eB2B Marketplaces & Net-zero Carbon in Agriculture –
Yield Sustainability & Marketplace Innovation – 22
September 2021
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Specialist:
Title:
Moderator: Nyree Hinton (NH), Third Bridge Sector Analyst
Brennan Turner (BT)
Former CEO at FarmLead Resources Ltd
Agenda:
1. Agtech innovation in row crops vs specialities and farmers’ incentives and hesitancy around adopting
new solutions
2. Regulatory dynamics, including definitions of net-zero carbon
3. Competitive landscape –Indigo Ag, ADM (NYSE: ADM), Andersons (NASDAQ: ANDE), Cargill and
others
4. Transaction data utilisation and futures market visibility considerations
Contents
Q: How has agtech innovation progressed over the years? Has it moved faster in row crops vs speciality?
How do online solutions come to market and how fast do they do so?
Q: How are farmers being incentivised to adopt new technology? What factors could push row crop farmers
to be more digitally focused?
3
4
Q: Why is the trust factor very important? It is because there’s a saturation of GPS devices, platforms and so
on, and farmers have previously used solutions that didn’t work well? Why wouldn’t farmers adopt
technology that can increase their farms’ efficiency as quickly as possible, given some of the platforms are
free? What is holding back adoption besides the provenness of the technology?
5
Q: Who’s driving innovation in B2B marketplaces? Who’s gathering the most data on farmers and gaining
their trust, and how are they doing so at sufficient scale to make the data useful?
Q: How are companies such as Indigo Ag differentiating their marketplace offerings from those of other
players, such as the company you previously led?
6
6
Q: Could you elaborate on the rise of carbon capture?
7
Q: What are your thoughts on regulation? Players seem to be developing their own definitions of net-carbon
zero and running with them as marketing ploys, so do you expect a regulatory push to clean up the industry?8
Q: Are there any purportedly unsustainable practices by farmers across geographies and production types
that may be a first target for regulators? Where could they start to build a framework, given you mentioned
there are eight definitions of carbon credits from agriculture?
9
Q: How much choice do farmers have around marketplace offerings beyond large one-stop shop players
such as ADM, Cargill and Andersons? Can only a few players support USD 9m transactions, which may not
be big to ADM?
10
Q: What are platforms able to observe from their transaction data that was previously obscure? How can
players capitalise on information around buying-decision drivers? How is the transaction data being used by
the platforms to be more predictive or proactive?
11
Q: You touched on the plant-based side. Are companies such as Ingredion and ADM experiencing so much
margin growth in peas, soybeans and specialities because of the lower visibility in the futures market for
these commodities? Beyond Meat is consistently unable to make a profit, so is this higher cost driven by a
lack of visibility?
12
B2B Marketplaces & Net-zero Carbon in Agriculture –
Yield Sustainability & Marketplace Innovation
Transcription begins at 00:00:03 of the recorded material
NH: Welcome to Third Bridge Forum’s Interview entitled B2B Marketplaces & Net-zero Carbon in Agriculture
– Yield Sustainability & Marketplace Innovation. I’m Nyree Hinton and I’ll be facilitating today’s Interview
with Mr Brennan Turner, former CEO at FarmLead Resources.
Brennan, before we get started with today’s Interview, please state I agree or I disagree to the following
statement: You understand the definition of material non-public information and agree not to disclose any
such information, or any other information which is confidential, during this Interview.
BT: I agree.
NH: Thank you, Brennan. Could you introduce us to your background and the various roles you’ve held in the
industry?
BT: My family literally have their roots in agriculture. My family have been farming in Saskatchewan and
parts of North Dakota for over 100 years now. This yea, we seeded over 80,000 acres of farmland, set between
six different families. Basically, to put that into perspective, if you took the island of Manhattan and times it by
about seven that’d be the size of our farms, so one of the larger entities in the game. Spent some time in
education from Yale in economics. Spent some time trading commodities on Wall Street, before going back to
the farm in around 2012-13, becoming an ad hoc consultant and then realised there were some opportunities,
as the digital wave was hitting the farm, to help our operation be a little bit more connected, a little bit more
efficient in terms of how we not only sold grain, oil seed and post-crop production, but also how we bought
some of our crop inputs. You could see that was early days, but built FarmLead, now doing business as
Combyne, into a company that touched almost about a third of all farmers in North America through
integrations and partnerships and whatnot, and have consulted on a variety of other agricultural and agtech
opportunities over the years. Yes, I know the industry pretty much backwards and forwards, because I was one
of the first players, I guess you could say, to really start to scale up an online solution for the agricultural
community.
[00:02:21]
Q: How has agtech innovation progressed over the years? Has it moved faster in row crops vs speciality? How
do online solutions come to market and how fast do they do so?
BT: I think Silicon Valley specifically is, from a geographical proximity standpoint, so close to a lot of the
Salinas Valley in central California, where a significant amount of fruit and vegetables are produced, as well as
nuts for that matter, and wine. What I call these speciality row crops, high-value fruit, vegetable and vines, the
industry name that I refer to it as, and because they’re so high-value the introduction of technology onto those
operations just provided some massive not only cost savings in some cases, but massive efficiencies in terms of
optimising the crop production, and therein your return becomes so much greater. This is everything from
crop health to irrigation. I think that there was a lot of money that was poured into the crop management cycle
for these high-value speciality row crop areas. As a result, I think more and more money got poured into then
the row crop side of things, obviously your corn, soybeans, the pulse crops, other oil seed like flax, mustard,
canola, barley, oats, etc. The difference being that because those high-value crops, they’re not as valuable
clearly as what a bushel of corn or soybeans is worth, the return on investment necessarily isn’t as great in
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terms of adopting the technology.
