Episode 7: How fair and competitive is the business of supplying agricultural inputs?
Contributors in this episode
Chris Fellows
The Farming Forum
Florian Ritzmann
FutureFarm
“Ultimately, it is the consumer who pays for this. Any regulator looking at this needs to view it through that lens and yes, farmers are at a disadvantage by not having transparency and effective competition for certain products in the input space. But ultimately it will all feed through the price of the product on the shelf. And that is clearly something that we don’t need more of right now.”
Florian Ritzmann
Welcome to episode seven of the FutureFarm podcast today. With me in the studio or shall we call it a sweltering hot office at the end of August 22. I have Chris Fellows. Chris is here today to discuss the state of competition and agricultural inputs. Food does not grow by itself. If you're a farmer, you know this, if you're not, it may not be so obvious. Because to run a farm, whether it's arable, horticultural, or livestock, farmers need to buy lots of things - principally fuel, crop protection – also called chemicals, fertiliser, seed and animal feed. Plus a few other things. And just like anything else, these inputs are getting dramatically more expensive. So making sure that the market is working efficiently is critically important. Do farmers have effective choice when it comes to selecting the supplies they need to grow our food? Is the pricing of these products transparent? Is it unbundled from other services and is the pricing up front? Are the billing and credit terms reasonable? Important questions indeed. Chris Fellows lives at the coalface of inputs retailing across essentially all of these categories. And not only this, Chris Fellows also co owns The Farming Forum. It's also called TFF, which is the place to go if you want to know what farmers are saying, and experiencing.
So we know he has his ear to the ground. And let's get started. Chris, would you mind telling us a little bit about yourself before we get into it?
Chris Fellows
Mine was probably an unusual way into agriculture. I started actually working in software after qualifying in meteorology. So apart from being qualified to be on the telly to do your weather forecasts, I then decided that I didn't want to be on the telly or do podcasts or DISH TV. But you know, here I am. That software actually worked in the food industry, though. So I did a lot of my early work working with software companies on creating efficiency in their actual downward supply chain to where I am now working for like bakeries Kerry Gold Marks and Spencers right the way through retail to food production. So it was certainly very interesting for me. After about 15 years, I actually decided that farming had to be the way to go. Inspired by friends like Clive Bailey. Seeing how he lived his life, I thought this farming is brilliant. We definitely got to do some farming. And I bought a farm down in Cornwall. I'll be honest, it wasn't all about food production for me. Cornish farms as most people who farm in Cornwall will know are a lot about tourism. We diversified heavily. But we did produce pigs, chicken, and we grew all our own grass and straw. All that food was processed, though. We processed it ourselves, taking it right through from production through and we sold everything on the farm. We made good money out of the pig. In fact, I was horrified when I found out what a pig actually sold for at market. So I was actually very naive about the whole buying process. Because I was selling for such high values. I didn't really care about costs as much. And probably as a small farmer, as long as I was making money. I was I was happy.
Florian Ritzmann
So you went from weather forecasting to farming, which is probably, you’re right an unusual route. But nevertheless, it does make sense given that weather is one of the big, big factors in deciding your farm’s going. Okay, so thank you for that. Why don't we jump right into it? The topic of agricultural inputs. I think to set the scene, a lot of our listeners are not farmers. It might make sense to simply explain in a little bit of detail, what does a farmer need to run their farm? What kind of farmers are there out there? And what do they need to produce food for us?
Chris Fellows
It really depends on the type and scale of farmer. So if we look at an average livestock farmer, which like I was an average of probably pretty bad, you need feed, you need vet meds, you need fuel, and then you will need some degree of crop protection products. In fairness, I didn't need a lot of crop protection products because I was organic. So that made life pretty simple for me. And then we're into the feed section, but that's fairly normal for a livestock farm. If we're starting to talk about bigger arable farms, things change. Obviously no vet meds on most of those farms, but significantly more fuel and crop protection products. Then also your basics to grow anything.
Florian Ritzmann
Yeah, fertiliser.
