Upstream Ag Professional - September 27th 2026

Index

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No audio edition this week.

One of my favourite topics is proprietary brand strategy, an area I love and think is incredibly fascinating.

This week, The Daily Scoop published two stories on the topic that I think are worth highlighting, and then I think the topic is worth diving into where proprietary products have came from, and where they are going.

Index:

Overview

Proprietary product strategy has been emphasized within Upstream since the beginning of the publication, has come up often, such as in Navigating Strategic Development, Strategy Tax and the Opportunity in Uncertainty in Agribusiness, and is something that I have been a proponent of since my time working in ag retail, for many reasons, including those highlighted by Margy Eckalkamp, like the need to have a strategy for competing with generics, overcoming margin erosion, and the need to differentiate portfolios.

What I’d add is the element of control and optionality.

Specifically, overcoming reliance on suppliers that can govern growth and influence cash flow (eg: reliance on programs). Not to mention, you become reliant on them for innovation at a time when innovation is arising from various players and corners of the industry and not having a vehicle to capitalize on that leaves retail companies behind their competitors. Or, we could look at what happened with Bayer and Simplot or Winfield last month — you could be cut off from product access. Owning your own brand also delivers ability to influence customer experience (eg: bring in a product for your specific regional needs). Control is king.

For the full breakdown, check out the article in the heading.

Previously, I have put together thematic filing overviews — such as John Deere Precision Ag patent summaries, or ones specific to N-fixation, or surrounding fertilizer or crop protection formulation. Moving forward, I want to put together monthly overviews of some of the stand outs from recent filings and grants.

Here are the recent filings that caught my attention, and why. For the full breakdown, check out the link in the heading.

Lilac Agriculture, a North Dakota State University spinout based in Fargo, raised an oversubscribed $2.3 million seed round led by Innova. The company is developing rhizobial inoculants for pulses, starting with a pea and lentil product called PL11, selected for two traits at once: how efficiently a strain fixes nitrogen and how well it competes with native soil rhizobia to occupy root nodules.

The team is quite experienced. Alongside CEO Natalie DiNicola and CSO Dr. Barney Geddes, the founders include agtech veterans Matt Crisp and Tom Snipes, who was CEO of Plant Response, which was acquired by Mosaic.

I spent the majority of my agronomy career in the pulse growing regions of western Canada (where there are around 8-9 million acres grown annually) so lentils and peas were apart of most crop rotations I worked with, which is why this news caught my attention.

A few things stand out:

1. It's a crowded, commoditized category. I’ll take this from a Canadian perspective because if any North American pulse inoculant provider is going to be successful, they will need to penetrate the Canadian market (Lilac’s first product is for the Northern US Plains, where there are around ~1.8 million acres of pulses). In Canada alone, the list of inoculant providers is large with major players like Syngenta (via Bioceres), BASF and FMC/Novonesis, and then smaller players like Lallemand, XiteBio, NutriAg (HGS Bioscience), Premiere Tech and Verdesian, with nearly all of it moving through retail, which Lilac states will be their route to market. Most of these suppliers also carry a broad portfolio they can bundle for both retailer and grower. BASF is the largest pulse input supplier in western Canada when it comes to products like herbicides and fungicides. This is in a segment that also has a high treatment intensity — in Canadian pulses it's 80%+, which means growth comes from convincing retailers and farmers to switch rather than from expanding into untreated acres. It’s notable that if we think about most venture investments in agriculture, they are into segments that are more “blue ocean,” rather than fighting directly with incumbents on the same feature sets. I have to assume with them being venture driven, they will eventually move into soybeans (but that’s a different bacteria and competency).