I’ve seen that technology has been adopted pretty aggressively in the fruit and vegetable and vine space,
whereas in row crop, again corn, soybean, wheat sorts of crops, it hasn’t been as aggressive. I’ll give a personal
example. On our farm, we just know parts of our land, we don’t need to use precision agriculture to optimise
our output on that land. Further, because we’re not irrigation-based, we’re set to the beck and call of Mother
Nature in terms of getting the moisture that we need every year, as well as the crop or the heat units. This year
especially in western Canada was extremely hot, and so the crop is about half of what we would normally be
able to yield, but long story short is that there are a lot of farmers, I think, in the row crop space among the
Midwest, even the Black Sea, you look around the world, it’s that farmers of corn, soybeans, wheat, etc, aren’t
necessarily as enticed, or incentivised for that matter, to adopt technology, in-field technology or even farm
management technology. That being said, I think there have been a lot of farmers who have looked to diversify
how not only they’re selling their production but also how they’re buying crop inputs, and that’s what’s given
rise to some of these different commerce websites, such as the company that I built, as well as a number of
other players.
[00:05:59]
Q: How are farmers being incentivised to adopt new technology? What factors could push row crop farmers to
be more digitally focused?
BT: I think probably the most significant data point that I carry with me, or that I think about on a regular
basis, is the fact that before 2030, so within the next decade, almost two-thirds of all farms in North America,
Canada and the US, we’re talking hundreds of millions of acres of production, are going to change hands from
the previous generation to the current generation, so my generation, the ones that are in their 30s and, by the
time they turn 40-45 sort of thing, they’re going to take over the farm. This generation, my generation, has
grown up with technology. We grew up around cell phones and now smartphones, we entered the workforce
and smartphones and computers were commonplace. We had to use them. We became comfortable with them,
and so, as a result, as you see that generation and demographic starting to take over the farm, inherently the
adoption rate is going to increase. That being said, the incentivisation, it comes in two areas, in my opinion.
The first is you do have people such as my family that are aggressively bullish on testing out new technology.
Maybe it’s a GPS tool. We’ve tested out some things like connecting our grain carts to our combines, so that
could be literally a driverless cart for that matter, or even just telling the tractor that’s driving the grain cart
what is the best route to hit all the combines so that you’re not wasting time in the field going between the four
or five different combines that you’re trying to get grain off of. You start to see some of those benefits, and so
you’re willing to try new things and, in some cases, those technologies are going to be subsidised by the
companies themselves in the sense that, “We’re not going to charge you full value because it’s a new
technology and we want you to try it out, give us some feedback.” I would say that the majority of farmers who
are willing to try those things out are probably 5,000 acres or larger, maybe even 10,000 acres or larger. On
the flip side, you’re starting to see an emerging trend. The second area is through these independent retailers,
crop-input providers, fertiliser, chemical, seed sale players, even the grain elevators like Cargill and ADM, who
offer those services on the side, they offer independent agronomy advice. I have a couple of family members
who run those divisions for a variety of different grain companies in Canada, actually, so I’ve got some first-
hand knowledge of how those operate.
The point is that these companies understand that if we can offer some intangible value-add to the farmer to
get them stickier or help them do more business with us, whether it be they buy more crop inputs from us or
they’re going to sell us more grain at the end of the year or throughout the year, you create a little bit more of a
relationship. Therein is probably the overlying factor that is, I think, oftentimes overlooked by Silicon Valley,
which is the trust factor in all of this technology use and adoption. A farmer doesn’t necessarily just decide to
do business with Cargill or ADM or any of these other players. They decide to do business with the somebody
that they trust. They do business with Mike, who happens to work for Cargill, or they happen to do business
with Janine, who works for ADM. Those are the people that they trust. Inherently, it’s a trust factor, I think,
that over time a lot of companies have recognised that the adoption of the a technology, you can show them all
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the ROI and data and figures that you want, but if the farmer doesn’t trust the technology and more so the
person that’s selling the technology, then they’re probably not going to adopt it. That trust piece of the
equation, farmer reviews and whatnot, testimonials, that’s going to be come more commonplace, in my
opinion, going forward.
[00:10:33]
Q: Why is the trust factor very important? It is because there’s a saturation of GPS devices, platforms and so
on, and farmers have previously used solutions that didn’t work well? Why wouldn’t farmers adopt technology
that can increase their farms’ efficiency as quickly as possible, given some of the platforms are free? What is
holding back adoption besides the provenness of the technology?
BT: I think that you have to dig into a little bit of the farmer’s psychology, and keep in mind that this is
somewhat different in different geographies. It’s a little bit different in South America compared to North
America, the Black Sea vs North America is very different. As you get to the small-scale operators in India,
parts of Africa, so on and so forth, again, it’s a different behavioural dynamic that the farmers and their
trading partners and their crop-input providers or whatnot have. That being said, in terms of the pay dynamic,
most of those entities, I think about precision ag and it’s based on a per acre cost, those are upfront costs.
