CropLife Retail Week: Nutrien Trip, Potash Pledge, and Top Ag Tech Trends

Eric Sfiligoj and Lara Sowinski discuss the Nutrien Innovation Farm, a presidential move to protect the potash supply, and top technology trends.

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*Below is a partial and edited transcript:

Eric Sfiligoj: Hello. Welcome to another edition of CropLife Retail Week. I’m Eric Sfiligoj, editor of CropLife. Back in seat in studio talking to my good friend Lara Sowinski. Lara, I missed you last week.

Lara Sowinski: Yeah. You were out and about running around. I was out and about running around.

ES: Yes. And before we go much further, I should explain to our viewers why I was absent from last week’s video. While Miss Lara was covering for me with you, our viewers. I was on the road visiting with our good friends at Nutrien Ag Solutions. They were opening a new innovation Farm research, center, just outside of Champaign, Illinois. So I drove from where we are located, our offices in Ohio to Champaign. It’s, about, 7.5 hour drive.

And of course, going there again an hour and coming back, I lose one because of the Eastern Central time zone thing. But the, the facility itself, Lara, was very nice. You should be seeing some pictures on screen of, who I was seeing and what I was seeing. They had an official ribbon cutting on March 20th, and, they actually are going to use this facility to test out their products.

And that includes seed crop protection, adjuvants and equipment that they use. And they had mentioned, of course, that this facility is a quote unquote new chapter for them. It is the fourth such innovation farm they have. They have others in Kentucky, California and Mississippi. But this one actually is in the heartland in Illinois. So corn and soybean are going to be the major crops they’re looking at.

And they’re going to be focusing, of course, on education and research and testing of products. But they also mentioned that soil health is going to be a big component of this facility. And Paul Bonnet actually there, one of their gentlemen said about soil health that, they view it as that’s going to be the next step in the evolution of agriculture, because all things start with the soil.

And that, of course, leads to better yield in the long run. So this is something we’ll be following up on. But again, my thanks to our friends at Nutrien for having me along for the ribbon cutting, I appreciate it.

LS: It’s awesome. I think I’ll, try and get there myself. And maybe you could come along when we’re in Chicago area for our public advisory Council meeting.

ES: And again, like, I was seeing this facility here in March, you know, and the fields were bare. But, you know, if we visit later in the fall, I’m sure we’ll get to see a full crop in the ground and in the field. And, I’m sure there’ll be some research, information will be able to share with our viewers.

So, again, if you want to know more, stay tuned and we’ll, we’ll hit you up in October. So before I kick it to you, one more thing I want to talk about, again, we’ve been getting a lot of news out of Washington, DC regarding, proposals and tariffs. Are they aren’t they going to be in place?

And I know, you know, one of one of the countries being targeted with tariffs is our, Canada, our friends to the north. And I know that our friends in the fertilizer business were very concerned about that because one of the important fertilizers, potash, most of that, about 90, 98% or so of the potash we use in the United States comes from outside the United States.

And certainly all that comes from Canada. But, we found out, a couple of weeks ago, I guess, this happened. President Donald Trump signed an executive order that, is including potash as one of the, important American minerals. So that basically means that potash will not be subject to the tariffs. And our friends at the Fertilizer Institute, put forth a, a note saying that today’s forward looking action by the president recognized potash is a critical mineral, to ensuring U.S. farmers have access to essential nutrients needed to grow the crops that feed our communities.

So let’s. So, again, we get some good news there out of our friends in DC. Yeah, that that’s actually a big relief. I’m sure. Oh many friendly. Yeah. So hey, I’ll kick this off to you then. I know you said you had a couple of things to talk about, including a planned trip you have on the docket.

LS: Yeah. Our signal newsletter, which, comes out every week on on Fridays, is part of our global ad tech initiative. Here at Meister. Recently had an article from, Ron Baruchi, CEO of Agmatix, and he, identified top five ad tech trends for 2025 that he was watching. And number one on his list was data driven regenerative agriculture.

