For the fourth time, FBN has released its Ag Chemical Price Transparency Report.
Co-founder Charles Baron says FBN was releasing the data on an annual cadence, but the disruptions starting in 2021 in the crop protection supply chain caused volatility and made their metrics hard to track via an annual report format.
“Prices were rising and collapsing so fast you’d have to run this analysis monthly to keep up,” Baron says.
In 2019, FBN made a big bet and acquired generic producer WillowoodUSA and its lineup of crop protection products, which it sells direct-to-farm. Then in 2022, the company made a large investment in its glyphosate production.
Baron says the company’s efforts behind giving farmers more “price transparency” in their inputs is what has continually fueled the effort behind FBN Direct, particularly through challenging times with building a supplier network and building out its own generic offerings.
He says since those black swan events of COVID, weather-related shortages, and others have ironed out, this year provided a good opportunity for the company to compile its national data from farmer members.
For this year’s ag chemical price transparency report, FBN asked members to send in invoices from their chemical purchases between January and May 2024. They received more than 2,400 invoices from 33 states.
Products are evaluated based on the average price paid by the customer for the same active ingredients normalized to the same concentrations, and included prices net of discounts. The data used in the calculations may not always have reflected additional rebates or additional marketing offers not captured on an invoice.
Baron says one of the most notable takeaways from the data analyzed was there was a 72% median difference between the highest and lowest price paid for all chemical products analyzed, and up to a 468% difference on the most variable products like AMS.
The report is available to all FBN members who submit their own price invoice data. FBN also offers price comparison data (tracking prices over time and in current market conditions) on its own e-commerce offering, FBN Direct, which includes FBN generic crop protection products.
“Swapping from branded to generics had farmers save as much as 35%,” Baron says.
He also highlights when a farm gives FBN their pricing data for inputs, farmers can track their individual price comparisons when doing product research.
“It allows the farmer to benchmark their historic purchases, both in the current market and looking back in time” he says. “This was a major goal of when we started FBN—to give farmers better visibility into their business and provide ways to improve.”
FBN currently states it has more than 75,000 members in the U.S. and Canada, and slightly more than 20% transact in some way with the company—which includes buying inputs, acquiring financing, or participating in its Gradable platform.
In 2023, FBN completed 33,000 deliveries of farm inputs, provided $1 billion in financing, and paid $22 million in premiums from Gradable.