Without seeing or being able to demo the technology, so to speak, farmers become inherently sceptical. They
get to demo equipment before they buy it. A new combine these days can cost over USD 1m, and so why would
I spend USD 1m blindly, if I can’t even try the technology out? It’s like, basically, taking a new car out for a test
drive before you do anything. It makes it difficult for farmers to be willing to spend tens of thousands, and in
some cases hundreds of thousands, of dollars upfront, without actually seeing any evidence that, “This is going
to work on my farm.”
The second dynamic is this personal dynamic, which is, again, “This is my farm.” This is, “If I decide to let you
into my circle of trust, so to speak, it’s still my farm,” and so there’s a data dynamic. I think more farmers are
recognising that the data that they are producing through the technology is pretty valuable to the companies
that operate the technologies, and so they want a piece of that pie, potentially, if it is going to be monetised.
There are a couple of companies that share in those benefits. One is a company called Farmobile, which was
eventually bought recently by AGI, which is an equipment manufacturer based in Canada but has operations
throughout the world. There are definitely the data practices they’re in, like who has the most data is going to
benefit, just because if I can understand soil types, if I can understand heat units, if I can understand all the
different variables that go into growing a crop, and I can compare it and contrast it against a couple of million
other acres, I should have a pretty good template to understand, “If we get this type of weather, this is what we
need to do. If we get this type of weather, this is what we need to do.”
Should a farmer be able to benefit from that peer-reviewed data? I think so. I think they should be able to.
They’re going to benefit from it as well. There are a couple of different business models that are being
employed by a variety of different companies, but I think more farmers are being cognisant that the data that
they are producing on their farm is going to be worth something and even more so, as you get into some of
these sustainability conversations. I can tell you that, just as part of my role as the Market Access Committee
Chair for the Canadian Roundtable for Sustainable Crops, the downstream desire, the desire, I should say,
from downstream supply chain players, whether it be processors, manufacturers, grocery store companies,
food retailers, even consumers themselves, is that they’re looking for more information about how this food
was produced. What are the sustainability factors associated with it? Did it sequester carbon, for that matter?
Is it using less crop inputs than it did previously? The data is becoming more important to a lot of different
functions or factors within the supply chain and, again, farmers are starting to recognise this as well, I think.
The trust inevitably, if it’s not there, then a farmer is going to be less inclined to want to do business with that
entity, or even that individual, for that matter.
Private and confidential 5
[00:15:25]
Q: Who’s driving innovation in B2B marketplaces? Who’s gathering the most data on farmers and gaining
their trust, and how are they doing so at sufficient scale to make the data useful?
BT: In the fruit, vegetable and vine world, one company that I’ve been watching recently is called Semios, it’s
a Canadian-based company, but they just acquired somewhat of a competitor of theirs called Agworld, an
Australian-based company. I think they paid about USD 100m or it. Again, it’s that peer-reviewed production
data that becomes really interesting. On the flip side, there are a couple of companies that are monetising the
commerce side of things, those include ProducePay, as well as iTradeNetwork, which is an interesting entity
that just continues to grow, as far as I understand, since they were acquired about a decade ago for about USD
0.5bn. They’re trying to get more sticky in terms of adding more value-add, adding more analytics, adding
more support to make that agri business or farm operation that’s employing their technology to be more
effective, more efficient and more profitable, ultimately. In the row crop space, again, corn, soybean, wheat,
etc. Precision ag, some of the incumbents are Climate Corporation, which is owned by Bayer. You’ve got
Xarvio, which is owned by BASF. A couple of smaller competing platforms that are offered by Syngenta, but I
would say Farmers Edge is one of the largest independents out there. They recently went public, earlier this
year.
Decisive Farming was one of their biggest competitors and they were recently acquired by Telus Agriculture,
which is probably a great segue into the farm management space because Telus Agriculture is trying to do
more of a vertical play in terms of vertically integrated the supply chain across each individual farm to a
precision ag, to a crop management and a farm management tool, to ultimately a farm-to-fork sort of ultimate
strategy. They’ve been very public with this information, so it should be nothing new to those who understand
Telus Ag. They’ve also got some vegetable and vine and fruit and vegetable and vine technology, so they’re a
wide swathe and they have the network distribution, given the fact that they’re one of the largest cellular
infrastructure companies in the world, let alone Canada. I expect them to continue to grow and differentiate. A
couple of other farm management, you’ve got Farmers Business Network, which is an interesting company
because they not only do the commerce side of things in terms of selling crop inputs wholesale to their
members, but also do a lot of grain marketing and trying to help the farmer out there. Their business model, I
think, is morphing into one that is similar to a company called Agri-Trend, which was bought by Trimble,
probably about six years ago now, in the sense that they have a lot of support staff, a lot of independent
consultants that you can basically tap into for more support, especially on the grain marketing side of things,
but they do collect a lot of data across a lot of different farms to help inform farmers of betting seeding rates or
better insecticide or pesticide application rates, to even fertiliser usage. They’re a pretty unique platform.
Then as I get into the actual marketplaces side of things, FBN, again, has their own marketplace model but
specifically for their members. Indigo Ag, which is, I don’t know how many billions of dollars they’ve raised
now to date, but it’s a lot, and they’ve gone through some growing pains, whereas my company, FarmLead,
again now doing business as Combyne, has probably raised about one one-hundredth of the capital but has
scaled the operation to be similar size in terms of the number of users and transactions and whatnot. Those
are a handful of the different players. I tend to get a lot of questions about blockchain specifically in the
trading side of things. I think in the fruit and vegetable space, where the product is a lot closer to the
consumer, one or two steps removed from the consumer, it has a lot more application, and so you’ve seen a
couple of companies get into that space. GrainChain is one of those that’s doing some interesting stuff,
specifically in the coffee space and I think they’re delving a little bit into the fruit and vegetable. Yes, there’s a
long laundry list that I could probably go through, and Seana Day probably has the best map. I think it’s
Triventures that puts it together, but it maps it all to different companies, Those are some of the top names
that come to mind when you ask who are some of the top players.
