Justin Greer started his career unloading trucks and loading trailers as a warehouse manager at an ag retailer. Today he is national product manager for crop care at Innvictis Crop Care, part of Simplot, and a member of this year’s The Scoop’s 40 Under 40 class.
“If you had told me when I started that I’d be doing this job at a national level, working in product development, on the front end of a lot of these innovations, I’d have thought you were crazy,” Greer says. “I never thought I’d go that route.”
Innvictis is organized into three business units: seed, bioscience and crop care. Crop care covers herbicides, insecticides, fungicides and adjuvants. Greer says the brand’s roots go back to Sander’s and Pinnacle, and when Simplot acquired those retailers in 2020, it got the Innvictis brand with them. That is how the company has been able to “scale up to a national footprint,” he says.
Planning 2027 since spring
Greer says his team began working on 2027 in April or May. As part of the company that is a top-five retailer, Innvictis fields calls from suppliers that want to either supply product directly or partner on development.
“We have our eyes on things that are constantly coming off patent, what those look like, maybe different pre-mixes, different technologies we can add to those off-patent chemistries to make them more efficient, more effective,” he says.
The team also watches biological and nutritional products. The goal, Greer says, is to “put something out there that’s going to help with stress mitigation on the crop, fertilizer availability, all the issues our grower customers are dealing with.”
A steadier supply chain, with caveats
Greer has been a product manager since 2017, a stretch that took in the first round of tariffs and then COVID.
“Nothing’s ever been the same,” he says. But each year, he says, things get “a little better, a little better.”
For 2027, Greer says he does not foresee big supply chain disruptions in off-patent chemistry from Innvictis’s standpoint. Fertilizer and fuel, he says, are “a whole other issue” tied to international events. On the Simplot Grower Solutions side, he says several projects aim to improve forecasting, logistics and distribution from the field level up, and he expects “a big improvement” going into next year.
Turning barns faster
Greer says the timing and the pace of the inputs industry has evolved.
“We would go out there in November, give a guy a price, finance it all at 0%, and say, ‘We’ll hold it all in the warehouse until literally the day before you need it in July, and then I’ll deliver it right to your door,’” he says. At the same time, he was charging the lowest price in the county. “There was so much value in that, and we just didn’t even know it.”
Today, he says, Innvictis might do a little of each of those things, but “all of that is almost impossible.”
Greer says the company runs a much tighter supply window than before—managing inventory volume and timing as close as possible.
“We don’t want to hold on to this stuff any longer than you’d have to, because it is a liability for everybody,” he says.
The goal is to “turn those barns quicker,” Greer says, rather than “fill the barn, sit on it for 10 months, and move it when it’s most convenient.”
Advice from the front half of the book
Greer says his start at the field level made him “more relatable to everybody in our industry.” Even the sink-or-swim moments helped, he says, because “it helps you learn things a little quicker.”
His advice to those early in their ag retail careers is to focus on the job in front of them. “Try to live in the present and do the best job at what your role is today,” Greer says. “If you’ve got future aspirations, that’s fine, but don’t look at every job as some stepping stone opportunity. Really try to make the most of it.”
