Feeding America: Making Sense of the Complex Agricultural Chemical Supply Chain

The agricultural chemical marketplace is very complex. The end customers—growers— require a highly responsive and localized supply chain while suppliers must make purchase and production decisions long before variations in weather, pricing, pestilence, or prevalence of crops are known. The inherent conflict of long lead times and responsiveness is a nearly intractable supply chain problem. In this article, I outline how successful Agri- science suppliers try to optimize supply, demand and other influences to improve these crucial decisions, which ulti- mately impacts how produce is being brought “to the table”.