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iGrow News - 2025 Precision Ag Intelligence Report - https://igrownews.com/precision

Episode Description

What shook up the world of precision agriculture in 2025? In this exclusive deep dive, Harry Duran sits down with Sepehr Achard, fellow co-founder of iGrow News, to explore the striking trends and surprising signals from the just-released 2025 Precision Ag Intelligence Report. From the surging impact of AI on product development—and the sudden vulnerability of software-only companies—to unexpected M&A moves like food giants buying robotics startups and why a drop in patent filings could predict a seismic shift, this episode connects the industry’s hidden dots.

Discover why $600 million in funding might no longer guarantee success, the mysterious surge of patents out of China (but almost none granted), and which countries are quietly emerging as ag innovation hubs. The guests grapple with the future of metrics like "compute cost per acre," the looming prospect of AI-taxation, and whether distribution—rather than technology—could become the true differentiator.

And in a world rocked by global tensions, could fertilizer shocks and input price spikes trigger the next wave of ag innovation—or stall it in its tracks? Don't miss this detailed yet fast-paced conversation pulling back the curtain on where precision ag is heading next.

Ready for the data points no newswire is covering? Press play.

5 Key Takeaways

In a rapidly evolving AgTech landscape, strategic awareness and rapid adaptation are critical for survival and growth. Take charge of your future with these decisive actions:

1. Monitor patent activity and social signals of key industry players to anticipate strategic moves and market shifts.
2. Diversify beyond pure software solutions—build or partner for hardware, own unique data, and prioritize distribution networks for defensible growth.
3. Prepare for increased M&A activity by strengthening your customer base, technology differentiation, and profitability to become acquisition-ready.
4. Rethink KPIs for the AI era by tracking new metrics like compute cost per acre and token usage to measure operational efficiency.
5. Keep a pulse on global events, such as geopolitical conflict and supply chain volatility, to anticipate their cascading impact on AgTech investments and strategic decisions.

Act now—evaluate your business model, data, and partnerships with these insights to stay ahead in precision agriculture.

Memorable Quotes

"It's not a differentiator anymore to have fancy technology or AI you can create; the real differentiators are controlling the data, owning the hardware, and—most importantly—having the distribution."

"The cost of developing new products is dramatically decreasing, but the cost of introducing these products to market is increasing; developing technology alone doesn't mean much anymore because it can be replicated quickly and cheaply."

"China has a patent creation engine driven by universities, but once you look at actual granted patents and real technology, there are overlooked hubs like Korea, Japan, India, Israel, the Netherlands, and the U.S. producing innovations that are truly patentable and impactful."

Resources Mentioned

Taylor Farms - https://www.taylorfarms.com/

FarmWise (Autonomous Weeding Business) - https://www.farmwise.io/

Climate Corporation - https://climate.com/

John Deere - https://www.deere.com/

Massey Ferguson - https://www.masseyferguson.com/

CNH Industrial - https://www.cnh.com/

Starlink (integrated by CNH Industrial) - https://www.starlink.com/

Arable - https://www.arable.com/

Google Cloud - https://cloud.google.com/

Amazon Web Services (AWS) - https://aws.amazon.com/

Yamaha Agriculture - https://global.yamaha-motor.com/business/precision_ag/

Caterpillar - https://www.caterpillar.com/

Monarch Tractor - https://monarchtractor.com/

Connect with Us!

Be sure go subscribe to our other shows:

Vertical Farming Podcast: https://verticalfarmingpodcast.com/

Greenhouse Success Stories: https://greenhousesuccess.com/

Presented by iGrowNews.com

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/igrownews

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Welcome back. We have a special bonus episode today across all of our

podcasts. So you may be Hearing this on AgTech Digest, vertical

farming Podcast or Greenhouse Success Stories. Today, I'm

sitting down with my fellow co founder, Sepp Rachard of

iGrow News, and he's the creator of the

2025 Precision Ag Intelligence Report.

Sepp, thanks for joining me on the podcast. Yeah, thanks for

having me, Harry. So excited to

put this episode together. It was your idea that we do this, and I

think it makes a lot of sense. You've done a lot of work to put

this report together, a lot of hard work behind the scenes.