Absolutely. Okay. So it depends on what you farm. But there's some common denominator products, fuel being the one. And crop protection, which is tech speak for the chemicals really, the glyphosate as well is what you need to grow the food we eat. And what sort of, if there is an average, - what would you say is the average spend in the UK for a farmer? To on, you know, across livestock and arable. What does it take in terms of money for you to run your farm?
Chris Fellows
Well, that's a world of difference, if I'm honest. From the likes of Dyson farms, which will be spending probably millions down to a smaller farm, probably worth us looking at some averages, but it certainly could be anything around 100 pound a hectare.
Florian Ritzmann
And your average holding size in this country is 100, 200 hectares, you would say, round about there?
Chris Fellows
I think technically, it's quite a bit smaller from the Defra figures. But they include a lot of small holders with only say 15 to 20 acres who aren't farming any scale,
Florian Ritzmann
okay, but it's in the 10s of 1000s. It doesn't really matter what kind of farmer you are. So no matter who you are, and where you farm and what you farm, you're going to have to reach into your pocket in order to grow food.
Chris Fellows
Yeah, I mean farming, fundamentally farmers as whole are going to spend about 900 million this year on crop protection products.
Florian Ritzmann
Right, just on crop protection, okay. Now, when it comes to where they go, traditionally, where do farmers go to buy these products? Where are the typical sources and again, happy to generalize, this is not an academic exercise.
Chris Fellows
So for any farmer at scale, there are five big sources. They are called, collectively the Distributors within farming. You might say there are six, including Zantra as well who came onto the market later than some of the others. But certainly the mainstays are Agrii, Hutchinson, Agrovista.
Florian Ritzmann
And they will sell you everything you need to run your farm or do they specialise in things like crop protection. And I imagine it's mainly around crop protection?
Chris Fellows
In terms of crop protection, yes, they can sell you pretty much everything. They'll all have slight variances, they will use certain brands rather than other brand. But fundamentally, they can get you every single product you need. They work with all the big producers, which are the companies we will all know from even people who listen to execs.
Florian Ritzmann
So farmers don't go direct to Bayer or BASF to buy their stuff, they go through a distributor when it comes to products like crop protection. Is that the same in fact with fertiliser, or do farmers go directly to the manufacturer? Or is there a similar scene of distributors there in that area?
Chris Fellows
It is similar. The distinct difference probably is more to do with how the product is moved around. With crop protection, a lot more is held in warehouses, whereas with fertiliser a lot more is delivered directly. So everyone is more a broker in that situation.
Florian Ritzmann
So the other two categories worth mentioning, I suppose there are three really, as seeds. For seeds again, do you go through a distributor? Is it more or less the same? Or do you go directly to your Syngentas?
Chris Fellows
No, you typically wouldn't go to a KWS or LimaGrain or Syngenta to buy your seed. It would always be through a third party.
Florian Ritzmann
Okay, so we've established really that in this value chain, there are distributors who sit between the farmer and the manufacturer of the product. Perhaps the one exception might be fuel, where it seems like there is quite a bit of going direct to the fuel supplier that you know. You're nodding so I guess you agree. And perhaps machinery could be another one where you know who sold you that tractor, so you got to go to them to get your spare parts
Chris Fellows
But even the machinery market has evolved over the last 10 years. Just like it has for anyone who's bought a car. You know, the days are going where you just go to your local dealer to get the price that's true for car buying, and it's becoming the same for machinery. So it has evolved. What I would say is crop protection hasn't evolved massively unless you're a small scale farmer and it is very, very different compared to your scale. If a farmer wants to buy one count of glyphosate use, there's a million places you can go and get them. You can get it from eBay, Amazon, you can get it from a multitude of websites. But if you want 20 cans of glyphosate the world definitely does change.
Florian Ritzmann
Okay, I mean, there's I guess one more player in this value chain worth noting, which is the agricultural buying groups. We will probably speak about them a little bit later. Ultimately, they are co-ops and they mediate or negotiate on behalf of the farmer and tend to be a farmer owned. But I think we can speak about their role in a little while.
