Welcome to another Sunday edition of SFTW!
This week's edition talks about the relative lack of churn in the rank of incumbents within agriculture.
Happenings
- Upcoming AgTech Alchemy events. Seattle (May 19, 2025), Fargo (June 12, 2025), Silicon Valley (June 12, 2025)
- Second part of the GenAI in Ag whitepaper to be released on May 20, 2025. You can get the first part here. It is free for SFTW members.
Build Less, Scale Faster: The Rise of White-Label Platforms
Ag leaders aren’t asking “Can we build it?”—they’re asking “Should we?” White-labeled platforms are helping agribusinesses move faster and deliver on strategy while staying focused. From carbon tracking to digital agronomy, e-commerce, and lab insights, leaders are choosing to scale through their brand, not by building new tech stacks.
Customers don’t care who built it—they care that it works. With white-labeled tech, you can go to market fast with your logo, your workflows, and our managed infrastructure behind the scenes.
Lindy effect: If a book has been in print for 40 years, it is likely to stay in print for another 40. If it’s new, it might vanish next year.
The concept originated from conversations among comedians at Lindy's Deli in New York, who observed that the longer a show had been on air, the longer it was likely to continue.
It was formalized and popularized by Benoit Mandelbrot and later expanded by Nassim Nicholas Taleb (a mathematician and an obnoxious blowhard) in his book Antifragile.
We can say with a high degree of confidence that Shakespeare will still be popular a few hundred years from now, and Plato will be influential a few thousand years from now.
Image source: Sketchy Ideas
The Lindy effect is typically seen in non-perishable items like ideas (e.g. religion), practices (e.g. contracts), basic tools (e.g. hammers) etc. Some other non-perishable items like business models like subscriptions have shown strong Lindy influence.
Companies are less likely to show the Lindy effect, though a brand like Coca-Cola has stayed strong for many years. (It is not guaranteed it will, though it is in a fairly strong spot).
The list of most valuable companies in the US changes quite a bit every few years.
Within agriculture, one could say companies are showing a form of Lindy effect, especially the incumbents.
For example, within the seed and chem space, four companies control the majority of the share of wallet from growers. More importantly, even though these companies have gone through many different transformations, they have often thrived and survived through multiple geopolitical events, pandemics, trade wars, technology shifts.
Syngenta traces its history back to 1758 through the founding of Geigy, a Swiss chemical company. Over the next two and half centuries, through multiple acquisitions, mergers, divestments, Syngenta in its current form emerged in the early 2000s.
Bayer was founded in the late 19th century in Germany and continues to evolve through their acquisition of Monsanto as late as 2018, though the Crop Science division is in an existential crisis right now. Corteva traces its origins back to the late 19th and early 20th century through their Dow & Dupont links. BASF similar has been around since 1865.
The headquarters of "Fried. Bayer et comp." in Heckinghauser Strasse in Barmen-Rittershausen (1863) (Image Source)
The story is similar on the equipment side. Deere has been around since 1837. Though CNH in its current form was formed in the late 20th century, its acquisitions and divestiture trace its history back in the 19th and 20th century through FIAT and brands like Massey Ferguson. Kubota was founded in the mid-19th century whereas Mahindra has been around since the middle of the 20th century.
The data with off-takers is similar. The ABCDs of the world control a plurality of products moving through the supply chain. ADM (1902), Bunge (1818), Cargill (1865), and Dreyfus (1851) have been around for a long time.
So why have these companies survived and thrived for so long?
There are different reasons for different sectors within ag, and slightly different reasons for different companies, but they can be broken down into four main categories.
- Distribution
- Physical infrastructure
- Fragmented markets
- Tech innovation and scaling
These factors are not independent of each other, but they build on top of each other to increase the entrenchment of these incumbents. If your company is taking advantage of all four factors, the Lindy effect will be strong.
Let us look at some examples across offtake, OEM, and seed & chemical companies in agriculture.
Offtakers
Offtake requires a large and connected physical infrastructure with grain elevators, storage facilities etc. The storage infrastructure has to be connected with a logistics infrastructure over rail, water, and land with access to terminals and ports to connect supply with demand.