Productive but Priced Out: NCGA Report Documents a Yawning Input-Price Gap Between U.S. and Brazilian Farmers
New Kynetec data show American growers paying a 68% premium for corn seed and up to double for some pesticides versus their biggest export rivals — just as a fourth straight year of red ink looms and a glyphosate trade fight boils over
American corn growers have never produced more efficiently, and rarely have they been paid less for it. A report released Wednesday by the National Corn Growers Association, prepared with agricultural data firm Kynetec and published under the pointed title “Productive but Priced Out,” puts hard numbers behind a suspicion that has circulated in farm country for years: U.S. producers are paying substantially more than their Brazilian competitors for the same broad categories of seed and crop protection products.
“The price gouging that is happening for U.S. farmers is even worse than many of us suspected,” said Matt Frostic, the Michigan farmer and NCGA first vice president who chairs the association’s Inputs Task Force, which produced the report after months of work. The timing sharpens the message: U.S. corn farmers are on track to lose money for a fourth consecutive year, with some projections putting average losses as deep as $100 per acre.
What the Report Found
The study compares what U.S. and Brazilian farmers actually paid for seed and crop protection products from 2023 through 2025, using Kynetec’s farm-level price data. It deliberately excludes fertilizer, which NCGA has addressed in separate work. The gaps it documents are not marginal. U.S. prices across all corn seed comparisons averaged a 68% premium over Brazil. Corn insecticide prices averaged 87% higher. Some U.S. herbicide prices approached double Brazilian levels across both corn and soybeans, and some fungicides ran at more than twice the Brazilian price.
Reported U.S. price gaps versus Brazil, 2023–25. Seed and insecticide figures are category averages; herbicide and fungicide gaps were reported for some products.
“U.S. growers are often paying more, and in some cases a lot more, for the same broad categories of inputs, and these are not small differences,” NCGA chief economist Krista Swanson told reporters. “They’re large enough to affect decisions on the farm and the long-term competitiveness of U.S. agriculture.”
Swanson was careful to pre-empt the obvious methodological objections. The report does not claim that every product or every acre is identical between the two countries, she said, and it accounts for the fact that U.S. and Brazilian farmers operate under different rules, markets and production systems. Currency exchange rates explain part of the difference — but not all of it. “It does show that cost gaps are consistent enough and large enough to matter, and that pattern is simply too clear to ignore,” she said.
Why the Gap Exists
The report’s most consequential finding may be structural rather than statistical. Brazilian farmers appear to enjoy far greater access to generic and single-active-ingredient products, while U.S. producers are more often buying premium premixes from the largest global manufacturers. Those premium products may deliver real value, Swanson acknowledged, but when meaningful price gaps persist even among similar products, “it raises questions about transparency, competition, and whether U.S. growers have enough choices.”
That framing matters because it shifts the argument from a complaint about prices to a critique of market structure. If the premium U.S. farmers pay reflected only superior technology or service, the gap would be a business decision. If it reflects a thinner generic market, consolidated distribution and legal barriers that keep lower-cost alternatives out, it becomes a policy problem — which is precisely where NCGA is taking it.
| SIDEBARKynetec: The Numbers Firm Behind the NumbersThe data underpinning NCGA’s report comes from Kynetec, a market research and analytics firm that has quietly become the closest thing global agriculture has to a Nielsen. Founded in the U.K. in 2002 as a specialist researcher for the crop and animal health industries, the company runs farmer panels — branded FarmTrak — that deliver standardized, farm-level data on what growers actually buy and pay across more than 50 countries. It surveys hundreds of thousands of farmers, veterinarians and ag professionals each year and operates from dual headquarters in Newbury, England, and St. Louis, Missouri.Its corporate history reads like a consolidation map of ag market research. Kynetec merged with St. Louis-based Doane Marketing Research in 2007, was absorbed into German research giant GfK in 2009, and re-emerged through a management buyout in 2016. A 2019 merger with Germany’s Kleffmann Group united the industry’s two dominant farmer-panel operations, and in 2021 the company was acquired by Paine Schwartz Partners, a private equity firm that invests exclusively in food and agribusiness.Two recent moves matter directly for this report. Kynetec’s 2022 acquisition of Spark and its 2023 purchase of MQ Solutions made it the leading agribusiness data provider in Brazil, with monthly farmgate price tracking from dealers of crop protection and crop nutrition products. That is precisely the capability a credible U.S.–Brazil price comparison requires: the same firm, using broadly standardized methods, observing transaction-level prices in both countries.The analytical significance cuts in NCGA’s favor. Kynetec’s paying clients are overwhelmingly the input manufacturers themselves — the seed, chemical and animal health companies that subscribe to its panels to track their own market share and pricing. Industry will find it awkward to dismiss findings built on the same commercial data it buys. The caveat runs the other way: Kynetec supplied data, not conclusions. The framing, the product selections compared and the “price gouging” language belong to NCGA, and a data vendor whose revenue depends on manufacturer subscriptions has every incentive to stay out of that fight. |
The Squeeze Behind the Study
The report lands in the middle of the deepest farm profitability crisis since the mid-2010s downturn, and arguably worse. USDA projects the cost to grow an acre of corn will average $917 in 2026, only about 1% below the 2022 record. Over the same window, the season-average corn price has collapsed roughly 37%, from $6.54 per bushel in 2022/23 to expectations around $4.10 for 2025/26 — below most estimates of break-even for a large share of producers.
