Upstream Ag Professional - September 21 2025

Welcome to the 111th edition of Upstream Ag Professional

Index

1. WIPO Agriculture Patent Landscape Report Highlights and Analysis

2. Customer Experience > 'Clicks and Mortar': What Nutrien Misses About Digital Enablement

3. H1 2025 Agrifood Funds Report

   1. Who’s Buying Dying AgTech Companies?

4. Drone Spraying: The Progress, Pitfalls, and Path Forward

5. Cisco Foundation Backs Fractal Agriculture’s Equity Financing Model for Regenerative Ag

6. Why Haven’t We Seen More New Billion-Dollar Companies in Agriculture?

7. Don’t start with the product. Start with distribution.

8. Other Interesting Ag Articles (10 this week)

Thank you for being an Upstream Ag Professional member!

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

1. WIPO Agriculture Patent Landscape Report Highlights and Analysis

2. H1 2025 Agrifood Funds Report

3. Customer Experience > 'Clicks and Mortar': What Nutrien Misses About Digital Enablement

New Launch Next week!

I’ll be rolling out new functionality for all Upstream Ag Professional members. It’s designed to make it easier to search the Upstream archive, surface competitive intelligence, and support business development research plus much more.

Full details will be shared next week.

1. WIPO Agriculture Patent Landscape Report Highlights and Analysis - Upstream Ag Professional

1. Why Patents and IP Matter in Agriculture

2. Aggregate Overview by Regions, Company, & Focal Areas

3. Non Pesticide Pest Management

4. Soil and Fertilizer Management

5. Formulation Technology

6. Food Segment

7. Predictive models in precision agriculture

8. Autonomous devices in precision agriculture

Last week, I read through the WIPO Agriculture Patent Landscape Report which sheds light on where new intellectual property in agriculture is accelerating and who’s leading the efforts on a global basis.

For the full breakdown check out the link in the heading, which includes ~27 images illustrating various aspects of IP in agriculture.

Quick Insights from the Report

• According to the report, the Agrifood sector comprises over 3.5 million published patent families over the past 20 years, which the report splits into two main categories: AgTech, representing 60% of the total patent count (2.1 million) and FoodTech, making up the remaining 40% (1.5 million). 

• The US remains the largest region for IP, but filing growth in Asia (China, Japan, Korea) is accelerating the fastest.

• Only 12% of patents are filed internationally, showing most innovation remains locally protected but North American IP is more outward-looking than Asia’s.

• Surprisingly few patents from Fertilizer Manufacturers (eg: Yara, Mosaic, ICL, and Nutrien) - Yara has the most over 2,000 but I think reinforces the lack of R&D investment and the commodity mindset apparent within that sector - they all invest less than 1% of revenue into R&D. Between the four of them they don’t spend $500 million in R&D annually. For context, the four largest crop protection/seed companies spent $6.6 billion in 2024.

• Notably on the food side, Pioneer Hi-Bred/Corteva ranks first out of corporations on the “alternative food sources for human food” segment with 373 international patent families including a broad portfolio in alternative nutrient sources and novel plant breeding techniques to enhance nutritional content of crops (eg: biofortification with vitamins and minerals). If we think back to The Context Network's 2024 Biotech Traits Commercialized (BTC) Study Highlights and Analysis, we can see a heavy skew towards food based traits for all the major seed/trait companies, but Corteva had the highest percentage in the food segment at 47%. 

• Interestingly, there has been no overall growth in patent filings related to the biosynthesis and bio extraction of biological agents for pest control. The number of patent filings associated with traps and other devices (including sprayers, dispensers, and biodegradable devices) has seen a decline during the latter portion of the report period (2017 onward).

• The most common areas for patent filings are: 1) pest management 2) crop genetics and 3) sensors/connectivity/smart farming.

• The Predictive Models in Precision Agriculture segment show a significant annual growth rate of 27.1%. John Deere is the leader in predictive computational models integrated into automated machine controls and holds 116 international patent families, including on things like:

  • Predictive crop state & characteristic mapping

  • Predictive nutrient mapping

  • Predictive harvesting models for machine control

  • Predictive yield mapping

2. Customer Experience > 'Clicks and Mortar': What Nutrien Misses About Digital Enablement - Upstream Ag Professional

The announcement from Nutrien saying The Future Is A ‘Clicks and Mortar Business’ feels like déjà vu, taking me back to themes I was writing about in 2020 — customer experience in ag retail.

There are two themes that come to mind from reading the article:

1. Front End Customer Experience

2. Value of a Digitally Enabled Team

Front End Customer Experience

First, let’s define customer experience.

When I say “customer experience,” I am talking about the sum of all interactions a customer has with the business — critically, how those interactions make the customer feel.

It’s broader than customer service or the transaction. For example, service is one touchpoint (eg: resolving an issue), whereas experience covers the entire journey: engaging the company, evaluating options, purchasing, paying, using the product or service, and post-purchase engagement/support.

Key elements throughout the customer journey include:

• Ease of interaction — how simple and frictionless it is for a customer to get what they want at every point of engagement/need.

• Consistency — whether the experience is reliable across channels (in-person, online, mobile etc).

• Responsiveness — speed and quality of communication.

• Personalization — tailoring offers, messages, or support to the customer’s context.