And it's not just a market overview. Just normally you would

see something like this and it's just pulled from a couple of press releases, but

you've really tracked over 250 market events

from 2025. Funding rounds, acquisitions,

partnerships, product launches, executive hires, and then

cross referenced it against patent data, which

is, I thought was interesting, covering, if I read correctly, more

than 105,000 filings globally. So it's a

report that connects a lot of dots most people in the industry aren't even aware

of. Yeah. So we pulled 200, well, more than

250 market events from press releases, articles that we

published. And in addition to that, we looked at over

105,000 patents that were filed since

2024. The reason being 2024 and

not 2025 is that usually you got this 18 to 24

months lag in the public data that is

available. And so some of

the patent applications haven't been yet processed.

And so usually when you look even for 2025, you would see

a major drop from June onwards,

which doesn't mean anything. It's just because there's a

log lag pretty much. And I think what struck me the most

is some of the things that popped out when you're

looking through this. The over $600 million in

funding, the M and A deals, the product launches. But you see things

like a food company acquiring a robotics startup, or this

observation that when companies stop filing patents,

it could be a signal that something else is happening behind the scenes. We'll

get into the specifics, but I'm curious what you saw that jumped out at you

from the data. That might have been a little bit of a surprise. Not so

much a surprise, but perhaps the scale and

how quickly it's happening. It's just the impact of

AI in product development. And that's something that I think

is not talked about enough. And it's something that we covered in the

report is that today, if you're a software

company, I mean, I don't want to say

you're in trouble, but you have to find

solutions to either secure and show that you have quality data

input, for instance, and you have access to a major

database of data that cannot be found anywhere

or hardly found anywhere, or you also provide the

hardware. But if you're just a software company today,

I mean, a 20 year old or a 25

year old could come in and just build pretty much the same thing

and the same UI that you have

for your client at a much cheaper

price. And that's another thing is also the cost of developing

new products is dramatically decreasing and the

cost of introducing these new products to market is also

dramatically increasing. Like before, we used to say that as

long as you have a high quality product or like a highly

developed technology, for instance, then that was one of the major

keys to success. But today developing that technology

doesn't mean much anymore. It can be developed

very rapidly, very quickly compared to a couple years ago.

And the ramifications it has is enormous

because not only does it decrease the cost of

developing those products, but it also doesn't justify enormous

funding rounds. It doesn't justify all the things that we've

seen over the years. And it will have implications and

it will change the space in a way that we haven't seen yet.

And that applies to any industry. It's not just we're talking about agriculture and

precision ag here, but it applies to every single industry.

Yeah, and I think that the fact that you saw that in 2025 as something

that was on the horizon and already affecting some of the companies in the report,

that's only going to get exponentially more exposed

in 20. I mean, it's already, I'm seeing it already in 2026, even internally,

some of the tools that we're testing out and using, and I think you've even

experienced the power of what you can do with some of these tools like code

and agent. It's pretty crazy. Yeah, it's insane. And that's what changed. I

mean, in 2025, people used AI for very basic

stuff, mainly content creation and things like this.

But now you can use AI to actually develop products, new products,

or enhance the current products you have. And

yeah, it will lead to a lot of changes in both the way we

measure success as well. I mean, we, we've mentioned the creation of this

new metric is just an example of a metric that we could use,

but compute cost per acre for instance, could be a new metric that

we see. And major KPIs

that you would find in a pitch deck, for instance, may include token

usage, for instance. And some of the funding rounds actually

will fund token usage in the future. And when we say in the future, we're

not talking about 10, 20 years time, we're talking about the within

by 2030. So it will

certainly unlock new opportunities for a lot of people,

but also it will unlock new challenges that the industry will have

to face. Yeah, the comment about token uses is interesting because I read an

email today from a newsletter I follow on AI and because all the

workforce is getting reduced, greatly reduced, you

see companies cutting like 50% of the workforce. Now what they're talking

about is maybe they're going to have to, to make up for the revenue, governments

are going to have to tax the AI and tax token

usage because where else is it going to come from? Because if the tokens are

doing the work now, they got to find a way to make up that revenue.

Yeah, I mean, it just shows like the ramifications it has.