Okay, so we've kind of painted the scene. Farmers tend to go through middlemen to buy the products they need to run their farms. We've established that they spend, well, depending on how big they are, but they all spend quite a lot in order to grow the food that we eat. So, these are substantial amounts we're talking about. Now, with your sort of TFF hat on, I know you know exactly what's going on on your forum and sort of what the trends are, when it comes to input buying. What are farmers, if you could generalize, what are farmers actually saying about the state of competition on your forum?
Chris Fellows
I think to a degree farmers are actually relatively happy with the situation. I probably shouldn't go as far as saying blissful ignorance. But there is truth in it. A lot of farmers are buying very well and can buy very simply. And in any walk of life, buying well involves your time. And you have to offset the amount of time you'll spend buying versus efficiency of buying through one route. I don't think any of us, in any walk of life, would argue with the fact that if we only buy from one source, whether that's Tesco’s, or your local co-op, you'll know you're not always getting the best price. But do you really want to go to Tesco’s for some products, then to Morrison's Brothers and then Asda, then your butcher, and then your baker and then your grocer? You may know the best way to get your prices, but you may be happy with your way of buying.
Florian Ritzmann
So is there any. I'm going to have to dig here. Is there any sort of reference to anti-competitive practices or you say they're happy but perhaps blissfully happy? Is there something they should be saying on your forum that is worth putting into this podcast?
Chris Fellows
One of the things we've looked at and seen, there are certain cases, and there's been a number of them documented on the forum, where there's been overcharging. Basically, whether that's an institutional practice, or just mistakes, or just happens on local farms or happens because it can, it certainly has. And that's the same in any walk of life. There are a million different products to buy. And there's a million different prices that they can be at. What's become clear with the internet, though is people just talk more about prices. So, prices have become more transparent. Farmers record their prices on the forum of what they're buying for certain products all the time. They may not say where they get them from, or exactly how many they bought, which is pretty critical information if you want, to know to give a price relevance, but they do talk about it. So it means that if you are a farmer who is online, talking to a lot of other farmers, whether that's on Twitter or Facebook, The Farming Forum, you will get a feel for where price is naturally set. Of course, this has become a lot more difficult this year. Crop Protection prices have been very static for years and the likes of glyphosate have actually fallen. In the last year and a half, we've seen this sudden spike. Ag inflation is now a very real thing. And although prices haven't gone up like they have for fuel, they have certainly gone up and crop protection would have been, say a 750 pounds million pound market a few years ago, it's now probably going to be 900 this year. Only thing that obviously adjusts that is it just seasonal use. And dry years, you just need less fungicides, typically speaking, so you don't always spend the same amount every year. So farmers are becoming more self aware in this market. But it's up to an individual farmer to do that. You've got to understand there are six big players in the market and multitude smaller players. So if you want the best prices, you've got to shop around. And that is again the same in any walk of life.
Florian Ritzmann
Okay, so we've come to a point in the discussion here where, let's take a step away from the farmer. So we've established that the farmer is you know - smart farmers shop around although it was always sort of a question of, you know, how much shopping around is beneficial for you in terms of the time invested in it. And they use your forum to kind of help each other in a way, to kind of say here, over here you can perhaps get it a little bit cheaper. Could you make an argument - now you and I, I guess we have to come clean here. We work together on farm deals. We've been running together this online price input buying group for 18 months, I believe now? And is it worth looking at, you know, take the farmer on one side and look at, you know, our side of the equation, which is us trying to, as a business or any buying group really as a business trying to source product. What is you know, this is a bit of a thorny topic, but it's got to be said, what is our view really, or your view, and I’ll second you, What is our view on competition in the marketplace? And let's start with this, look at this category by category. So let's start with fuel. We launched with fuel straightaway. That was our first product. What's your take on competition and how it works in the agricultural fuel market?
Chris Fellows
Agriculture is definitely very traditional. There's a small number of players, but fuel was a good place for us to start. Because fundamentally, there's a lot more players in the market. It's regionally based and prices are very dynamic already. They're very much based on where you live. Obviously, fuel is a very expensive product to move around. And therefore it was less contentious. It was our ideal place. Plus, every farmer needs fuel, whether it's 100 litres a year, or 100,000 litres a year. So, it was a perfect place for us to build our membership and offer someone a system that's just easy - where you don't have to ring three people a day to get a price. You just open your phone, and it gives you your prices on that day.