[00:20:58]
Q: How are companies such as Indigo Ag differentiating their marketplace offerings from those of other
players, such as the company you previously led?
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BT: I think, again, they’ve gone through a lot of transformation, as I understand it, over the years. I knew
some of their previous executives that are no longer at the company. I think that Indigo wanted to insert
themselves throughout the supply chain, when a lot of the incumbents, again I’ve mentioned Cargill and ADM,
they have existing infrastructure for these supply chains, whether it be logistics or rail or hedging. I think
Indigo tried to come in and provide that independent digital elevator experience, and that was emphasised by
the fact that they hired a lot of ex large grain trading company players to help lead that charge. They’ve done
some interesting stuff and I think they’ve started to understand that just because a farmer does one deal to test
the waters a little bit doesn’t mean they’re going to sell the rest of their production through that entity. We
understand it, and my experience building our company, is that knowing who’s on the other side of the
transaction for USD 100,000, USD 200,000, even USD 1m deal, I think the largest-size deal that we ever did
on our platform was about a USD 9m canola deal, and that was one single transaction. In a lot of cases, as I
understand it, Indigo look to try to monetise the transaction, and as did we. We learnt early on that it’s
probably not the right way to do it because on a USD 9m transaction, if you’re taking even 20 basis points,
that’s a pretty significant chunk of change to some people, especially farmers, who, again, tend to be fairly
frugal-natured and they look for the best deal at all costs almost, whereas an entity like Cargill or ADM, they
just look at it as the cost of doing business.
I think that they recognise that, like many other agtech entities, establishing a little bit more of a trust bridge
with their clients and getting to know them a little bit better and being around them, but while still giving
them the independence to operate on their own and just being their support staff as required, as needed, has
started to help them. They’ve gone a little bit more into the hedging side of things, so they’re helping farmers
with hedging and whatnot. Invariably, if you’re not talking about sustainability these days, you’re not going to
get any recognition, it seems like, in agriculture. They’ve really, again, as I understand it from the outside
looking in, ploughed a lot of money into the carbon-capture technology and carbon credits. When I last talked
to their executives a couple of years ago that were there previously, they were looking to do a lot of
acquisitions. I don’t think that necessarily happened. They did buy one satellite imagery company, but that
was more or less it, and they’ve kind of had to reinvent themselves, I think, in the ways that many other agtech
companies have had to. I think that trying to disrupt, so to speak, the agricultural industry from the outside
looking in is incredibly difficult when the industry is set up and, I guess you could say, established by a wide
variety and a wide network of infrastructure that’s been established by a lot of these big-name companies that
have been around for a very long time. Indigo has to adjust their business model to account for that and,
instead of disrupting them, I think they’ve started to use that word less and less and you’ve seen other
companies use it as well.
Bushel is another example. They cater more to the agri-business side of the agtech equation, so helping out
grain elevators track their inventories and the contracts that they’re signing and executing on with their farmer
networks. They consider themselves to be more of, I guess you could say, a support mechanism or an enabler
to that institution or that agri business to be better and more efficient and more effective and, again, more
profitable. They want to build on top of that existing infrastructure and knowledge of the people that are
working at these rural elevator locations, whereas Indigo early on wanted to disrupt and get in the middle, to
basically be a paper-traded middleman for a lot of the physical grain trade. I think the sustainability element
for Indigo is going to be interesting, given the fact that it’s still a voluntary carbon-credit market and there are
a lot of players that are getting into it. I think it’s extremely early days, but I think they’ve taken their licks like
a lot of other companies in terms of understanding getting to know the farmer is incredibly important, getting
to know the other players is incredibly important, and working alongside them is going to accelerate your
pathway to success vs if you, again, continue to talk about disrupting the industry, there’s going to be a lot of
pushback from the incumbents and the people that, frankly, are involved in the large majority of commerce on
the farm, or within the industry for that matter.
[00:26:56]
Q: Could you elaborate on the rise of carbon capture?
BT: Carbon capture, I think, has been around for a long time. There have been private markets for carbon
credits in a variety of industries. Oil and gas probably have been the most mainstream, but no farmer has ever
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really been recognised for their sustainable practice because nobody every asked for it until Larry Fink from
BlackRock decided that every company needs to be socially responsible, in his 2018 annual letter, and that
really pushed a lot of different entities to explore the ESG dynamic. From my personal perspective, there’s a
lot of greenwashing going on, unfortunately, but today, again, it’s all a voluntary market, and so you’ve got
some companies willing to pay a farmer USD 15 a metric tonne for their carbon credits and some companies
willing to pay USD 10 or willing to pay USD 20. There are a variety of strings attached to those carbon credits,
such as, “We first right of refusal for future carbon credits,” which farmers are a little bit sceptical of, given the
fact that, “Why would I sign a five-year agreement when this industry is still in its infancy?” They recognise
that their sustainability is becoming somewhat commoditised. I can tell you for a fact, across all of our acres
we know for a fact that we’re sequestering anywhere between a quarter of a metric tonne to a half a metric
tonne per acre, and yet we still haven’t found probably the appropriate market to sell those credits into. You
could argue that we’ve just been storing them, and we have the documentation and whatnot, and we’re waiting
to see where the industry goes and whether or not there’s going to be regulation. (Inaudible 29.07) goes life
cycle, carbon analysis, which you’re seeing in the biofuel space and now it’s been transferred over into the
agricultural space.
