The agricultural retail market can feel impossible right now. Farmers are struggling, almost nobody is willing to take a chance on unfamiliar products right now, and farm input providers are doing what they can to keep customers.
Too often, though, that looks like a pricing discount that locks them into a cycle of future discounts.
It’s a tough market, but it’s not hopeless. There are ways to win customers, increase your cross-sell success, win more acres, and ensure customers are happy with you come harvest time.
A winner for many small and mid-sized farm input providers right now: the outcome guarantee. Here, we’ll walk you through how an outcome guarantee (like our own Crop Plan Warranty) can be your ticket to stronger relationships and better risk management in 2026 and beyond.
How it Works: Bundle, Warranty, Advise
Outcome guarantees are flexible tools. We’ve seen farm input providers use them to drive adoption of new products, encourage the use of more sustainable inputs, and more. In the context of growing season 2026, we’re going to focus on how to use an assurance program to advise customers and earn the acre.
Here’s how you can do it:
- Create a product bundle that includes a whole-acre prescription.
- Include at least one higher-margin product in the bundle.
- Attach a cash-back assurance program to the entire bundle. Any farmer that buys the whole-acre prescription and implements it as directed can receive a cash payout if performance falls short.
There are a few keys to making this work.
First, you’ve got to choose the right product bundle. Typically, retailers bundle one or two products customers tend to buy from them (say, fertilizer and fungicide) with one or two they don’t (say, seed). Customers are of course free to purchase any of the products unbundled, but they’re only eligible for the assurance program if they buy the full bundle.
Second, you’ve got to make sure your sales team is on board with how to position the bundle and assurance program. It’s important that the agronomists on the floor understand who the bundle can benefit and how they benefit so that everyone understands how and when it’s the right offer for customers.
Go deeper: How Agricultural Sales Leaders Can Inspire Change
That’s what farm input providers focus on. Meanwhile, on the back end, the fintech company managing the logistics of your assurance program (like us) can handle the financial and technical components.
Use Outcome Guarantees to Drive Adoption, Prospect, and Cross-Sell
In the current economic moment, farm input providers are finding outcome guarantees most useful to drive adoption of specific products, bring in new customers, and cross-sell. Let’s take a quick look at how each tends to play out.
Drive adoption of specific products: Farmers are more price-conscious than ever right now and therefore more likely to shop around for their inputs. Bundling higher-margin products with those farmers are already buying from you – and attaching an assurance program to the entire bundle – can help you move those harder-to-sell products.
This tends to work well with new products that farmers might be reluctant to try without an assurance program. See below for tips on how retailers can collaborate with manufacturers to make this offer even more attractive to farmers.
Prospect: Farming is always uncertain, but the uncertainty farmers face today is unusually high. An assurance program removes some of that uncertainty: even if the product doesn’t perform as expected, farmers still get paid. When you highlight the risk reduction aspect of an assurance program, you can bring new customers in the door.
Cross-sell: The assurance program is a compelling offer for many farmers looking to minimize uncertainty. By tying it to a multi-product bundle, you create a win-win: you win the whole acre by cross selling additional products, and your customers enjoy greater peace of mind about the ROI of their input investments.
Develop Partnerships to Improve Margins
In any situation, Crop Plan Warranty is a zero-risk adoption-driving tactic for farm input providers: you only pay for the assurance program if a customer purchases the bundle you define. And even then, the cost of the assurance program is lower than your margin on the sale.
But there’s also a way to make the terms of a Crop Plan Warranty even more favorable, both to input providers and to the farmers they serve. This involves partnering: for example, retailers might want to partner with a manufacturer of one product in the bundle.
Here’s how we’ve seen it work:
- A retailer defines a full-acre prescription bundle to back with an assurance program.
- The retailer contacts the manufacturer of one product in the bundle – typically one that’s newer to the market or that farmers are less comfortable purchasing.
- The manufacturer agrees to contribute to the upfront cost of the assurance program, thus offsetting some of the retailer’s initial investment and / or some of the price premium farmers pay for the warrantied bundle.
As you can guess, this also benefits the manufacturer: by attaching an outcome guarantee to their product, they increase farmer trust and therefore drive adoption.
Other Assurance Program Opportunities for Ag Retailers
Outcome guarantees are effective in part because small and mid-sized farm input providers can get them off the ground quickly. There’s likely still time to set one up for this year’s growing season. But outcome guarantees based on actual production history aren’t the only option for improving margins and managing risk in this difficult time.
Side by side warranties let you create an assurance program for a product for which you have hard comparative yield data. These are very cost-effective (again, when you have the data).
Another option is bespoke warranties. With these, we can help you build a custom assurance program for a specific scenario, including warranties that aren’t tied to yields. For more details, please reach out.
As embedded finance options for the ag industry keep improving, retailers can expect to see more assurance program options for supporting their operations. Retailers who familiarize themselves with this financial tool now will be the best positioned to use and adapt it to minimize risk across their operations in the years ahead.