Florian Ritzmann
Yeah, I totally second that though where I would draw a slight caveat is, after the outbreak of the war, and all the volatility that came with it and the concern that I registered certainly was how suppliers, and I'm not strictly speaking about our panel, I'm talking about behaviour across the board, essentially withdrew from the market. And you know, as a farmer, if you're dependent on fuel, essentially, not having access to a source like Farm Deals to get a quote meant you'd have to ring in, and the process from there would be suboptimal in terms of transparency, from what I've heard, being that suppliers would not quote you a price but take your order and quote the price on the day of delivery, which clearly, in my mind pose problems. Because obviously, if that price wasn't right for you, you know, with delivery date, at times being at that time being up to two weeks, you would have been almost forced to take the offer no matter what it is. So, but in general, I think you are right, that these are extreme times. I do see our farmers enjoy using, particularly the mobile app, to get daily prices and buy when the fuel price is right for them. And that's certainly functionality that we'll be only building more and more of with price alerts and predictions, etc. coming later this year. So that's fuel. Now let's look perhaps at the opposite spectrum. Let's look at crop protection. What was our experience here, which I suppose is reflected amongst any start up in this space, and they will be going through more or less the same thing, trying to build a service that transparently shows you the product, the price and the time when you can have it at wholesale prices. So what would we say was our lesson here?
Chris Fellows
Crop Protection is definitely more difficult to move into. Fundamentally, if we didn't have an app, we would have supply of all products by one of the distributors. I don't think there's any other buying groups in the country that can't get the products they want. The fact that we can't, is because of the way we distribute our prices, which I personally find a little bit amusing if I'm honest. Because everyone has a price. It doesn't matter what buying group you belong to, you just probably have to ring up to get it. Which just seems like a very inefficient way to work for me - that every day a farmer has to ring up and find out his price on glyphosate or graze on Pro Bowl or any of the products. The concept of them being able to just open a website and open their phone and find out their specific price, and I don't mean everybody's pricing, I mean the price that is valid for them and the farms they own just seem sensible. We don't tell them other people’s prices, we don't tell them the prices in East Anglia, the prices if they buy for bigger farmers who are getting better prices (those prices are specifically built for them) with tiering in mind. That just seems really simple and easy. It also makes sure that every product we sell, and every time we sell a product, it is a profitable product for the company supplying that product, it means that there's always the right amount built in to deliver to the right person in the right volume. It's a very honest price. So given we're doing exactly what all the other buying groups are, you'd think it would be very easy for us to get supply, especially being the fourth or fifth biggest in the UK now. But actually, the opposite is true. There's still a very reluctance, just because of the way we distribute information. And that's probably the oddest thing. But obviously, with such a small field to work in, it means that you, you are beholden to people, and then scale becomes important. And it probably is the thing about understanding, it's the time it will take and you see things changing all the time. And certainly in the immunity market, they've changed significantly where you're supplying products to say smallholders or golf courses or football pitches. There are a multitude of websites out there. One of which, in fact, is owned and run by Agra VISTA. So they are happy with website systems in certain markets, but they still resist that that system in in ours. And even then, you know, if you had an agri Vista website, would it be the only place you went and bought from? People do tend to go towards marketplaces for these because you've got multiple systems. And I think the same would be true if BASF actually said, we're going to sell direct, you know, you'd have to then go to BASF, because BASF aren't going to list Syngenta as products. So naturally, you see a marketplace as the right evolution of this market however it works. But whether timing dictates when that becomes the case is the key question here. How long will it take to happen?