Production costs have barely retreated from record highs while corn prices have fallen by more than a third.
The asymmetry is the story. When corn prices doubled in 2021–22, input prices rose with them; when corn prices collapsed, input prices did not follow them down. NCGA’s earlier High Production Cost series traced the long arc: since 2007, per-acre seed costs are up 135%, chemicals 117% and fertilizer 74% — increases that have far outrun both the trend in corn prices and general inflation over that period. Fertilizer alone accounts for roughly a third of operating costs, and NCGA’s recent grower surveys warn of price and availability risks extending into 2027.
Long-run growth in the three inputs that dominate corn operating costs.
The Glyphosate Flashpoint
The report’s release doubles as ammunition in an escalating trade fight. Frostic used the rollout to renew NCGA’s condemnation of Bayer’s petition seeking countervailing duties on glyphosate imported from China — a move grower groups argue would raise the price of the most widely used herbicide in American agriculture or choke off generic supply altogether.
“That is almost certainly going to increase our costs for glyphosate, or potentially cut off imported generic products entirely,” Frostic said. “So, not only are we paying a premium for our products, those same companies are now reducing our access to generic products thanks to U.S. trade laws. If this trend continues, input providers will force their own customers out of business.”
Bayer did not immediately respond to the report. The company said last week that its domestic glyphosate business as currently structured is not sustainable and that China has engaged in “predatory trade practices and subsidized imports of glyphosate.” The collision is now squarely joined: the input industry’s case for trade protection rests on preserving domestic manufacturing capacity, while growers’ case against it rests on the very price gaps this report documents.
What NCGA Is Asking For
The association is calling for heightened transparency from input providers and for pricing that reflects “the realities of the current economic environment.” Beyond moral suasion, Frostic outlined two policy tracks: leveling the competitive playing field with Brazil — including on ethanol market access — and a legislative remedy to the countervailing duty process that would require U.S. trade authorities to weigh the public interest, including farmers’ interests as consumers of the products at issue, before imposing duties. That is a significant ask; current CVD law gives the Commerce Department and International Trade Commission no such mandate, and amending it would draw resistance from domestic manufacturers well beyond agriculture.
The report also lands as Washington shows signs of engaging on the input-cost file more broadly: USDA announced a new $500 million fertilizer grant program earlier this month aimed at expanding domestic capacity.
Analysis: What to Watch
Three things elevate this report above the usual advocacy fare.
First, the data source: Kynetec’s farm-level panel data is the same commercial intelligence the input industry itself buys, which makes the findings harder to dismiss as cherry-picked.
Second, the framing: by conceding upfront that production systems differ and that currency explains part of the gap, NCGA has inoculated the study against the easiest rebuttals and forced the debate onto competition and transparency grounds.
Third, the target: this is the first major NCGA input-cost product aimed at seed and crop protection rather than fertilizer, putting the major seed and chemical manufacturers — rather than the fertilizer industry — in the spotlight.
The counterarguments deserve airing. U.S. seed prices embed trait packages, licensing and dealer service models that differ from Brazil’s; premium premixes can reduce application trips and resistance risk; and Brazil’s regulatory regime approves generics faster, a difference growers might not want in all its dimensions. Manufacturers will also note that comparing list or transaction prices across two radically different distribution systems is inherently imprecise. None of that, however, comfortably explains away gaps of 68% to more than 100% sustained across three years.
The near-term tell will be the glyphosate CVD proceeding — whether Commerce and the ITC move toward preliminary duties, and whether NCGA can convert grower anger into legislative language attaching a public-interest test to trade remedy law. Watch, too, whether input manufacturers respond commercially: in past downturns, seed companies quietly deepened discount programs when acreage decisions hung in the balance. With growers staring at a fourth year of losses and USDA projecting no meaningful cost relief for 2026, the pressure NCGA is applying has a clear objective — make the 2027 input book cheaper than the 2026 one. Whether the tools are shame, legislation or competition, that is the metric by which this report will ultimately be judged.