It’s basically extremely murky water still today, in my opinion. I saw this first hand in my role as the Market
Access Committee Chair to Canadian Roundtable for Sustainable Crops. A hard example just to make it
abundantly clear that carbon is such a buzzword that everyone is looking for it. I talk to grocery chain
executives and heads of sustainability for these entities and what they’re looking for is net-zero carbon. Yes,
sure, we can sell you grain and get products into your store like oat milk, that is a net-zero-carbon product, but
did you know, for example, that if we were to use less fertiliser, like fertiliser nitrous oxide, if it’s released back
to the atmosphere, the chemical compounds that are released back will stay in the atmosphere 300 times
longer than what carbon will? The function of sustainability is, is it more important just to sequester carbon,
or is it more important to be a no-till farmer where I’m not releasing all this other stuff out of the soil back into
the atmosphere? There are buzzwords and whatnot that go with it. I think that there’s invariably a consumer
element that’s being driven by this, but at the same time there’s an education element that there’s a lot of
gloss, I think, getting put on things today, and farmers are recognising this and they’re smart. They’re not just
going to go after the first shiny object, because they realise that in years past I think that there’s been some
snake oil that’s come around and many guys have gotten burnt on it.
This, again, goes back to the trust factor. Farmers understand that, “I can just accumulate these carbon
credits, so to speak, and wait for the time to monetise them,” because there are a lot of farmers that they see
the fine print, they look through the fine print and it doesn’t pass their sniff test, is how I look at it. That’s why
you have about 435,000 grain and oil seed farmers across North America, but whether it be the Bayer
programme or the Nutrien programme or the Land O'Lakes programme or the Indigo programme, we’re
talking about just a couple of thousand farmers that have so far signed up for this. Again, those will be your
early adopters, entities, farmers like my family, who are willing to experiment on a small parcel of their land to
see where it goes. Bottom line, very early days. I think the trend is heading in the right direction. I think,
though, that there’s a lot more marketing going on than actual technical realities. If I look at other industries
that have gone down this road, I think the marketing is going to continue to win the day, but we’ll see.
[00:32:23]
Q: What are your thoughts on regulation? Players seem to be developing their own definitions of net-carbon
zero and running with them as marketing ploys, so do you expect a regulatory push to clean up the industry?
BT: As I understand it, I think that, specifically from a life cycle analysis standpoint, there are about eight
different definitions that are out there in the market today for carbon credits from agriculture and I think
there’s a ton of lobbying that’s going on in both Washington and Ottawa, as well as in Europe for that matter,
for their specific definition to be adopted as the mainstream. I think we’re probably somewhere between three
to five years before that happens, because they want to see market adoption rates of the different definitions
and they want to poke holes. Lord knows, from an environmental assessment standpoint, those things take
years to get done at the government level from a bureaucratic standpoint, red tape, etc. I don’t think it’s going
to happen any time soon. If I think about the more macro lens, though, beyond five years, I think that you’re
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going to see probably more mandates from whether it be provincial or state level, or even federal standpoints,
for a farm environment plan. You already see it in places like Quebec where a farmer has to register, I think it’s
every three or five years, I can’t remember exactly the timeline, but every three or five years they have to
update their farm environmental working plan to understand where are their waterways, where are their tree
shelter belts and so on and so forth?
All these factors add up into what makes a farmer sustainable or not, but the problem is that those definitions,
they just don’t apply to all geographies. Soil types are different between western Canada and the Midwest. Tree
shelter belts are less commonplace across North Dakota and South Dakota than they are in, say, Ohio. I think
we’re probably going to get to a world, from a regulatory standpoint, where there’s going to be a myriad of
factors and if a farmer meets 5-6, maybe 10 of those 20-30 different sustainability factors, they’re going to be
considered a sustainable farmer. Even in my conversations with government on both sides of the border, they
are starting to recognise that we cannot have a one-size-fits-all blanket approach here. There has to be some
malleability to account for the differences of different farm operations. It’s extremely noisy. There are a lot of
players that are looking at it because they know that it’s a huge opportunity, and it is a huge opportunity, but I
think it’s still early days from a regulatory standpoint. As a result, you’re playing with borrowed money, I guess
you could say, until the regulatory happens.
[00:35:57]
Q: Are there any purportedly unsustainable practices by farmers across geographies and production types that
may be a first target for regulators? Where could they start to build a framework, given you mentioned there
are eight definitions of carbon credits from agriculture?
BT: That’s a really good question. I think I would say that the lowest-hanging fruit is probably in the
application of crop input, so fertiliser and chemical more so than anything. On the fertiliser side of things,
there’s some really interesting technology coming up from a variety of companies, and even seed companies
for that matter, companies like Pivot Bio or Benson Hill, who are looking to help grow a crop with less use or a
significantly diminished use of synthetic fertilisers. Basically, I plant a corn crop, historically speaking, a
farmer in Iowa is going to put down 100 pounds of nitrogen on every acre no matter what, no questions asked.