So I just want to dive a little bit deep into what you found specifically

around patents in China. They filed 78% of the patents, but they were only

granted 1.4%. So I'm curious what that

finding changed about how you think about the competitive

threat in that sector and what that means and how we should be viewing

it in the West. Yeah, I mean, so China has an

interesting model. It has pretty much this patent

creation engine driven by some of its universities. There are

high quality universities, don't get me wrong. It's just the process

is much longer because they flow essentially the patent

offices with so many patents. Yeah, so there is also this

preconception that a lot of the

patents that come from China are just

useless, for lack of a better word.

Obviously we know like there's been a lot of infringements over the years.

It's not something new. So there's also this part, there's also

the part that it takes just longer for patent offices to

review the patents and to award them compared to

other nations or other countries.

But in general they do have this patent creation engine

where they just want to secure this particular technology worldwide,

which is a model that's not adopted or that's not

taken in the west or at least in Western countries.

I don't think it's a model to follow per se, But

a model that's interesting to follow is that usually the innovation

comes from universities and then it's adopted by Companies,

which is kind of the opposite in the west, where the

innovation comes from companies and also certain times from

universities. But usually it's companies that do the bulk of

the innovation that's across sectors, again, whereas in China,

it's the opposite. So that's an interesting model. Does

it work? Well, there's a lot of Chinese

companies out there. I mean, you look at drone companies, for instance,

they're pretty much number one. You look at spare

parts as well, even from companies or

large OEMs in Europe or in the US like John

Deere and Macy Ferguson and so on. A lot a

bulk of their components are just manufactured in China

today. Even if there is some of the supply chain

that's still based in the US it still is the case that all

of these spare parts come from China. So they do have this tech, they do

have this knowledge, like the fact that people talk a lot about

China as this hub for innovation and so on, which

isn't really the case. It is an important

hub, that's for sure. But

to a lesser extent, if you look at the Netherlands, for instance, Israel,

the U.S. i think there are bigger hubs. And even

India, I mean, not a lot of people are talking about India, not a lot

of people are talking about Japan, Korea. These are bigger hubs

with technologies that, once they apply for

patents, are actually technologies that are patentable as well.

People are looking a lot at China, and it's not something that I'm refuting.

I'm not saying that China isn't one of the hubs in

agriculture, especially in the technology part. But there

are other countries, you know, I mean, we could name a few like

Korea, Japan, in the region, India, Israel,

Netherlands, U.S. obviously, Canada, that

in my opinion, produce patents. And once they file

patents, these are technologies that are patentable

much easier than in China. And it's often countries that are

overlooked. I mean, we talk a lot about Korea, we talk a lot about.

Well, we don't talk enough about Korea. We don't talk enough

about Japan and India especially. But these are

markets where there are innovations. There are innovations that are just going under the

radar, but there are innovations nonetheless. So one of the

signals that you found is that companies like Franca, Amica and Climate Corporation

had stopped filing patents, and that proved to be a signal

to something that was going to happen afterwards. Can you talk a little bit about

that? A lot of times it's hard to track

what companies are really doing, because again, when you're a private company,

you don't have to provide updates publicly. You're not a publicly

traded company. But one of the things that's

interesting is to follow trends and inputs. And that

applies to patents as it applies to activity on social media. For

instance, if you have a company that for a certain

period of time continuously applies for patents and there is

this sort of patent activity of them just

continuously applying and applying, applying and being granted or

redoing these patent applications and so on, and then all of a

sudden there's nothing for three, four years. Yeah.

Then that's a signal for things that may have

happened. It doesn't mean that they went bankrupt, it doesn't mean that nothing's happening. It

doesn't mean that they're out of business. It may mean that they were

acquired, or it may mean that they just have their technology,

they're currently on a commercialization process, but it's definitely

one signal to follow. The same way that if you have

a company that continuously posts on social media

and all of a sudden they don't post for a month or two,

that can mean that something's happening. What that is, I guess

the million dollar question. But it's one signal

amongst many others. Yeah, it's important to be able to track it

and obviously separate out the signal from the noise. But I thought that

was interesting. And then the other observation was

Taylor Farms acquiring Farmwise's autonomous weeding

business. So that's a food company buying robotics. And

do you see more of that happening or is that a sign of just

consolidation? So, yeah, that's something that we've seen actually in

the conversation with Blake Kroger, who's a partner at

Verdant Partners. I mean, we've been through two years,

well, two, maybe three years, depending on the segment of

distress deals. And like distress companies in general going

through bankruptcies, funding droughts, also

just clients not being able to pay them, and so on and so

forth. And so you got these distress deals available for

pennies on the dollars. Pretty much, yeah. And so all these companies,

whether it's an oem, whether it's a food company, it makes sense

because it's innovation that's pretty much free of charge.