Florian Ritzmann
Yeah, and I think I'd like to add here that my background is in price comparison, so I've built many price comparison engines and always approach this from an angle of how do we break this commodity down into something that is easily presentable for the user to select and buy. And I came into agriculture, more or less, with that same mindset. And what surprises me is that even though, you know, farmers grow and sell commodities, and it takes commodities to do that, that everything that a farmer buys is essentially a staple commodity, they are sold as if they were specialized products. And that I find curious. And I think what you've hinted at is the way we are feeling, that is the reluctance of certain distributors to engage with us, which we think we will overcome with scale and innovation. Because ultimately, I think it is, you know, having worked in price comparison, where I heard many times how this can't be done, not in our space, and then just watching it happen. I think it is wrong to assume that the same will not happen in what is essentially a commodity space. There is nothing that I've seen in agriculture that can't and shouldn't be broken down into its constituent parts, presented online and sold. That brings me on to the next point, because some of the distributors will say haha, Mr. Ritzmann, you're wrong here. And that's because we offer advice. And I think that is probably one of the things that is also holding the market back, at least in my view. So perhaps could you explain to our listeners what the problem, not the problem, or what the complex is between the selling of products that you need to apply to your crop and the dispensation of advice, agronomic advice.
Chris Fellows
So we have referred to them as distribution so far. And I think they refer to themselves as distribution as well. But in reality, these are advice companies. We're talking about crop protection products, I tend not to ever use the word, pesticide or chemical personally. But fundamentally, that is what they are. And you need a level of knowledge to be able to decide what to apply and when. Some farmers themselves are bases qualified, so they can do their own agronomy, which is what it's called. However, many people use either an independent or an agronomist from one of the big five distributors. They are fundamentally advice companies more than anything else. In terms of distribution, you wouldn't put them in the same bracket as DPD or Hermes. They are fundamentally about giving farmers the right advice to grow the right products as well as possible and this is probably where it becomes very difficult because it's easy to grow good crop, and it's pretty easy to grow a bad crop. Sometimes that's all about the weather. But also, you do need good advice. So, they are critical in this, in this whole part of growing food, and most farmers will need one. And even if they don't need one themselves, they'll need a sounding board. So, this ability to know what to put on, and most importantly, when to put it on is absolutely critical to growing food.
Florian Ritzmann
Okay, so I've got a dog at home. And when the dog gets sick, we take the dog to the vet, and the vet charges x. And then they'll charge us again, for giving us the medicine that the dog needs. But we could also just take the prescription and buy that same product, probably for half the price somewhere else. Is that what you're talking about?
Chris Fellows
Yes, you can, it depends on how you do your agronomy
Florian Ritzmann
Well, my point is that the vet is essentially taking a margin on the medicine, and perhaps giving you a subsidised price on the service or the other way around that you pay extra for the service and they give you a subsidised price on the but they're blending the margin of both. And that is what potentially is holding, the lack of separation between advice and product is what's perhaps holding us back a little bit and making distributors reluctant to engage with us? Is that a fair summary?
Chris Fellows
It is, although it goes further than that. In your example, you can take your animal to the vet, in fact, they'll come to your house and look at your agronomy, and they will tell you if anything's wrong with it for free. And if there is something wrong, they'll sell you something to fix that. But their services will be bundled in with the price of the product they sell you. So that's when it becomes almost impossible to actually differentiate between what is a good price or what isn't, as a farmer if you wish, you just wouldn't know. It's very convenient for you. Because all you're doing is getting a bill for the products you're buying. But the products you're buying also include a service that's being provided. And it's called serviced agronomy as a service. It's easy, it's simple. But in terms of knowing exactly what you're paying for what, it can be very muddy. Now there are also amazing advantages to serviced agronomy. You come first with everything. So, in the recent years where we struggled with glyphosate, just to collect glyphosate, if you're a serviced agronomy customer, you were getting first pickings, because you pay for their services all bundled in. And I can see that with that sort of model, it becomes very difficult then when you have websites putting prices of products on for what we call supply customers, because you can't compare the two, well, you could compare the two if you're putting your calculator to use at one side - we know roughly that agronomy costs between 50 and 20 pound a hectare. So, if you know you farm X amount of hectares per year, and you know exactly what you spend on crop protection any year, you could even work it out and back it out. But to know at any point in time, whether that price is good for you or bad for you, it is really quite difficult. It becomes then a yearly exercise, which is good for you.
Florian Ritzmann
Right, which is kind of like when you're trying to run a farm and grow a crop, and you're kind of fixated on the price of what you're going to get for the product that you grow that can be very, very tricky. You're asking a farm to do more than just farming.