We know that today, using satellite imagery and soil-test analysis, I don’t need to use 100 pounds of nitrogen
on every single acre. This acre maybe only needs 20, this acre only needs 10. Maybe this acre needs 50. That
variable-rate technology I think is becoming more commonplace, more readily used, because the equipment
manufacturers are starting to adopt it more readily. I would say it’s almost standard, it’s going to become
standard. Again, I think about the demographic that’s taking over the farm over the next decade or so, it’s the
best way to make sure that you’re not just wasting your resources and your crop inputs for that matter.
From an environmental standpoint, we all know the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico, the leaching of the soils
from the use of a variety of too much fertiliser for that matter. I think that’s probably one of the most
interesting areas that I’m keeping an eye on. Again, companies like Benson Hill, they’re doing it from a seed
perspective. Pivot Bio is doing it from a microbiome standpoint to help catalyse and make the most of the
fertiliser that’s going into the ground, the granulars there. I think that’s probably one of the most interesting
areas and one to keep an eye on. I would preface it by saying, and again I’ve shared this intel, or my
perspective, with governments on both side of the border, is that you can’t take a one-year assessment. A
farmer’s use of crop inputs year to year is going to change inherently, but if you were to take a rolling five-year
average perhaps, that’s a better approach, just because, again, in years when it’s extremely wet your fertiliser
application rates are somewhat diluted. It’s not as effective, unless you’re using some technology like what
Pivot Bio provides. Years where it’s dry, there’s no point in using fertiliser because you’re not going to get
anything out of it. Basically, the soils are just too parched anyways. That’s why you need that rolling average to
better understand exactly is the trend going in the right direction? I would say the second area of sustainability
is probably what I would call unrelated farming factors. These are things like water, water rights and water
runways, again tree shelter belts. Basically, these factors of is your environmental ecosystem on your farm or
around your farm supportive of the environment or is it breaking it down?
Again, there are a variety of different players that are in this space that are helping farmers better understand
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what they could be doing, or what are the good things that they’re already doing? How can they supplement
this? I think the trajectory of the net benefit over both the medium and the long term is starting to show up
because these farm environmental working plans have only been in place in a couple of jurisdictions for less
than a decade, so it’s not necessarily standard operating practice in many areas. I think that’s probably
another one. Then the last one, we’ve seen it probably the most on our farm, and I would think that a large
majority of farmers are also in the same camp, which is no-till farming, or minimum tillage, which basically
means that after you’ve harvested a crop you’re not going back through and ploughing the crop over, or the
field over, and allowing, again, all those elements that have been retained in the soil to be exposed back into
the atmosphere. You’re not turning over your soil just for the sake of turning it over. You’re actually
sequestering all these nutrients and keeping them in the soil, so the following year you don’t have to put in as
much fertiliser, whether it be nitrogen or phos or boron or a variety of different fertiliser and elements that
need to go back into the soil. Those would be the couple of areas that I would think about are the low-hanging
fruit.
[00:42:38]
Q: How much choice do farmers have around marketplace offerings beyond large one-stop shop players such
as ADM, Cargill and Andersons? Can only a few players support USD 9m transactions, which may not be big
to ADM?
BT: Just to be clear, a single transaction that’s worth USD 9m is a big transaction to ADM. The size of my
farm would do a transaction like that and that’s a huge win for a trader at Cargill or ADM because it basically
guarantees them supply and they don’t have to go find as much supply for that month or that quarter or
whatnot. The rule of thumb in grain trading, grain buying specifically, is that for every 10 phone calls that you
make to a farmer, to a variety of farmers, 10 different farmers, you’re probably only going to contract once or
twice because you’re just calling around nonchalantly. With a purpose, I shouldn’t say nonchalantly, but you’re
calling around to try to determine, “Which of the farmers in my geographic area are willing to sell today?”
Basically, you have this discovery process that has to be employed. When it comes to the online tools, that
discovery process is minimised in terms of the opportunity cost. I can see immediately in the farmers in my
geography, or even the people that I’m connected to through the platform, so, for example, on Combyne we’re
literally combining your trading networks in the one simple tool so that, as a farmer, I might deal with, let’s
say, seven different buyers. Cargill and ADM could be inclusive of that, but I let them know, “I’m looking to
sell 200 metric tonnes of corn and this is the price. This is when I’m looking to move it.” Now all of my buyers
know, “This is Brennan’s intention. This is where he’s looking to sell grain.”
On the flip side, if I’m a buyer and I have 200 different farmers that I deal with on a regular basis, or have
conversations with, and that’s my catchment area that I’m focused on, instead of maybe calling every single
one of them on a rolling basis, I’m going to put out a bid for just my farmers to see and it might be a special. It
might not necessarily be the posted price that you see on the elevator’s website or mobile app, but it’s a price
to say, “I’m looking to buy something today,” and let the market come to me in that sense, or let my farmers
come to me. It’s that one-to-many relationship approach and more in a B2B setting, because even though
you’re dealing with people, the people represent the companies, and so it’s Cargill buying it from Turner Grain
Company, or Turner Grain Farm Ltd, or something. This one-to-many approach accelerates the opportunity to
find grain or sell grain or buy grain faster, if you will, and start that conversation. Again, it can still happen
over the phone, you’re just trying to minimise the effort required to go find somebody who is incentivised to
sell today at the price that I’m willing to buy, or, on the flip side, find somebody who’s willing to pay what I’m
looking to sell for today. That’s why I think a lot of the traders from a variety of these companies, 19 of the top
20 grain buyers in North America were using Combyne regularly to interact with farmers that they wanted to
showcase the stuff or bid to, or even just be on top of where they’re looking to sell grain, so that they can be
their first phone call and make sure that they’re not missing out when Brennan is looking to sell grain.
