3 Catalysts For Current Crop Protection Supply Issues
“I’ve never seen so much emotion in the marketplace.” says Randy Canady, CEO of Atticus, who has 32 years of experience in the crop protection industry.
He’s referring to 2021’s tight supplies of glyphosate, glufosinate and S-metolachlor as well as other crop protection supplies. Canady says the Atticus team started to see the writing on the wall with how supplies for 2021 were shaping up in November of 2020. As such, he led his team to do three things: communicate with retailers, sell what they know they’ll have in inventory, and be ready to adjust to changing factors.
“Bad news is best delivered early,” he says. “So we let our sales people know what we had and when we had it. We did not oversell our inventory.”
Canady and the team at Atticus are in their seventh season since launching the post-patent crop protection company, and he highlights the current supply chain challenges in crop protection aren’t just due to the COVID-19 pandemic’s long-tail of logistical issues.
“We’re willing to sacrifice profitability in order to deliver on reliability,” he says. “It’s important to know that the current state of things is really that a series of three progressive events landed us in the challenge we now face. Initial stress fractures were amplified by tariffs and further exacerbated with COVID-19, erupting supply fragility to its limits.”
The Atticus team posted a blog about the supply chain, which can be found here.
And here are some highlights Canady wants to underscore:
- Global manufacturing of crop protection products, notably in China and India, started experiencing negative influences four years ago in 2017. Consolidation of plants between 2017 and 2018 cut the number of factories in half.
- Then in September 2018, tranches of tariffs on goods from China started to take effect.
- COVID-19 has a long-tail of impacts for product cost, logistical challenges and more.
Going forward, Canady expects these challenges to persist as more of the same through 2022.
“I know we will make mistakes, but indecisiveness will not be one of them at Atticus,” he says. “We have to make bold decisions. We need to be deliberate with the time we have to source, import, formulate, package, get wheels under it, and then load into a warehouse—and it’s always later than you think.”
He concludes by saying, “When faced with potentially confrontational or emotional topics, that’s when effective communication and active engagement work together to create desired outcomes; that’s how we define accountability.”