And, he said, the McKinsey Global Farmer Insights 2024 survey, revealed 68% of farmers adopted crop rotations, 56% implemented reduced or no tillage, and 40% used variable rate spraying or fertilization. You know, just in recent conversation, and I may have mentioned this recently, Fred Nichols at Humor, excuse me, Kristen Brower at, The Mosaic Company.

A lot of folks now are talking about soil health. You know, as it’s great, it’s, you know, as, Ron says, it’s an important topic for 25. We’re kind of laughing, though, especially those folks in my age group, because kind of the, the way that they’re saying it was like, what’s old is new again, it’s like this, you know, back in the 70s, back in the 80s, I remember Fred was saying that, you know, this was something that we did crop rotations, etc. this was part of what what you did the difference now.

And this is what’s so exciting about, tech in particular. We have more insights as to how it works, why it works, how we can apply to control it more, to get results that we’re looking for. But, it’s kind of cool. You know, I like talking about it. I like hearing about, what how people view viewer.

Kind of what’s working, what’s not. Where do we still need to make improvements, where we need some better insights and so forth? Soil health is actually one of our, primary themes, this year’s Tech Hub Live, which is at the end of July in Des Moines again. So I was excited to, see that. So it’s worth five, tech trends that Ron identified again, the first one being, region, data group drip driven region AG.

He’s talking secondly, another trend, gen unlocking the new data potential third, data driven product development for growers success. Fourth meeting resource constraints with AI and machine learning. And fifth, digital twins. The untapped frontier in agriculture. Yeah, I haven’t heard digital twins. In a while. I remember at our vision conference two years ago, we did actually have a panel discussion.

Did digital twins being one of those whereby you, you model scenarios, you know, the what if. And let’s try this. So I was glad to kind of see that, Matt mentioned again. But as I looked, at these trends that Ron identified again, so much and pretty much everything relies on data but clean data.

And it kind of goes without saying. But as we’ve, been talking to our advisory board for Tech Hub Live and again, just, you know, in discussions as we’re talking with folks about articles, we’re working on in content, this the problem, I, I will say, frankly, there’s a lot of data that’s not clean, not reliable. So, again, another topic in addition to soil health on our Tech Hub Live program this year, we’ll be talking a lot about clean, clean data like the importance of it.

But how to kind of do an audit to see where you need to improve it. Because if we’re using AI more and more to, come up with predictive analytics, prescriptive and, you know, and just kind of really this is the foundation of that data is not clean. Kind of like that garbage in, garbage out kind of kind of thing.

So anyway, Global Ag Tech Initiative, and check out the Signal newsletter sign up board if you don’t already get it. Just this last few weeks alone, this is one of many articles. It was like, oh my gosh, this is a really good. So this one pull for this out. And yeah, you mentioned I will be, taking a little road trip from El Paso to love it next week, the first week of April.

The Plains Cotton Grower Association is holding a meeting there. And, their speaker, thankfully, I get to, to hear him, Joel Nicosia from Lily Dreyfus Company. I just Joe did a fantastic, economic outlook, presentation during, the recent June show and our colleagues that were there, said it was just great.

A lot of the things that Joe had mentioned, you know, were really kind of top of mind and really kind of, you know, what does the cotton, subsector need to do to kind of make some, you know, in a tough way. I mean, there’s no way to sugarcoat it. It’s it’s really tough. The commodity prices are, you know, again, cotton is just kind of there.

And as we know, input prices are going up, etc., etc.. So I guess he had some pretty great things to say. Very good, good things. Like, hey, you know, this is how we can rally, this is what we can look to do. So I’m super excited to hear Joe. So again, that’s a plains cotton grower meeting in Lubbock.

And, I’m really looking forward to I’ll, we’ll be wearing all cotton. No polyester, no rayon, which, you know, frankly, I kind of, Do anyhow, I do like, you know, linens, cotton wool. So, anyway, I’m super excited, and I will report back what I learn and who I meet. When we get together next, I was, I say get, get a little video clip if you can as well.

I’m sure, a lot of our viewers are probably unfamiliar with that speaker and would love to see them for himself. Yeah, himself. So for sure. All right. Well, Miss Laura, then let’s end this know, program on a high note. Time for your favorite segment. Time for. Fun with number. Well, you you’re going to level up if you don’t know already.