Whether it be a USD 90,000 transaction, a USD 900,000 transaction or even a USD 9m transaction, which is
the top of the size of a deal.
I think that what some of these bigger companies have started to understand, that in order to keep the farmers
sticky to them, they need to create more value-add. I mentioned on the crop-input side they’ve created more
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value-add by providing independent agronomists or agronomy advice, some other crop planning help,
whereas on the grain elevator and the grain trading spaces side of things they’ve started to add more services
like hedging, logistics help. Probably the best are Cargill and ADM, because they’ve actually formed a joint
venture called GrainBridge, which is exclusively designed to basically support Cargill- and ADM-biased
farmers, or I don’t want to call them Cargill or ADM farmers, because they obviously don’t farm for just Cargill
and ADM, but they do a lot of business with those companies. GrainBridge is an interesting one because it’s
kind of a pseudo disruptor, innovation-based, but at the same time it’s controlled by two of the largest grain
companies in the world. I think bottom line is that all of these companies are going to participate. There is
only one company, and that’s why I mentioned 19 of the 20 companies, the largest grain traders in North
America use Combyne, there’s only one company that has an explicit mandate that they weren’t allowed to buy
grain through an independent platform like an Indigo or an FBN or a Combyne.
At the end of the day, a trader has to find grain. Their job is to go buy grain. It doesn’t matter where it came
from or who it came from, as long as they’re filling their quotas that they need to be done on a regular basis. I
think that what’s going to happen is more of these technologies that are not owned by the grain companies are
going to start to integrate into various back-office systems to make the job of the trader easier. If there are any
concerns or oversight issues from executives at the top, they can still understand, “This is what I’m reporting
of how much grain we bought through this channel, and this is how much grain we bought through that
channel. How much grain are we buying through the normal phone call-driven process?” which, again, I think
is becoming outdated, but it’s not outdated in the sense that to finalise a deal that was maybe made through a
platform, they’re going to jump on the phone to iron out some of those small details or particulars in terms of
logistics, in terms of, “Who’s sending the contract, when should I expect it?” All that sort of jazz. That phone
call is still omnipresent and important, or at least the option of it is important, but the legwork in terms of
finding a buyer, finding a seller, getting through the broad strokes of a negotiation, that is becoming more and
more done in an online setting. I think, again, both traders and farmers are becoming more and more
comfortable with it.
[00:49:59]
Q: What are platforms able to observe from their transaction data that was previously obscure? How can
players capitalise on information around buying-decision drivers? How is the transaction data being used by
the platforms to be more predictive or proactive?
BT: It’s a supply and demand function that is largely attributed to different movement periods. This is why
you have different futures contracts. Keep in mind that literally 90% of farmers, and this is in North America,
one of the most established, industrialised farming industries in the world, 90% do not hedge in the futures
market. That means that 10% of farmers are actively protecting their margin and whatnot, whereas 100% of all
traders are hedging, but you have to understand that even though only 10% of farmers hedge, 100% of farmers
sell in the cash market, the physical cash market. While a farmer might watch what the November soybean or
canola contract is doing, or the December corn contract is doing, they’re thinking about, “When is the most
optimal time for me to move my grain, let alone sell it? Because if I sell today off of Combyne, I’m going to get
a worse price than if I wait three months and store it, hold onto it and sell for movement in December or
January,” or could be another couple of months thereafter. That deferred delivery dynamic is becoming, I
think, more utilised by the farmer to better maximise profits and their cash flow needs. Aside from this, or
related to this, I should say, is the fact that farmers are building more on-farm storage and I do not think that
trend is going to change at all. We’ve probably added almost two million bushels of grain stores to our farm in
the last decade alone. I think we’re the extreme, but if you extrapolate that out down to a 5,000-acre farmer vs
the 80,000 that we’re at, they’re going a similar upgrade in terms of their infrastructure, so they are able to
hold onto this grain a lot longer.
I think it was the CEO of Cargill who said it about two or three years ago that the old business of a grain-
trading entity buying grain at harvest, holding onto it and then selling it at a profit for months later, that
business is dead. Mr MacLennan was probably right, because I think that’s why more of these larger entities
are looking for ways to add value. Coming back to your question, I think that the biggest grain companies
already know the traditional ebbs and flows of supply and demand, what’s already been contracted, and you
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can navigate that based on what’s being traded in the futures market. You can get a little bit of an indication,
but my point here is that because 90% of farmers are not hedging, truly understanding the supply nature of
what’s actually still available for sale is, over time, going to become better understood because you’re going to
have a lot of other systems speaking to each other and you’re going to, I think, be able to establish a little bit of
a benchmark or barometer in terms of, this is how much is sold off the farm by this date of the year or this
month of the year or this time frame of the growing season for that matter.
