By Priscila Castelani, Global R&D and Marketing Director for Crop Solutions, Indovinya
Agriculture enters 2027 under a complex combination of economic, geopolitical, regulatory, and supply-chain pressures. Lower agricultural commodity prices are compressing farm margins, while elevated input costs and interest rates continue to affect growers’ purchasing power. At the same time, tariffs, armed conflicts, shifting trade policies, and region-specific regulatory changes are reshaping how agricultural products are sourced, formulated, manufactured, and commercialized.
These pressures affect every participant in the value chain. Farmers are becoming more selective about their investments. Distributors are carefully managing inventories. Crop protection companies are reassessing portfolios and innovation priorities. Suppliers of co-formulants and formulation technologies are expected to deliver performance under increasingly demanding cost, regulatory, and supply requirements.
The challenge facing our industry is not whether we can develop technologies that work. It is how we innovate in a way that balances performance with affordability, helping customers deliver effective products while supporting farmer profitability, sustainability objectives, and long-term growth.
Farm Economics and Regional Dynamics Are Reshaping Crop Protection Portfolios
The agricultural value chain ultimately depends on farmer profitability. With lower commodity prices, elevated production costs, and high interest rates expected to keep margins under pressure through at least mid-2027, growers are scrutinizing every input decision based on its expected return. Strong corn and soybean production may add further pressure to commodity prices, even as fertilizer costs and geopolitical uncertainty remain significant concerns.
However, there is no single global agricultural cycle. Market conditions vary significantly by region, influenced by crop economics, weather, currencies, trade policies, regulation, channel structures, and access to technology.
North America is navigating profitability constraints, tariffs, and trade uncertainty. Latin America remains highly competitive, with currency volatility, credit conditions, and input affordability shaping technology adoption. In Europe, regulatory scrutiny continues to affect active ingredient availability, conditions of use, and reformulation requirements. China, meanwhile, combines its position as a major agricultural market and global manufacturing hub with stricter pesticide oversight and policies that can significantly influence commodity demand and international trade flows.
These regional dynamics are changing how crop protection companies build and manage their portfolios. New product development is increasingly evaluated not only on biological performance, but also on formulation cost, manufacturing flexibility, regulatory requirements, supply resilience, and speed to market.
Formulators are consequently under growing pressure to optimize existing products, rationalize portfolios, localize production where economically viable, and adopt technologies that improve performance without adding unnecessary cost or complexity. For suppliers of co-formulants and formulation technologies, success depends on addressing specific regional needs while preserving the scale and efficiency required to remain globally competitive.
The additional challenge for Co-formulants
Co-formulants are critical to crop protection performance, determining how an active ingredient is formulated, stored, applied, and delivered to its target. Solvents, emulsifiers, dispersants, wetting agents, and adjuvants influence formulation stability, spray formation, deposition, uptake, rainfastness, and ultimately field efficacy.
Their role is becoming even more important as crop protection portfolios evolve toward more concentrated formulations, increasingly complex active ingredients mixtures, biological products, and low-volume and precision applications. These developments expand the technical demands placed on the formulation and on each of its components.
Co-formulant selection is therefore becoming more complex. Each formulation type presents distinct challenges, from preventing particle agglomeration and crystal growth in suspension concentrates to maintaining stability in oil dispersions or preserving microorganism viability in biological formulations. Application methods, including drone and ultra-low-volume spraying, place additional emphasis on spray quality, drift control, deposition, coverage, and crop safety.
Technical performance remains the foundation of any co-formulant solution, but commercialization depends on a broader set of factors. With several technologies often capable of providing similar functionality, the selected solution must also align with the customer’s cost targets, regulatory strategy, manufacturing requirements, regional supply needs, and intended product positioning.
This creates an important challenge for technology suppliers: technical success must be translated into commercial and operational value.