• Emotional impact — the sense of trust, confidence, or frustration the customer walks away with.

Thinking about the customer experience means more than designing systems, workflows, and technologies — it is about enabling the culture and staff capabilities to deliver so that a customer’s relationship with the company is seamless, efficient, and positive enough that it builds relationships and loyalty.

Digital enablement is about supporting that customer experience in an ancillary way.

Digital Portals

On one hand, it’s encouraging that Nutrien is highlighting the need for a more integrated and seamless connection between customers and staff. Acknowledging the importance of digital tools is necessary in today’s market.

However, what was leading in 2020 is table stakes today.

For example, companies like AgVend have been built on delivering retails a way to offer better experiences for customers and staff. AgVend CEO Alexander Reichert recently shared with me that they have 35% of North American ag retail on their system, which means ~35% of North American retailers already have an integrated customer experience, which means that Nutrien isn’t leading, they are actually admitting they are playing catchup.

Mediums are Ancillary

Have you ever heard an ag retail say they are “cable and mortar” because they invested in a phone line?

I doubt it.

A phone line was a new medium through which an entity could connect with and communicate with a customer, improving the experience for the customer and the staff.

That’s what digital systems and customer portals enable, too.

Just like a fax machine machine enabling fax messages, cell phones enabling text messages, the internet enabling e-mail and now online infrastructure enabling connection through a digital hub or portal. These are all tools that enable ancillary customer engagement.

Not getting a phone line in the ‘50’s is the equivalent of not having an online system for staff and customers to engage.

Learning from Banking and Airlines

If your bank tried to differentiate itself by saying “we have an online banking experience and an app,” you’d probably say “so does everyone else.”

Why is ag retail any different?

In numerous articles in 2020 and 2021, including one where I talked about the need to focus on the “ambient” nature of customer experience, I emphasized that digital portals and hubs are not about transacting — they are about communication, freeing up time for the customer and staff and improving the entire relationship experience, not just the transaction itself.

I emphasized things like: Can the farmer see what orders were last year? Can they pay an invoice? Can they sign a fertilizer contract? Can they track program progress? Can they access financing? Can they see their scouting reports from their sales agronomist? These are the important aspects that empower farmers to manage their time and their business.

That’s all table stakes in the airline industry, too — purchasing your ticket online is useful, but augmenting the flying experience with the integration of digital systems supporting how you check-in, receive luggage updates, boarding start alerts, gate change alerts etc. all deliver a better experience throughout more than just the actual purchase. The digital tools act as a coordinating layer to augment your experience and what you are capable of.

What is encouraging from Nutrien, is they have stopped emphasizing dollars through the portal a KPI, something I long said was irrelevant (because transactions are not the important aspect). Nutrien stopped reporting dollars through their initial portal in 2023 and with the relaunch is beginning to frame things through an experience lens, including looking at:

• Does this improve outcomes for customers?

• Do customers save time and effort?

• Is it more convenient?

• Does it strengthen the connection between customers, Nutrien, and the people who represent the company?

In summary — the customer experience.

For the full article breaking down where Nutrien is starting, what future advances to digital portals will look like and where the value stems from in digital enablement at the retail level, check out the link in the heading.

3. H1 2025 Agrifood Funds Report - Pitchbook

Some Takeaways from the Report on VC/PE Funds and the Capital the Funds are Raising

• After growing through 2022, agrifood VC has plummeted. Fundraising collapsed from $3.4 billion in 2022 to just $1.2 billion in 2024, and new fund launches dropped 65% year-over-year, from 49 in 2023 to 17 in 2024. 2025 2025 data isn’t showing a turnaround either — only $0.2 billion raised across six funds through June.

  
  

• The raising and return challenges can be shown in the exit number and value, conveying why there are challenges with further raises for the funds:

  

• Private equity has held up better, though far from bullish. Fundraising peaked at $4.8 billion in 2023 before sliding 40% to $2.9 billion in 2024. Unlike VC, fund launches have held steady at 11 each year. Year-to-date 2025: $0.3 billion raised across two funds.

• Related to this, last week I shared commentary from Connie Bowen where she stated a 3x return for an agtech fund would be considered “good.” She also shares that that 3x return would be over a 12-15 year time frame for ag, not the typical ~7-10 years for mainstream VCs.

  If we break that down into annual returns, it illustrates some of the challenges that VCs have in raising funds: On a 12 year time horizon, a tripling would be a 9.5% annualized rate of return. On a 15 year, if wouldn’t even be 8%. I created a chart to illustrate returns (IRR) if you were to be more successful and 4x or 5x on a range of 10-15 years:

  

  For context, the S&P 500 has returned almost 7.5% annually over the last 25 years, and more than 12% over the last 5 years, with a lower risk profile and higher liquidity.

• For firms raising capital, their LPs are also going to have optionality to invest in “sexier” VC segments — such as artificial intelligence, or defense. Anecdotally, I was talking with a VC this week who’s a partner at a fund that does invest in agriculture, but primarily invests beyond ag. He told me it’s almost impossible to have ag companies even taken seriously in investment meetings when he brings them up relative to the opportunities out there in other sectors.

This all leads to the following question I have been asking for a couple years:

Who’s Buying Out Dying AgTech Companies?

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