Chris Fellows
Yeah, and it's a trigger for a lot of farmers that they may well be treated very, very fairly and be getting very, very good prices when you factor in the price they'd have to pay for agronomy separately. But suddenly they go online and see a price and then they ring up their agronomist and say why am I paying 15 pound a can more right now. And the reality is because you're receiving the service. But, how much you're going to use that service in any year? There's so many assumptions in this model, you've got to calculate. You can only look at it on a yearly basis. You can't look at it any spot price. But there are spot prices everywhere. Whether it's on our site, or whether they're listed in farm compare, whether they're listed farmers saying or whether farmers down the pub or at the market, they're all talking about prices. Just online, they’re a lot more real.
Florian Ritzmann
Okay, so we've covered crop protection. We've talked about fuel and anything in between. We've got things like seeds, machinery, fertiliser, are they're literally in between those two when it comes to this type of behaviour? I haven't got the sense that we struggled as much to establish ourselves in those categories. But I'd like your view on that.
Chris Fellows
No, I think prices are much more openly discussed in those and you don't have this complication of bundled in advice. And farmers really have a feel and there are specialist agronomy companies that will say to you, our aim is to reduce your fertiliser usage and we will save you costs by working through a whole scheme of things and therefore, you’ll need less fertiliser. But as a product that is either liquid or solid, it does keep. So, if you can, you could carry it over. And, again, it's all down to the weather, whether you use fertiliser, any point of time, it's all down to when, it's all about applying the right product at the right time.
Florian Ritzmann
Okay, so we haven't got that same issue, if you want to call it that of bundling a device with the selling of product in those categories or much less so. Definitely less. Okay. So if we wanted to compare agriculture as an industry to other industries. I mean, again, my reference point is, you know, all the price comparison tools that I helped build around energy and credit cards and insurance products, but you have a, you know, as an ex weatherman, you might have a completely different view on that. If you were to compare the level of competition in this space and the level of transparency and all of the things that would consider as competition. How does it compare to other industries that you've worked in? In terms of, you know, competitive ranking. And again, it's not scientific here, what we're saying.
Chris Fellows
It's by far the worst industry I've ever worked in. There are just too few players in the market really, and the players that are in the market are very big. And that is not to say, you know, for any given product that prices are particularly unfair, it just means there is a level of control. And it's quite simple when you're one of those big five, you don't want the others to come in. No one wanted Zantra to exist. When they started, Murray just did a very, very good job of being persistent and getting it off the ground and taking it to another level. And he became that next one most, most definitely. But it wouldn't have been easy for him to start. And I'm sure a lot of people told him back in the day, it wouldn't work. I'm sure he has a list of those names, everyone who told him it wouldn't work. And he probably reminds them of it significantly now. So new players in this market aren't impossible. But what we know from history is it will take time. And also, it's what do you want to be in this market? Do you want to be a buying group or distributor? The interesting thing is we came into it as a buying group, because there are hundreds of buying groups. We all felt it should be relatively simple as a buying group to become another buying group. That wasn't the case. Certainly hasn't been Yes, actually, it's been easy on certain products, difficult on others. Does that mean we need to become a distributor to become a buying group? I don't think any of us wants to be a distributor?
Florian Ritzmann
Well, certainly what is for sure is that the internet is just allowing, but it's almost creating this blurring of lines and sort of reshuffling the deck. And yeah, I mean, it just does seem obvious that some of the business models that we've just talked about, I understand why the executives of those businesses could see the threat to that business model. And I mean, again, looking at my background in price comparison, from a regulatory point of view, there are models to deal with this. And the best example I can think of is energy where the generation of energy, the distribution of energy, and the retailing of energy was essentially separated from each other. And if the companies weren’t broken up, they were essentially forced to build Chinese walls, so that they couldn't shift the margin within the business and prevent suppliers from entering the market. So now every supplier essentially buys wholesale on the same market. And I think that's certainly, you know, if a regulator, if you're listening, I think when it comes to some of these markets, I think that's kind of overdue. Kind of a hard look. And the reason why I say that, and I'd like your view on that, kind of like almost like a conclusion here is, who is actually ultimately paying the price of any uncompetitive behaviour here? What is your view on that? If no one pays the price, then hey, it's fine. But clearly, somebody must be paying the price. So who is that party or parties?
