In its annual crop protection market report, FBN highlights its outlook for pricing and supply trends.
“There’s a lot of uncertainty going into 2026, and you can contrast that to 2025, where tariffs were mostly known going into the spring,” says John Appel, FBN vice president of category management. “2026 is going to be structurally different. We saw that in 2025, at certain points, product prices were at multi-year lows, so there was no more to go down. But now the channel inventory has been largely depleted, we know that structurally these tariffs are going to come into place from a cost perspective.”
The FBN report gives price and supply outlooks for five active ingredients: glyphosate, glufosinate, 2,4-D ester, atrazine, and S-metolachlor. A project now for 10 years, the data used in the report is sourced from growers, FBN supply chain teams, and market reports.
Appel says there’s no “one size fits all” equation to how tariffs will affect crop protection pricing and supply chains as each active ingredient is sourced different. However, with a large quantity of AI coming from China for glyphosate and glufosinate, the pricing for those products is expected to increase with at least a 20% tariff.
“Others, like 2,4-D, you have significant duties on product like that, and on top of that, countervailing and anti-dumping duties that could be up to 170%, depending on the supplier,” he says. “That’s one product we saw significantly through our price data consistently get elevated throughout the year.”
FBN is advocating farmers implement a buy early mindset. Appel says the downstream implication will be suppliers delaying purchases until the product is needed for production to try to mitigate the risk of carrying inventory at unnecessary tariff levels.
“That could create product shortages once we get to springtime,” Appel says. “We look at the fall as the best time to buy to make sure we have very strong offers in the market with strong deals so that farmers can lock in supply and lock in prices for at least the essential products they know they are going to buy,” he says.
FBN focuses this report on herbicides as that product category has demonstrated the fastest growing adoption of e-commerce and online purchasing.
“Farmers are looking at the products that they probably know they’re going to need, and it’s very hard to grow a crop without herbicides,” Appel says. “Some of the other categories, like a fungicide or insecticide, are not really known what the pressure is going to be, so there’s more of a trend to buy some of those products in season as the need arises, especially in a time like this where, you know every dollar’s really going to count.”