2. The lack of strain advancement has a reason. In the AgFunder article there is an emphasis that rhizobia microbes haven’t progressed. There is legitimacy to this, but it’s important to consider the decision making process of farmers and retailers: competitive differentiation has often been at the formulation and stability level with things like handling (ease of treatment, flowability through air drill for a granular etc), shelf stability and on-seed survivability because a gain of a few percent in yield vs. being able to treat seed well before seeding or to treat on top of a seed treatment was often a more highly valued feature of inoculants. There has also been advancements in other technology, such as LCO signallers, which improves the ability for the rhizobia to establish a relationship with the plant, which is another means for one portion of what what Lilac is saying they will improve upon: how well rhizobia establishes itself on root nodules. There are also advancements in bundled microbes with the rhizobia, such as P solubolizers other other microbes like bacillus subtilis for example, creating a superior agronomic package that goes beyond just N.

3. Retail as a route to market. The emphasis is that they will sell through the traditional retail. In the inoculant world, it is common to have multiple suppliers because you can run into supply constraints or QC challenges constantly. But winning shelf space, and maintaining takes time, particularly surrounding the handleability parameters I alluded to earlier, and probably heavy incentives. Selling a straight rhizobia inoculant becomes a price driven conversation so retailers like to have the bundled packages that I highlighted above (eg: P solubolizers) because this becomes a real differentiator for retailers by augmenting the holistic agronomic conversation — having a straight “better N fixation” message becomes the same “our trials show better” conversation that is difficult to win and not to mention, the bundle improves total spend of the farmer on the acre, which means maintaining margins while gaining shelf space becomes a difficult tight rope to walk. A white-label strategy may be a realistic path. Licensing could be an option, but likely leaves little upside for Lilac, so capturing the full product value makes more sense to attempt. Either way, they can expect years of building trust with retailers and growers, likely starting as a backup supplier before anyone switches in any significant way. Farmers and retailers stick with products they know are compatible with their seed treatment and treating equipment. There's real loss aversion at play in the decision making process: a few percent more yield feels like a small gain next to the risk of not treating seamlessly and getting seed in the ground on time. That's another hurdle Lilac will face.

I love that there is an effort to innovate in inoculants. The question is whether a better strain shows up consistently enough in the field to gain traction when handling and convenience have been the differentiators.

Syngenta's EXORT is a foliar biological platform that enables products containing naturally occurring plant microRNAs. Those microRNAs act as plant regulatory signals, and the aim is to deliver biostimulatory responses to improve yields and crop quality. Syngenta said that multi-year trials showed “consistent yield gains” in rice, soybean, corn, cotton, vegetables and fruit. The first products are planned for 2027, followed by a phased rollout to about 20 countries.

Syngenta remains one of the major crop protection companies with the most external partnerships, investments and collaborations with bio-based companies and this announcement just reinforces their efforts in the segment:

As I highlighted earlier this year, Syngenta seems keen to ensure they have an innovation and growth story that they can lean into for when they IPO surrounding bio’s, so I assume that is part of this announcement effort as it was recently stated that they are looking to file later this year or early 2027.

I was looking at Syngenta patents and it appears some of the IP that is enabling this is stemming from the Valagro acquisition.

Another interesting enabler is TraitSeq, a company that Syngenta announced a partnership with in 2025, which could be used to score or optimize something like EXORT, but Syngenta never stated that TraitSeq has been associated with the EXORT platform. TraitSeq could offer four main capabilities: expression markers that allow earlier screening, which cuts time to market and improves success rates; insights into how products interact with environments, drawn from gene expression changes and translated into application guidelines; clearer mode of action, identifying the molecular pathways each product affects, which strengthens commercial credibility; and predictive performance modeling that forecasts where a product might work best. Knowing where to launch and which conditions to emphasize will increasingly separate winners from the rest in biostimulants. Syngenta also has genomics, proteomics, metabolomics, and phenomics data, and if TraitSeq can integrate them effectively, it could give Syngenta a better view of how biostimulants shape plant physiology and improve resilience to abiotic and biotic stress.

What Syngenta is introducing is similar to what we are seeing in the crop protection segment (such as with Bayer’s CropKey, or with RNA tech like Greenlight Biosciences) — designer biostimulants.