Especially if you compare it to, if they were to innovate in house, how much

it would cost them. We all know how slow a corporate

can be and how more expensive it can also become.

And so for that reason, it makes sense for a food company to invest in

new technologies. And we're seeing that as well. I mean, there's a lot of

food companies that have corporate venture capital, arms

that would invest in new startups and new

solutions to implement within their operation. So it's not

surprising and I think that we're going to see more and more of these as

more distress deals arise. That makes a lot of sense.

And then there's this idea of the reverse acquisition where a tech

company with capital buys an agronomy services firm with,

you know, 500 plus former relationships. Is this something we're going

to see more of companies doing this at scale? So that's the reason

why I also said at the very beginning that AI

is one of the most. The impact of AI is one of the most

starking findings in this report is

that again today the cost of developing a technology

is relatively close to

zero, where it hasn't at least been dramatically decreased.

Especially if you're talking about software coding, things like this, if you're

manufacturing equipments, obviously it's not going to be replaced like that. But

if you have a software component to it, if you have some

form of software, the cost of developing that has been

dramatically decreased and will dramatically decrease in the future.

And so today, if you're an investor and you're

investing a company, two years ago you

would say, okay, do they have a technology? Is it unique?

Yeah, okay, cool, I'm going to back that

tomorrow. How quickly can you replicate a

software In a week or a weekend maybe Even if

you have the good. The good subscription?

Yeah, a good subscription and enough Red Bull, I think you could.

I mean it is possible. Like it's not like something out of the blue

or so. No, it is possible. It's a poss. So

today it's not a differentiator anymore to have like this fancy technology

that you can create or this fancy AI or whatever it may

be. What's the differentiator is. Yes, if you

control the data, if you have that database, if you have the

hardware, and more importantly the distribution. And that's why

in other industries what we're seeing is that a lot of companies and big

corps are acquiring media companies

increasingly. I mean, we've seen the OpenAI deal, for instance,

with that newsletter. I forgot the name. Yeah, because the number one

differentiator now is just distribution and being able to distribute

that solution and that product across. So it makes sense.

And there's a ton of what we call boring

businesses of

dealerships, dealer networks and so on, where it's a 60

year old or 70 year old that's been doing this for the past

50 years that has this network and God knows how important

network is with Farmers. Yeah,

yeah. It's an opportunity for him. It's a boring business. You're probably going to

acquire that at a discount because.

Yeah, it's just going to be profit EBITDA times a

multiple. That's it. That's something that we also covered with Blake

and it will become a differentiator as well. So we expect

a lot of new acquisitions over the next 12 to

24 months. Months where it's going to be just acquiring

at least a stake in some of these dealership networks

and these quote unquote boring businesses. Yeah, definitely.

They're acquiring the reach as well because like you said, this

ability that was previously the differentiator, which was the

software is like non existent now. Yeah. I wonder

if you're seeing any signals or

anything from the news about software. Only pure play

companies in the ag space because if they don't

innovate, someone's going to innovate for them and put them out of business pretty

quickly. Yeah. And that's why we're seeing a lot of. Well, we're not

seeing a lot of bankruptcies, but we have seen quite a bit of

bankruptcies relating to software companies. We're definitely seeing

a lot of wave of people getting let go, fired

or staff reduction, restructuration. We're also

seeing mergers. So software company with a hardware company, for

instance, which makes sense. But today. Yeah,

I don't think I've included that in the report. But we may see, for

instance in the future businesses arise where it

would be kind of software development as a service where you

would have just one guy or maybe a team of like three,

four people go to growers and so on

and tell them like, hey, I can build the software for you with an AI

agent and with all of that I just need access to the

APIs of all the hardware that you use. So obviously it's

granted that the API exists in the first place.

Granted the farmer also has access to Internet, which is

not everywhere. But the advantage is

that that grower would have access to its own software, would be able to control

their data. No one will be able to control that.

