KEY TAKEAWAYS
- Many effective agtech innovations fail due to lack of farmer adoption.
- To drive adoption, manufacturers need to match farmers’ risk with the potential reward of new inputs.
- Outcome guarantees can help reduce risk and drive adoption.
A recent analysis of agtech startup failures in 2025 found that 13 out of 18 companies that shuttered cited the same cause: low farmer adoption. One of the report’s takeaways sounds like common sense to anyone in the ag industry: to succeed, agtech startups must pay as much attention to farmers’ business and operational models as to the technology they’re developing.
This alignment is crucial. Most innovations that agtech startups produce promise just an incremental improvement to farmers: say, a few extra bushels per acre or a slightly reduced need for fertilizer.
What they miss: to enjoy these modest gains, farmers are only willing to take on modest risk. Today, too many agtech startups ask farmers to take on much more.
Agtech startups that want to succeed in 2026 and beyond can do so by using financial tools that reduce the potential downside of trying new things. In this piece, we’ll look at how this applies specifically to companies manufacturing crop inputs.
Build Products That Fit into Farmers’ Existing Workflows
While farmers are notorious for being change-averse, they’re also historically enthusiastic adopters of new technology. For proof, just look at how much farming has changed in the last 75 years.
At the same time, though, they’re shrewd business owners. They get precisely one “shot on goal” per season, and they need an excellent reason to stray from what has worked for them in past years.
Agtech innovations that offer modest improvements – say, eight incremental bushels per acre – but significant upfront investment or new farming techniques (reduced tillage, additional input applications, etc.) have a risk-to-reward mismatch.
Most farmers are looking to reduce operational complexity, not increase it. Introducing new practices always increases operational complexity in the short term because it requires not just doing those things but learning how to do them. That both takes extra time and adds new sources of risk.
For a farmer to willingly embrace additional complexity, the associated product would have to provide slam-dunk gains – i.e., more than an incremental improvement.
The exception here is the “early adopter,” the farmer who’s eager to try new things even when they require significant adaptation. Innovation research suggests that early adopters make up less than 20 percent of the population. So scaled adoption can’t depend on scaling enthusiasm for novelty.
Just as important: early adopters often have a niche. Maybe they’re early adopters of innovative farming equipment but not inputs or of inputs but not practices.
So: manufacturers that want to scale adoption of a new input that only offers a modest benefit, you should only expect farmers to make modest changes to their operations. You can deliver on that by paying close attention to your target customers’ existing operations and developing products that fit within that model.
Remove or Reduce the Cost of Failure
Why are so few people early adopters? Because most of us operate with a cognitive bias called loss aversion. Loss aversion makes the pain of losing something we have greater than the pleasure of gaining something new.
In the context of new input adoption, that means the benefit a new product or practice promises has to greatly outweigh the potential risks of doing something differently.
One way to do that is to attach an outcome warranty to products that you want farmers to adopt. Our Crop Plan Warranty, for example, works like this:
- Manufacturers identify a product that is experiencing low adoption rates.
- They attach an outcome guarantee to this product: if the farmer doesn’t see the promised benefit at harvest, they’re eligible for a cash payout.
- They might also collaborate with retailers to create a product bundle that includes the product in question and attach the outcome guarantee to that bundle.
- Farmers now face a decision that involves very little risk for them: if all goes well, they’ll enjoy greater yields. If things don’t go well, they’ll still get paid.
By attaching an outcome guarantee to a product or bundle, you create a win-win-win situation: farmers get to try innovative products with very little downside risk, retailers have tools for nudging farmers toward higher-margin products, and manufacturers get to increase adoption of their inputs.
Create an Environment Where Meaningful Progress Is Possible
Beyond the short-term goal manufacturers have to increase adoption of their current product line, setting up the right financial incentives can also help manufacturers drive wider-scale change more quickly.
Take biologicals, for example. At scale, they can help increase yields, improve resistance to pests, and increase the health of soil, water, and air.
But to achieve those benefits, farmers have to adopt biologicals at scale. A side-by-side Crop Plan Warranty can make that scale happen faster. Here’s how:
- Without an outcome guarantee in play, a farmer might be convinced to adopt a new biological input on one or two percent of their land. This lets them learn whether the product works while minimizing the risk of loss.
- With a side-by-side outcome guarantee in place, a farmer can use precision equipment to set up a trial between their standard practice and the new product.
- At harvest, the farmer can see with their own eyes whether the product worked. Crucially, they can also maximize their gains from adopting a new input – without facing any of the downside risk.
This system also creates a virtuous circle: as more farmers gather more data on new products, they become less risky for other farmers to try. This helps manufacturers, farmers, and retailers advance toward products that improve both outputs and land stewardship.
In This Economic Moment, Ag Input Manufacturers Need to Meet Farmers Halfway on Adoption
What I’ve discussed so far in this piece is true about farmers and innovation and adoption during any economy. In this economic moment, however, where farmers have faced blow after financial blow for several years, rethinking adoption is more important than ever.
Ag input manufacturers that want to survive long term and make a meaningful difference in the agriculture landscape can do so only if they’re clear-eyed about the risks and challenges farmers face when it comes to adopting new inputs.
Creating with existing workflows in mind, removing as much adoption-related risk as possible, and making the path to meaningful change as short as possible are three ways to drive adoption faster and more durably. Get more info today about how Crop Plan Warranty can set you on the path.