How EXORT Works

At its simplest, EXORT would let Syngenta use genomics and bioinformatics to screen naturally occurring plant microRNAs (miRNAs) for those that influence target traits, which is where the TraitSeq partnership could be influential. For example, it could help manage heat stress by controlling how the plant opens and closes its stomata, with similar approaches possible for other stresses and quality traits.

Historically, biostimulant products have been closer to what I’d call a shotgun approach — use a known biostimulant substance, like ascophyllum nodosum or a humate, or whatever molecule, and try to understand how it works, where it works and position and price accordingly as a biostimulant product. EXORT is a precision tool. If it delivers, that gives Syngenta a detailed opportunity for not only discovery, but also an understanding of mode of action that many in the biological category can't tell in a cohesive way which lends itself to better positioning, and a platform it can extend across crops. This gives them an opportunity to apply The Funnel of Specificity and The Four E’s in a precise way.

What I'd want to see

The idea behind the platform is compelling to me, but where I am curious to hear more is surrounding:

I was late to see this release and only sent questions to Syngenta’s communications group on Thursday, so I have not heard back from them at the time of publication surrounding the questions.

This week Vylor announced a collaboration with Rainbow Crops. Rainbow spun out of Belgium's VIB–UGent Center for Plant Systems Biology in 2025. The companies plan to use AI-guided multiplex gene editing to develop corn hybrids with better heat, drought and flood tolerance, better input efficiency and higher yield. They didn't give a commercial timeline.

I first highlighted Rainbow Crops earlier this year in the context of Corteva and gene editing and commoditization of gene editing.

Rainbow is among a host of other players that have been invested in, or have collaborated with the Corteva Catalyst/Vylor Edge groups, as Corteva Catalyst took part in Rainbow's €9.7 million seed round in June 2026. (Note: Once the spin officially happens on October 1st, I will create new images and break these images out into Vylor and Corteva specific ones):

One of the things that stands out to me is that things like drought tolerance and vigor are “polygenic”. They depend on dozens of interacting genes, so single-gene edits and classical trait stacking only get you so far. Rainbow's Trait Foundry™ combines AI-driven design, multiplex editing (many edits in one cell in a single pass), precision breeding and automated phenotyping into a design, build and test loop.

Elite germplasm and multi-environment testing still decide who wins in breeding. So far, gene editing has worked best on traits where the genetics are well understood. The challenge every major seed company is trying to close is performance under stress, where things get noisy and the genetics are networked. If the Trait Foundry system can generate designed diversity at multiplex scale and feed phenotyping data back into the model, the limiting factor moves from editing capacity to how fast you can phenotype and select in elite germplasm.

I suspect most major seed companies are building partnerships of some sort with an AI plus editing company. I am also sure, based on commentary from CEO Chuck Magro, that we can expect more collaboration on the editing front too — the news specifically leans into what I discussed in Mapping Power in the Seed Value Chain: Who Wins, Who Loses, and Why.

a. Triple Threat: Fuel, Fertilizer, Financing Compress Farm Margins. One of the things that is always emphasized whether with tech products, or traditional input products is “return on investment” or ROI. I have emphasized it myself, but I think there is another factor that needs to be factored, particularly when core expenses increase: absolute price. You can have a 7:1 ROI consistently, but if the farmer can’t take on the incremental risk within their operation or doesn’t have the profit margins to reinvest into the product, it doesn’t matter what the ROI is. When foundational needs are increasingly expensive, it gets harder to justify the “elevated” product options in those environments and I think that is an under appreciated aspect to moving a farmer into a specific product.

b. BASF’s InVigor Gold canola seed to be processed by Bunge, supporting commercialization in North America. Bunge will process BASF's InVigor Gold, a canola-quality Brassica juncea hybrid bred for hotter, drier environments. The first hybrid, L322, launches in Montana, North Dakota and Washington in 2027, and Bunge's Washington plant will become the first delivery point. Many crops have been held back more by market access than by agronomy. Securing a crusher before launch gives growers somewhere to deliver the crop, which is often what decides whether they'll try a new one. BASF's target is to grow canola acres in drier, marginal areas.