The right co-formulant may reduce the required dosage, replace multiple formulation components, enable higher active loading, improve long-term stability, simplify manufacturing, or increase the efficiency of active-ingredient delivery. Its value should therefore be assessed beyond price per kilogram, considering its total impact on formulation economics, production efficiency, application performance, and cost-in-use.
This perspective is particularly important when developing safer solvent systems. Modern formulations may combine several active ingredients with different physicochemical characteristics and solubility profiles. Selecting a solvent increasingly requires formulators to balance solubilization performance, temperature stability, water miscibility, flash point, packaging compatibility, regulatory status, environmental profile, and cost.
The same principle applies to dispersants. As active ingredients become more complex and poorly soluble, dispersant selection can strongly influence particle-size control, suspension stability, dilution behavior, spray consistency, and ultimately product efficacy. Technologies that perform effectively at lower use levels or across several active ingredients can create both technical and economic advantages.
Connecting R&D Priorities with Customer Needs
At Indovinya, we bring collaborative innovation to life by connecting our R&D capabilities with those of our customers throughout the development process.
Our roadmap prioritizes new solvents within the SURFONIC® AG family, advanced dispersants from the TERSPERSE® portfolio, uptake enhancers, and the optimization and derivatization of existing technologies across our SURFOM®, TERWET®, among other brands.
Together, these platforms are designed to help formulators address increasingly complex active ingredients, improve formulation stability and delivery, and respond to evolving safety and sustainability requirements. These priorities reflect the industry’s growing needs.
Through meaningful technical dialogue, we adapt our priorities to customers’ technical, economic, and regional needs. Our global R&D structure provides a collaborative environment where customers and technical experts can co-create, develop, test, refine, and accelerate solutions from initial concept through commercialization.
This structure also allows insights from different markets to leverage our solutions. A challenge initially identified in one region may reveal broader potential across other crops, formulation types, or application systems. Conversely, a globally available co-formulant may require adaptation to meet local regulatory requirements, manufacturing conditions, agronomic practices, or cost expectations.
The objective is not simply to increase the number of technologies available to formulators. It is to identify and adapt the right chemistry to achieve the best possible balance of performance, affordability, safety, supply resilience, and scalability for each customer and market.
More focused customer collaboration
Customer-centric innovation remains essential, but collaboration must become more disciplined. Suppliers and customers should align early on technical requirements, target economics, regulatory pathways, commercialization timing, and the potential scale of each opportunity.
The most relevant questions are straightforward: What farmer or formulation problem are we solving? Is the performance improvement meaningful? What is the acceptable cost-in-use? Can the solution be manufactured competitively in the regions where it is needed? Can the technology scale beyond one formulation or customer? What technical, regulatory, or supply barriers could delay commercialization?
This alignment is particularly important in crop protection, where successful laboratory development may be followed by formulation optimization, application testing, field validation, regulatory assessment, and regional manufacturing qualification. Development efforts must therefore be guided by a clear understanding of both technical potential and the path to commercial implementation.
Answering these questions early helps reduce development risk and directs resources toward opportunities. It also helps identify when a new molecule is required and when an existing technology can be optimized, derivatized, combined, or adapted to solve the customer’s challenge more efficiently.
Creating Shared Value Across the Agricultural Chain
As agriculture moves through another demanding cycle, innovation must be measured by the value it creates across the agricultural chain. For co-formulant suppliers, this means helping customers develop formulations that deliver reliable performance, remain economically competitive, address regional requirements, and advance safety and sustainability objectives.
Achieving this balance requires closer collaboration, clear development priorities, and a shared focus on solutions that can be successfully scaled and commercialized.
By partnering closely with our customers, we believe formulation innovation can support this transition by connecting chemistry, application expertise, and market insight to improve active ingredient delivery. Advancing value-based technologies can help crop protection companies create greater value for farmers, strengthen the resilience of the agricultural value chain, and contribute to a more positive and sustainable growth cycle.
For every farmer our customers support, we stand with them.
