As farmers prepare to plant this spring, 2023 isn’t shaping up to be as much of a guessing game as last season in terms of some inputs and especially supplies of certain herbicides. Despite warnings from weed scientists last fall, BASF says the company isn’t seeing a shortage of glufosinate this year.
2022 posed continuous supply chain challenges in just about every sector of agriculture, and glufosinate and glyphosate were hot topics. When farmers reported problems finding certain herbicides in 2022, they resorted to plan B or C for weed control.
However, 2023 is starting off on a much better foot, according to Kate Greif, senior marketing strategy lead for BASF.
“We’re happy to tell you, we feel very confident in our ability to see an increase in supply of Liberty for the 2023 growing season,” Greif told Farm Journal.
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Greif points out growers still need to talk to their local retailers, but on a national level, the situation has significantly improved in a year.
“It’s also all about shipping and logistics,” Greif adds. “Industry wide, the majority of Liberty and many of our products get sprayed in a very short window in a calendar season. So, what we’re really focused on doing as an organization is expanding our shipping windows. We do have product moving throughout the entire year, rather than trying to get it just in time to the farmers at the time when they need it.”
It wasn’t just active ingredients that posed sourcing problems last year. Greif says the supply chain issues even hit things you wouldn’t expect, like the packaging of those products.
“We saw things as simple as problems getting caps for jobs in the last few years. And so really what we’ve learned from that is plan earlier, plan more often,” says Greif. “And then ultimately, we’ve built a lot of contingency plans within our production systems to ensure that we’re going to be able to get these products to farmers and to get them to them on a timely basis.”
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While the supply chain on the chemical side is shaping up to be better than last year, it’s also good news for growers trying to lock in all tools they need to combat tough-to-control weeds.
“We absolutely are seeing where there’s going to be more availability to phosphonate this year and at this point, based on our forecast, enough to be able to meet the market demand,” she adds.
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