CropLife Retail Week: Nutrien/Suncor Acquisition, PA Glyphosate Court Case, and Tech Hub Live Keynote Details
June 28, 2024 Eric Sfiligoj and Lara Sowinski discuss a recent business deal involving Nutrien, an award reduction in a glyphosate case, and NASDA’s Ted McKinney.
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*This is a partial and edited transcript:
Eric Sfiligoj: Hello. Welcome to another edition of CropLife Retail Week. I’m Eric Sfiligoj, Editor of CropLife and CropLife Iron. Back again with my fun, fun friend on video, Lara Sowinksi back from of a well-needed vacation. Lara, welcome back to the program.
Lara Sowinski: Yeah, thank you very much. It was a well needed and a very enjoyable vacation.
ES: Let’s go over a little bit of news of the week and month that folks may have missed. Our friends at Nutrien have decided they’re going to acquire Suncor Energy’s agricultural assets and that includes Suncor’s biocontrols products. According to the folks at Nutrien, this is going to help broaden their portfolio and biological options for their customer base. They’re hoping to market these products under their Loveland products line name. But again, they’re not going to be available right away.
The anticipation right now is the products that Suncor has are going to be approved for use sometime during the 2025 calendar year, so they probably won’t be in the ag market until 2026 growing season. So here’s another, long-time established ag company supplier and retailer that’s jumping into the biological space. So again, the more the merrier, I guess.
LS: Right. And a trend that we’ve certainly seen, whereby established companies, as you mentioned, acquiring startups and pure play but biological companies, you know, we’ve seen that with other companies. And so yeah, this is a big development. So congratulations to both Suncor and Nutrien and, and I’m sure this won’t be the last time we report on this will be stay tuned viewers, for a couple of videos from now.
ES: One other thing to share on my front before we’ll kick this over to you. We’ve talked on many videos of how our friends at Bayer have been fighting, over and over again, across the nation in courtrooms, regarding glyphosate, Roundup and, folks that are claiming the use of that product has caused them harm.
And actually, there was one case recently in the state of Pennsylvania where the jury found in favor of the plaintiff against Bayer and awarded the plaintiff $2.25 billion in liability in damages. But we found out in the last week that another court in Pennsylvania decided that that amount was too high, and they reduced it to about $400 million.
But ultimately, Bayer still thinks that given the facts of the case, that, that amount is still too high. So their plan is to appeal to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. So they’re planning to do that here in the month of June. And, we’ll see what happens with that case as we move into the fall. But, yeah, Bayer has got to be happy it was reduced from billions to millions.
But again, they still think millions is too high. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, that’s a sizable, Yeah. From billions to millions to millions. yeah. No, lots of news around that, too. You know, sometimes we don’t always talk about every aspect of that, but there are a lot of cases still, going through the process. it’ll be interesting to see, how these other ones are resolved as well.
And I guess you have some news to share regarding one of the people that will be at Tech Hub Live talking to all the attendees. So, Miss Lara, if you would take it away.
LS: It seems like only yesterday that we started planning for Tech Hub Live, which, you know, truly was just after we ended Tech Hub Live 2023, we, shifted into planning mode for 24. But, here we are at the beginning of July and, you know, weeks away. Days away, really from, from Tech Hub Live. We have the perfect keynote speaker for the times, if you will. I mean, you know, we are reporting, a lot with farm income and, farm bill things that are kind of in play still. And, Ted McKinney is our keynote speaker at Tech Hub Live. Ted will kick off the programing on day one, Tuesday July 30th. I’m sure many of you are familiar with NASDA. That’s the National Association of State Departments of Agriculture. I was not familiar with NASDA, prior to meeting Ted, but the more I learned about Ted and his role at NASDA, I really have to say this is, again, is a perfect person to be presenting our keynote this year.
So, for those of you that don’t know NASDA, the organization was founded in 1916. It is a leader and a problem solver on the nation’s most important, issues. Speaking on behalf of a unified voice from all 50 states and four territories, NASDA is a nonpartizan association working to influence policy that is beneficial for all regions people and environments.
They are committed to representing the interests of everyone in the food supply chain. So Ted’s been in this role. Ted is fantastic. His bio is incredible. He got his start on a farm and still is involved with his family farm in Tipton, Indiana. He was a member of the 4H. He served as the USDA’s first undersecretary for trade and foreign Agricultural affairs. And that was from 2017 to 21. So he’s got international experience. His role at the USDA was leading the development and implementing of trade policy, facilitating foreign market access, access, and promoting opportunities for U.S. So, he was raised on the farm for forage, went to Purdue, has global trade and so and just an all around great guy. And we are really excited to have him as our keynote.
That’s day one. On Day two is is our Women in Ag Tech group. So we have some ambassadors and members of our women in Ag Tech, and that will be a panel discussion. And that will be our keynote on day two.
This is our fourth year for Tech Hub Live. And this program is just awesome. It’s just really is an all star, with panels and all the Fireside chats that you and I have, the, Tech Talks, the roundtables. This year we have two workshops at the conclusion of the program on day two, on Wednesday the 31st — one on drones and one on biocontrols. So, both of them are hot topics. So, go to TechHubLive.com. If you haven’t registered yet, please do. We would love to have you there.
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