c. When crops are under the weather is a great overview from Ariel Patton on disease and agriculture.

d. Biologicals No Longer Compete With Chemistry. This article frames the utilization of biologicals as "Can biologicals replace chemistry?” and is incorrectly stating that it is an “increasingly restrictive question” — it was, and has always been, the wrong question to be asking. Black and white, us vs. them mentality has never been in the farmers best interest, it has only been an argument in the best interest of pushing some particular world view (eg: synthetics are bad, and to be fair, some are not great for various reasons). There is no doubt that some biocontrol options can replace some synthetic molecules, and in some instances, there is increasingly views of UV-B, UV-C and lasers to replace chemistry as well. I have frequently had messages from readers suggesting I am biased towards chemistry, yet when I was an agronomist I was accused of being too bullish on biological tools. My main bias is that I ultimately want more tools for farmers — not less due to regulation, nor certain ones pushed on farmers when they may in fact be inferior, but fit some specific world view. Every tool has pros and cons. Inputs for a company are zero-sum, but for the farmer or agronomist (or newsletter writer) they are merely tools to be weighed based on what the situation calls for. There may be validity to other means of controlling pests or improving plant health, but until that can be proven consistently and profitably, it is about identifying the gaps and supporting the farmer with tools that enable them to produce more profitably. The important question is where any product fits within a crop plan, under specific field conditions or situations, and whether that response produces enough economic value to justify its place in the production system. I have long held this view and wrote about it in Synthetics, Biologicals, Systems Agronomy and Weak Link Problems. Taking tools away from farmers is not in the farmers best interest. Adding tools to their tool box is.

e. Outside Ag News: There was a lot of coverage this week surrounding Claude (Anthropic) discovering a novel enzyme system with CRISPR-like repeats. Anthropic says Claude mined public DNA data and flagged ART, a “phage system that pairs a reverse transcriptase with a CRISPR-like repeat array and an accessory protein.” Nobody knows yet what it does, but their team says it is worth exploring. ART lives in bacteriophages, so if it proves programmable for example, it could first be useful in bacterial genomes aka for agriculture: N-fixers, or endophytes for example. Also this week, there was a discovery of a Volcanic Springs Amoeba Surviving 63 °C, Setting a New Heat Record For Complex Life. This isn’t explicitly relevant to agriculture either, but given the capabilities in gene editing, having a better understanding of organisms that can withstand heat may have future applicability for crops and withstanding high temperatures.

f. Bayer U.S.-Crop Science: Availability of a Petition for a Determination of Nonregulated Status and Draft Plant Pest Risk Assessment for Herbicide Resistant MON 96012 Cotton (Gossypium hirsutum) - Bayer is looking for approval of five-way herbicide resistant cotton to match what they are launching in soybean with Vynconic. They are planning for 7-way resistant soybean out towards 2040.

g. Whoever Controls Fertilizer May Control the Next Wave of Biologicals (Note: this is in Portuguese when you click the link - it needs to be manually translated to English since it is on Linkedin). I have been talking about the competitive dynamics in crop protection, fertilizer and biostimulants for 5+ years. Fertilizer companies are moving into the segment at the same time as crop protection companies, competing against groups they previously didn’t have to in areas that are non-core to them. Yara and Mosaic, the two companies emphasized in the linked article are main players in the biostimulant battleground, and are both positioned well to enable novel bio-based tech deployment onto the acre. One of the points of emphasis in the article is surrounding formulation of biologicals into the fertilizer granule, something I have talked about extensively including the original Anuvia patent filing around distributing novel inputs via the fertilizer granule, such as herbicides and fungicides and the potential opportunity given the limited delivery mediums for inputs. Last year, I highlighted other companies and their patents surrounding this endeavor in Patenting the Fertilizer Granule as a Crop Input Delivery System, and if you look at the patent coverage in the first story of this edition, Mosaic has been looking at this segment even more meaningfully. For the likes of Yara and Mosaic, they will be challenged to win space in the spray tank, however, they are, and have been, incredibly well positioned to grab a ride along in the fertilizer granule. Mosaic envisions $200 million of EBITDA by 2030 and $500 million of EBITDA further out for a company that had $2.4 Billion of EBITDA overall in 2025. Each competitor in the biostimulant segment is going to try and leverage their position of strength — crop protection companies in the spray tank, seed companies on the seed and fertilizer companies on and within the granule. What will be interesting to watch is if any of them can cross over into one anothers territory long term, or create a unique partnership to do so — Mosaic has already begun to try. I think because the retail is a unique integration point, we will see white label (proprietary product efforts) play a key role across all of these segments in the coming decade.

