch.”

The microbe spends its early life growing and colonizing the root, and once it is established the switch flips and it starts producing and sharing nitrogen. Switch is not eliminating the trade-off between growth and nitrogen production, but it manages it by inserting a trait into the microbe that ensures the microbe focuses on establishment first, then switches into nitrogen production.

What I think is interesting about Switch is that it is the switch that is the asset, not the microbe fixing nitrogen strain. The "grow first, produce second" control system can in principle be applied to other microbes and agriculture related functions. Phosphorus solubilization is an obvious example in agriculture.

For the full overview that goes through the below, check out the link in the heading:

Index:

Related: Bayer recently released this 2026 Biological Ecosystem Guide, a framework for biological crop protection & crop health partnerships.

BioConsortia has raised $15 million in equity from an entity affiliated with John Pasquesi, managing member of Otter Capital. Otter led both the 2018 Series D and the August 2025 round, and this raise brings BioConsortia's total funding to $110 million since 2014.

Its portfolio spans biostimulants, biocontrol and crop-agnostic nitrogen-fixing microbes. The nitrogen product has a two-year shelf life whether it's granulated into fertilizer, used as a liquid seed treatment or applied through a pivot. If that holds up in the field, it can move through traditional channels and draw interest from seed and fertilizer companies.

When I spoke with BioConsortia's leadership in early 2024, they were confident they had solved some core problems holding back nitrogen-fixing microbes: low-cost production, survival through the supply chain and moving fixed nitrogen into the plant.

The thing that stands out to me about BioConsortia is their Mosaic partnership. In late 2020, Mosaic secured exclusive Americas rights for corn, wheat, cotton and sugarcane, then expanded into Asia in 2022. For a company with no nitrogen business, it opens a new farmer budget through seed treatments or even MicroEssentials granules, and Mosaic has applied for patents in this area. I covered where Bioscience fits in Mosaic's strategy in Mosaic Investor Day coverage, and looked at the partnership in more detail.

FMC announced an update to their Q3 expectations on Thursday.

FMC stock dropped over 30% the day they announced, meaning they are down ~80% over the last year, and ~90% over the last 5 years, with a market cap now below $900 million. Tessenderlo just invested $400 million for 20%.

The reason for the drop is that FMC Announced a cut to its Q3 outlook, with revenue for the quarter now expected to be between $65 million and $125 million when they previously guided about $850 million at the mid point, a nearly 90% reduction.