Chris Fellows
We live in a model that is called dynamic pricing, fundamentally in agriculture, where farmers are fundamentally charged at different price based on who they are, and some legitimate reasons of where they are and how much they buy. But dynamic pricing as an economic model has one aim and one aim only. That is to extract more money out of a given market. It is not there for the benefit of the people buying the products. It is there for the benefit of people selling. So, we do need clearer pricing. The French a couple of years ago actually did separate the two processes, you cannot supply advice and product, which meant all the prices you then saw for products were the actual prices. They didn't have any services bundled into them. So, it has been done in other EU European countries. And personally, I think it should happen in the UK, just to make things simpler and clearer and transparent. You've got confused people and, confused for a number of reasons. And anything that can be done to make that simpler, just seems sensible to me. We're not saying we don't need agronomists. We'll still need exactly the same number of agronomists, we’ll still need them to walk exactly the same amount of land. And we'll still need them to give exactly the same amount of advice. What we're just saying is that that advice should be paid for separately to the products that they advise you to buy.
Florian Ritzmann
That's right. So, to go back to my sick dog use case, essentially just be given the prescription and then go out and find the product. Preferably on Farmdeals, guys, I hope you're listening. I mean, I would add that, I think, you know, I mentioned the cost of living crisis at the outset. And I think ultimately, it is the consumer who pays for this. And I think that is ultimately, you know, any regulator looking at this needs to view it through that lens and yes, farmers are at a disadvantage by not having transparency and effective competition for certain products in the input space. But ultimately it will all feed through the price of the product on the shelf. And that is clearly something that we don't need more of right now. Sitting here, looking, staring ahead at what could be a really difficult winter to come with price rises really across everything. So, and again, I think I feel slightly vindicated, because today in the news, I read that the grain traders, the four major international grain traders that between them control 70% of the grain trade, of the International grain trade, have announced record profits at a time when we're talking about 100 catastrophes. Which kind of like, doesn't seem to make any sense to me. Well, it makes sense, but it doesn't feel right. Okay, so I guess, to conclude, my final question to you would be, what do you think should happen? And what could farmers do to help themselves in this while we are building Farm Deals, and surely bring all the products that ultimately they will need onto our shelves?
Chris Fellows
Well, that's where we get to it. This is fundamentally an issue for farmers to work on themselves. The information is out there. So, you know exactly what you're spending, what you should be spending, what other farmers are spending. There are a multitude of tools for it. We have one on the Farming Court Forum called Farm Compare, where you can submit your prices and get information back on what other anonymous prices are in your area and countrywide. So, it becomes a farmers responsibility to look, whether that's on a daily, weekly, monthly or yearly basis, but to actually sit down for at least a few hours a year, and go through everything they've bought, and work out how competitive it is. And if you do that, you just have better control. And it's going to be important on everything you buy. So just fundamentally looking at whether it's insurance, or car insurance, or warranties, or whether you should buy a new tractor, whether your finance agreements are up to date, you need to look at everything. But the information is there for crop protection. You can do this. So, if you take time, just having the Farm Deals app means you can look at any price in any time. You don't need to actually ask anyone.
Florian Ritzmann
Correct! Yep, Farm Deals is certainly a very easy and unique tool to get some transparency in this market. And it's only going to get better from here, with filters now around the corner to be released next week. Very excited about that. But yeah, I think farmers have shown throughout the ages really, British farmers know what to do. And I think, you know, our numbers show it. I mean, we've got 2000 users now, members on the platform. So, we must be doing something right. Right, I think I'd like to call it a wrap here because I think we've covered all the major issues that we see without going into too much thorny detail. I'd like to thank you very much, Chris, for joining us, again, in this really sweltering office. And well I'm sure I'll have you back on a little podcast show later, say in a year's time, and we can have another chat about what we've achieved in the meantime. That would probably be a good milestone. How far we've gotten, probably live with AgroVista and Zantra. But yeah, thank you very much for listening. This was the FutureFarm podcast. Thank you.