h. This is a take from venture capital firm Pymymic’s Rogier Pieterse that is worth briefly digging into: “We don’t believe in what we call the US VC model, where you invest in one or two winners, which are then supposedly going to return your fund. We believe in investing in not per se just one winner, but in what we say the middle layer, and trying to avoid losers.” VC has notoriously been about power laws. I think it’s worth mentioning that the "US VC model" didn't emerge out of an arbitrary cultural preference for chasing unicorns, but it emerged as a math adaptation to early-stage technology risk and outcomes. The “one or two names return the fund” is more a reality in VC surrounding results and the shape of the asset class returns. Though, I have increasingly heard AgTech VC’s make similar statements to Rogier. I pulled some numbers to quantify. Correlation Ventures found that roughly two-thirds of deals fail to return capital, about 4% return 10x or more, and 0.4% return 50x or more. Other work showed a similar concentration: 6% of investments produced about 60 percent of total proceeds. When another group looked at a successful firm’s portfolio, the 10x-plus deals were 7% of the fund and 60% of the return. The logic has generally been: You cannot lose more than the size of the investment, but you can see effectively uncapped gains if you are right, which is the underlying logic of VC. In agriculture, where there has rarely been an exit above ~$300 million and most not hitting nine-figures, it isn’t surprising that investors are wanting to try and look at things differently and structure their portfolio’s and thesis’s accordingly, but the challenge remains: avoiding “losers” is hard because building a new business is an inherently challenging thing to do.

i. Agoro announced Microsoft offtake. At Climate Week NYC this week, Agoro Carbon Alliance issued its first Verra credits under the June 2025 deal to deliver 2.6 million soil carbon removal credits over 12 years. Vintages are 2021–22 from VCS 3634 (cropland) and VCS 3656 (pastureland), quantified under VM0042 v2. First-tranche volume and price remain undisclosed. Agoro plans a shift to VM0042 v3 in early 2027 for later CCP-eligible issuances.

Related: Gamifying Software in Agriculture: Unlocking Engagement Through Dopamine and Competition - Upstream Ag Professional

AgPlenus takes fungicide discovery beyond chemistry - AgroSpectrum

AI for Biostimulants: Turning Plant Mechanisms Into Field Predictions - Linkedin

‘Bring us your difficult trait problems’: Biographica, Hudson River partner on crop genome editing - Linkedin

China’s agricultural spray drone fleet dwarfs U.S. market - Ag Daily

Nutrien Pulls Back Further From Brazil Farm Retail - The AgriBiz

KWS Fiscal Year Results - KWS

Aigen Launches Element Gen 2 X4, the Scalable Precision Mechanical Alternative to Chemical Weed Control - Aigen

Verdex Capital Announces the Carrot Ventures launch of Hypocotyl Inc. - Verdex Capital

Danforth Center Startup Spearhead Bio Closes Oversubscribed $1.62M Seed Round - Danforth Ceter

6 Key Considerations for a Biological Product’s Journey from R&D to Market - Agribusiness Global

The smarter the machine, the simpler it should be. - Swarm Farm