And the risk of like a startup

going bankrupt and going out and like losing access to the software and

so on disappears as well because then the software is the ownership of the

grow. Yeah. So the question now becomes

one, do growers want to get in the hustle of having

to find someone to build that and so on and so forth.

For me it's a possibility. We've seen a lot of brokerage business

While going out of business because growers wanted to go directly with

the fastest solution. So that can happen.

And another thing is also it depends on the scale.

I don't see small farmers being

too interested in that. Even if for smaller

farmers, they could have access to the same software, but at a

discount at a cheaper price. So they may adopt

software is more than they do today. Now, the advantage that software

companies have is that they can see what's happening elsewhere,

because ag in general is slow and it takes a little bit

of time. But here we have this

sort of trifecta. We're even more than a trifecta, but we have

all these externalities like increased

fertilizer prices, increased input prices, increased equipment

prices, stress around prices of corn,

wheat and so on. Prices stress around

capital costs as well, like financing and so on.

Usually whenever you have these sorts of events, the

first thing people do is that they try to cut costs because if they increase

revenue, the cost will increase as well. So it makes no sense for

them to invest in something that could increase their

revenue. And so if replacing the

software, the software company they were using by their own software reduces the

cost and offers the guarantees, I could see that happening

quite fast and quite quickly. You mentioned the

compute cost per acre as a new metric. Talk a little bit

about how you created that and what a healthy versus

unhealthy number looks like. So this is just like me

thinking and imagining like some

metrics that could be relevant. So again, it's not based

out of interviews or things like this, but it's more based off what

we're seeing outside of aggressive, and we're seeing token usage as a

metric today. And so a compute cost

per acre would probably be something around like,

yeah, token usage and the amounts of tokens your software is using

or your AI solution is using per acre.

And that could become. Because token usage essentially implies a cost, there

is a cost as you consume tokens. And so that could

become a metric where people will look at,

well, you're using, I don't know, I'm just going to invent numbers like, I

don't know, $10 an acre, for instance, of tokens,

while your competitor is using $5 an acre per.

Yeah, $5 of tokens per acre. So your competitors are just more

efficient at doing the same tasks.

So it's maybe one of the metrics that we're going to

see. I don't know if it's going to be named compute cost per

acre. I would be happy if I found a name like this that's for

sure. Probably going to trademark it as well. No, I'm kidding. But it's

probably some sort of metric that we're going to see is around

token usage. Yeah, I think it's a function of how it's being

used because obviously you could, we've seen in the AI world how you could

burn hundreds of thousands of tokens and not build anything meaningful.

So. But, but I think something, I think you're, you're onto

something there. And I think it provides some insight

into, you know, maybe it's a metric of

AI staff, you know. You know, because it's.

Typically headcount is used to be just how many people you have working and

now they're going to have to figure out what the AI headcount is and

how efficient you're being with it and is it

driving revenue and, you know. Yeah. Is it driving down your, your

cost? And so there's some sort of math in there related to AI

headcount and how people are building autonomous companies where

an AI chief of staff is talking. You know, this is something that I've been,

you know, piloting internally as well, so it's

still early days, but I think it's an interesting way and especially for investors

who want some insight into what's happening with these companies and how they're adopting these

technologies and if they're on the leading

edge or, you know, they're falling behind, it's.

I'm sure that's something an investor would want to know as well. Yeah, I mean,

it's. Well, it's something that we said at the beginning is like, I, I think

that at some point in pitch decks, we're going to see like, yeah, use of

funds is going to be. Yeah, half of it is going to be. Is going

to go to token usage. And that goes back to a comment of.

And what triggered that thought was a comment by the CEO of

Nvidia around some of his key

engineers consuming less than $250,000 of

tokens a year. I believe I may be mistaken on

the exact number, but I think it was right around that being like,

yeah, they would, they would need to be worried about their position. And I

think that today. Yeah, that would be. That, that, that is pretty much

token usage equals product development or product usage. So,

yeah, I think it would, it might have been Nvidia or another company that was

actually tracking employee token usage and there's like,

quotas they have to meet, so putting a lot of pressure on employees. But

if you're in a Tech company. I mean it's probably expected because, because you

can see the savings. I mean it's, it's really night and day and

when you start cutting down what's a $200

a month, you know, OpenAI expense as opposed

to a six figure salary, like it's, it's nothing. Right. So it's like. Yeah, and

it can work 24, 7 as well. So yeah, or around the clock.