We were starting to see it a little bit at FarmLead, in terms of the contract data that was being accumulated, to
better understand, because in a lot of cases, even with the corn and the soybeans and the wheat and the
canolas of the world, there’s a ton of non-futures-related crops that just don’t have a futures market to
understand how much is actually being traded. You have barley, you have oats. Even though oats have a
futures market, it’s a pretty small or weakly traded contract, in my opinion. You’ve got peas, you’ve got lentils,
this whole rage for pulse-based and plant-based diet, that is largely driven by what’s being produced in peas
and lentils. If a company like Beyond Meat is now able to understand really how much of yellow peas are being
traded, which would then be fractionating, going into their own production, they’re going to get a better
understanding of what is the best time of the year to potentially buy yellow peas. I think that’s where a
significant amount of opportunity lies, but, again, it’ll come down to who is most willing to pay for this data? I
think there are a variety of companies like S&P Global Platts and similar-type entities that are desperately
looking for this type of contract information. It’s going to become more readily available in the coming years
and there’s going to be lots of opportunity because that ground truth of that farmer to first sale transaction
data is not readily available today, except held by those few entities that do maybe 10%, or own 12% or 15% of
the market, that they can get a decent sniff or understanding of how much is actually moving in the market.
[00:55:43]
Q: You touched on the plant-based side. Are companies such as Ingredion and ADM experiencing so much
margin growth in peas, soybeans and specialities because of the lower visibility in the futures market for these
commodities? Beyond Meat is consistently unable to make a profit, so is this higher cost driven by a lack of
visibility?
BT: I think in any industry, when there’s opaqueness or a lack of transparency, there are massive arbitrage
opportunities. The difference being that we talk about that in agriculture in terms of tens of millions of dollars
of opportunities vs maybe thousands or tens of thousands in other industries, in specifically consumer goods
trading world. Therein, Beyond Meat is a hard example. I know Ethan Brown on a personal level and there’s
no ability to really hedge in a futures market for yellow peas, so you can’t even hedge your costs of operation
from just a raw commodity sourcing standpoint. I think that could change with more of physical contract data
being accumulated and centralised, and it’s to their benefit. Then further to that, I think that there are also
going to be some conditions that go with it in terms of, “The peas that I bought came from a farm that has an
environmental working farm and it is sustainable across these 12 different factors.” Again, it helps sell the
narrative. Further to that point, it allows them to potentially tap into capital that has a specific ESG mandate,
which I think we can agree is becoming increasingly the norm. I think it’s one-third of all institutional capital
in North America now has an ESG mandate, so there are a lot of people that are just looking for, “Where can
this capital go and what’s going to meet our criteria?” That would be one example I just gave, in terms of
Beyond Meat being able to showcase, “The yellow peas that we buy,” or indeed sustainably sourced and so on
and so forth.
I think that the difference this go around in terms of that market transparency becoming more prevalent is
that farmers are now on the same playing field in terms of access to information, I would say, as what the large
trading companies have had, or have enjoyed, in years past, because those multinational corporations have
intel from the ground in Argentina and Brazil or Ukraine or Russia or Australia, whereas now on the internet,
today’s farmer is understanding exactly how much rainfall Western Australia is getting. Hard example would
be if I’m a harvest spring wheat grower, so high-protein wheat going into breads usually, durum is another
example going into pasta and couscous, there are only so many areas of the world that produce that quality or
specific type of wheat that can then be used to go into a bread-making or a pasta-making product. I focus on
those areas of the world that would technically compete with me, even from a farmer-to-farmer standpoint, it’s
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that industry as a whole collectively that competes with me individually, but also my industry as a whole, in
terms of market opportunity. I understand if there’s a drought in north Africa that means that Algeria and
Morocco and a couple of other countries are going to need to import more wheat, and Canada or the US
options are usually the best because at the same time European crop production isn’t as great as it normally is
either, because some of that drought lingered north into parts of France and Spain, so on and so forth.
The farmer now has more access to information to help them make some of those decisions. Don’t get me
wrong, I don’t think a lot of them have the skillset to properly analyse and interpret this information and really
understand the long-term impact of what’s happening on a daily basis, but there are a variety of companies
that are starting to emerge to help sort through that noise, is what I would call it, to help the farm. Marketing
consultants, who, again, basically collect all this information, digest it and then regurgitate it out for each
individual farmer, based on the crops that they’re growing and how it pertains to their operation. The farmer is
just on a little bit more on an equal playing field, and the rise of Indigo Ag, or my company that I started, even
a Farmers Business Network on the crop-input side of things, they’re putting a very clear and accessible price
point on the value of a commodity, whether it be a chemical, a fertiliser product or even a bushel of yellow
peas. As a result, the incumbents have to understand a better way to do business, and a larger part is again this
value-add to continue to build that trust and say, “We’re your trading partner.” I’ll tell you from experience, we
have sold grain to companies that we regularly do business with, at a price point that’s USD 0.05-0.10,
sometimes even USD 0.15 a bushel less than what a less-established smaller player that is maybe new in the
market, trying to make some big waves for themselves by some aggressive pricing, just because we know that
we’ve done a lot of business with that other company, they’re reliable, we know we can deliver on time, and so
we prefer to do business with them and we’re willing to take a smaller price just because we know of that
reliability and that trust factor and that relationship that, again, has been established for many years.
[01:02:04]
NH: I think that’s a good place to end the Interview. Let me close by saying thank you for your time today,
Brennan. We covered an extensive lot, so I really appreciate you taking the time. Clients, if you would like to
speak to Brennan in a private call or meeting, please let your relationship manager know. Thank you, clients,
for joining Third Bridge Forum’s Interview today. Have a good one.
BT: Cheers. Bye.
Transcription ends at 01:02:19 of the recorded material
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