As the 2025 harvest season wraps up, many farmers are in precarious financial straits: crop prices are low, interest rates are high, input prices are high, and beneath it all is more uncertainty than normal.
If you’re a small or mid-sized independent ag retailer, you’re no doubt looking for ways to encourage growers to bring you their business for the 2026 buying season. Input financing may provide the leverage you need.
When you’re able to offer an attractive interest rate on financing for crop inputs, it’s a no-brainer for farmers to take out an input financing loan with you rather than try to lock in prices with cash or think about stretching their operating line.
Here’s the best part: it’s not too late to set up an input financing program for the 2026 buying season. Here’s a look at how to launch a program that benefits all parties.
The Industry’s Simplest Input Financing: How it Works
The Growers Edge input financing program is designed specifically for small and mid-sized independent retailers. Because of that, it’s simple and easy to manage by design, with terms that work for smaller retail operations.
The program works like this:
- We handle the back end. This includes tech setup (which includes matching your branding), payment collection, application review, loan processing, and collecting past-due balances, should that become necessary.
- Farmers apply via a simple online form. The typical applicant requires just a few minutes to complete the process.
- Farmers get access to funds within 24 to 48 hours. Funds become available quickly, and customers can use them only at your retail location.
- Payments are due at harvest. Loans are typically offered on a 12-month basis, meaning farmers are required to pay after harvest – when they have the cash on hand.
- Loan balances are revolving. If a customer decides to repay part of their loan before it’s due, they can continue to use their credit line until the date of required payment.
Behind the scenes, loan terms are particularly attractive to independent retailers: ours is a no-recourse offering, meaning you are not responsible for guaranteeing any part of the loans. This feature helps bring input financing within reach of retailers who might not have otherwise been able to consider it.
What’s more, you can choose to buy down interest rates if you’ve got the resources and are interested in creating a more attractive financing offer for your customers. If that’s not feasible, you can also offer input financing without a buydown. Both ways work: among our current input financing customers, about half buy down interest rates and half don’t.
The bottom line: You can offer input financing without any upfront financial investment. The only investment you’ll need is the time it takes to get the program set up. Let’s take a closer look at what that entails.
2 Weeks to Funding: How to Launch
Pull up your calendar and look two weeks out. If you call us today, your customers could have access to our loans as early as then. How do we manage that?
First, setup on your end requires filling out only three documents. In fact, the biggest factor in how quickly you can get your input financing program up and running is how fast you fill out those docs.
Second, we don’t have a cost associated with onboarding. No application fees, no origination fees, no onboarding fees. Again, the only cost is your time, including the time it takes you to learn about the program (which you’re in the process of doing right now!).
But our input financing offering isn’t right for everyone. Let’s take a quick look at a few situations where it’s likely not the best fit.
Who Shouldn’t Use Our Input Financing
We’ve found there are a few use cases where our input financing offering tends to not be the right choice for ag retailers.
1. A product-specific offer yields better ROI
At present, our input financing offering is slightly less customizable than what some of our competitors offer. From a product-specific perspective, we can offer about 90 to 95 percent of what our competitors do.
What we can’t do today is offer product-specific loans.
If you’ve crunched the numbers and determined that offering product-specific input financing (i.e., a seed loan, a fertilizer loan, etc.) delivers a better ROI for your operations than a non-specific loan, you should go with the former.
2. A manufacturer-subsidized offer yields better ROI
Another scenario where our offering may not make sense for you: if a manufacturer-specific offering (e.g., a cash discount and subsidized interest rate buy-down for another input financing offer) leads to better ROI than our offering, go with that one.
3. You don’t have organization-wide buy-in
Finally, we’ve found that in cases where a retailer doesn’t have buy-in across the organization, from the C-Suite through individual agronomist salespeople, the input financing offer may not work.
Our customers are much more successful when people throughout the organization recognize the value of input financing and are eager to put the offer to use. Without that buy-in, results tend to be less compelling.
Example: An Input Financing Program for Fast-Changing Circumstances
So how are ag retailers using our input financing to support their customers?
One retailer approached us after a shakeup at their seed provider. After being a brand dealer for that provider for 20 years, changes made it necessary for the retailer to switch to a new seed brand for the 2026 season.
As they set up their offering, they were shopping around for an input financing offer. Among the offers they considered was a cash discount and subsidized interest buydown with another input financing provider.
But when they ran the numbers, they found that it made more financial sense to combine the brand’s cash discount with our no-recourse input financing offering. We got the program up and running in early November. Within the first two weeks, more than a dozen loan applications had come through, with several other grower conversations in the works.
The retailer was happy to not only find an input financing offer that made financial sense but also to be able to get it up and running so quickly.
Set Yourself Up for Success in 2026
Farmers are already structuring their finances for the 2026 buying season. By having a compelling input financing offering available today, you can help ease their cognitive load. Make this decision easy, and they’ll be able to focus their attention on crop-related matters.
Ready to find out what an input financing program might look like for you? Get in touch with Andy Flores today (andy.fores [at] growersedge.com).
Want to get more information about our offering? Check out “Simplify to Succeed,” the recent webinar we did with CropLife about our input financing product.