But yeah, transporting that to farmers and how farmers

are going to measure their metrics, I think that's going to be,

probably going to be there in terms of the metrics that they're going to use

because token usage I don't think is something that

you can include in a subscription, especially if it's at scale.

And we see that with all the AI companies is that

you would pay for the amount of tokens that you use.

And especially if you're talking about large scale growers with complex tasks

and so on. I do see that as one

metric to measure the efficacy of your, of your solution.

I want to talk a little bit about the funding to M and A pipeline

and right now from what I can see in the report, I'm like

about a 36 month lag. So companies that raised a Series B, for example, in

2021 or 22 eventually became acquisition targets in

2024 and 2025. So I

know you don't have access to that crystal ball, but you know, using

that same logic, did any companies stand out or is it still too early

to tell like who could be potential acquisition targets? Well,

like we said with the conversation with Blake, is that

any company that has some form of good

technology, so good, again, depends on the vertical that you're

involved in, depends how many clients you have and so

on. Yeah. But today

the market is such that if you're a large

OEM or a large company, it makes sense to acquire

businesses for pennies on the dollars because these

businesses will find it hard to raise funds anyways.

And so offer and exit is sometimes just the only solution

they have. So I think that there's this part, but in terms

of acquisition targets, yeah, as long as

you have a technology that's being used essentially by clients

and with a good customer base and so on,

I think that is something that's quote unquote, relatively

easy to sell or to get acquired.

Always has been. It's just, it depends also on the

monetary policies as well from central banks. I mean, we know that interest

rates have an impact both on funding availability

and also on mergers and Acquisitions. So

yeah, yeah, that's something that was interesting in your conversation with

Blake was also him stressing that they want companies

to be profitable before they engage again. That's what we're

seeing and that's what I think is going to accelerate as well. From

2018, I would say to 2021,

2022, there was this big period where companies

would have a relatively easy

access to funding and large funding amounts. We've seen

like all these hundred million dollar deals and $200 million there and

so on. Most of them went bankrupt, by the way, but

funding was available. But now

funding is less available. It's still available for the right businesses. As

long as you have, you are profitable. But tomorrow,

again, what are you going to justify a hundred million dollar

deal? I mean you cannot justify $100 million funding round

if it's just developing a product. There has to be either

an infrastructure component to it. So meaning acquiring

like assembly line or things like this, like

actual production lines essentially of equipment.

Otherwise it's just token usage. So what are you going to invest in like

sales, marketing? A hundred million dollars worth of sales

and marketing. That's, that's quite a lot. So it's going to be hard. I think

it's going to be harder and harder. I think the amounts of funding, like the

total amounts per round is going to decrease in the next

few years. But I also think that

the lag between rounds, which is

usually 18 to 24 months between each series and

seeds and so on. So between a seed to a series

A to a series B, I also think these amounts of months

is going to decrease and we're probably going to see like within a year a

company going from pre seed C to series A, for

instance, and even maybe a series B. Just because

the technology development lag which

historically existed is probably either going to decrease dramatically

or disappear depending on the solution you're offering. And

then the only reason, again as I said, the only reason why you would raise

a fund or raise money is to either fund

token usage, which can be justified, but

more importantly is going to be sales and marketing. That's the only thing that's going

to make you survive. And that's going to be the only differentiator in this

new market that we're seeing. The other trend is

the safe idea of hyperscalers. So arable partnering with Google and

Amazon and CNH integrating Starlink. You see that

also as a trend. There's always been some interest

from larger companies outside of ag. They always

have some solutions for the Ag industry. So I don't think it's

something that is abnormal, per se.

So what's interesting is that since the 70s up

to the 2000s, we've seen a lot of automobile companies

and large automobile groups getting out of agriculture.

And now recently we're seeing them getting back into agriculture.

So there is the example of Yamaha, for instance, the Japanese company,

acquiring a robotics firm and settling their

Yamaha agriculture division. We're seeing also

Caterpillar, for instance, acquiring, well, what is remaining of

Monarch Tractors, which is a company that recently went bankrupt

or at least seize their operations. So we're seeing more and more

of these deals and there are other auto manufacturers that

are interested in seeing ag as a potential target,

which is an interesting trend. It's not something that I would have expected,

but let's see. To be confirmed, I would say. So as we wrap

up, if you had to pick a trend, a

signal trend from this report that is going to define

precision ag for the rest of this year and

into 2027, is there anything that stands out for you?

Well, whilst we were writing this report, something happened

called war. And I'm well placed to talk

about it because I live in Dubai. We've seen

some of the effects of it. And again, this is something that is moving

extremely rapidly. I mean, every day we got conflating reports

about a potential deal and then no deal, and then a deal and then no

deal. By the time this is published, things would have

dramatically changed for the better. Or even as of today. I mean,

we're recording this in mid April. Yeah. And apparently there is an article

saying that the Strait of Hormuz is now

going to be open. So. Yeah, let's see.

But by the time this is published, things could grow

hopefully better, but it could also go

dramatically worse as well. So things can change. But I think that

that will define the year in precision act, because

that's something that we've seen with the Russia, Ukrainian war.

Yeah. There's always this concept with any commodity

of the Goldilocks Zone. So people probably don't. For those who

are not familiar with the Goldilocks Zone is there is a price

range for anything you buy where people are happy.

Both the supplier, the clients, everyone's kind of happy with it.

Anything below that, then the supplier

of that commodity is not happy because he's not making any

money. Anything above that, obviously the

supplier could make some money in the very

short term, but the effects it has on the supply chain

is such that it could affect that. It could affect

it as well. So no one's really happy with it. It's kind

of like an oil and gas where you have this goldilocks zone between 60 to

$90 a barrel, where everyone's kind of happy.

Well, here what we're seeing is the impact it has on fertilizer

prices, whether it's urea, whether it's nitrogen as well.

And that people may wonder, why am I talking about fertilizer? Well,

that has an impact on precision ag adoption.

Slight increase or say that we are within the Goldilocks zone,

the higher end of Goldilocks zones. It has a positive

impact on precision ag, namely on everything that would save

money on input. That has a positive impact. If it goes

way beyond that, which is currently the case. I mean, we're talking about

seven or six hundred dollars a ton

for urea, for instance, which again, by the

time this is published, can dramatically increase or decrease. So again,

that disclaimer should be repeated once

every two minutes, I think. Yeah, yeah. Because things can change.

But that has an impact because the farmer now,

well, he's not going to sell the corn or so on that he's

going to, that he produces with that fertilizer

with the help of that fertilizer. He's not going to sell the pro. The corn

for that much at least. So it's going to be more expensive for

him. If it's more expensive for him, that means that he's going to look into

other crops. That means that it's going to just create this

whole cycle of like, it's going to increase prices.

And that's what we've seen in the Russia, Ukrainian war is that

that plus the fact that the energy costs dramatically

increased. I mean, everyone pumps gas in their cars and

I'm sure they've seen some of the effects. It just creates inflation

and then at some point, if it's sustained over time,

it forces central banks to act. And usually by acting it means

that they have to increase interest rates, which then increases

the cost of financing new equipments.

So then that just affects precision ag as well. Even

though it makes sense to help reduce input cost, if you

cannot just invest in that, then you're going to be affected

as well. So that's why it's important and that's why I think, at least for

this year, the outcome of this conflict and

this war is going to affect

pretty much everything and namely precision ag.

But since it was, it happened whilst we were writing the report,

we've just had the time to include a section at the

end to talk about because in our opinion, it doesn't change

the structural aspects of precision ag or the

ag industry. However, it will definitely

exponentially increase or decrease some of the

scenarios that we've predicted for 2026,

2028, period. Yeah, for sure. It's one of those

things that wasn't on the on the bingo card, as they

like to say. But then all of a sudden it is and everyone's scrambling to

figure out the impact. Kudos again for the all the work you put into

this report. It's very thorough, very detailed, and I think

it's something that's needed for this space. So

congrats again for all the work you put into it. Well, no worries.

Thank you. So if you want to copy the report, you can

head on over to igrownews.com precision and if you're listening

to this, on the date the episode goes live, we have a special running

for about 48 hours and it's going to apply a 20% discount.

So it's in your best interest to act early to avoid paying full

price. So thanks again, Sepper, for your time. I really enjoyed this deep dive

into the report you created. Well, thank you again.