The Succession Gap: How Agricultural Inputs is Quietly Losing a Generation of Talent

For decades, Big Ag has functioned as the training ground for the entire agricultural inputs sector. The senior leadership teams at today's most exciting start-ups and scale-ups, across synthetic and biological crop protection, seeds and traits, and AgTech, are disproportionately staffed by people who cut their teeth at Tier 1 and Tier 2 multinationals. That pipeline has quietly underpinned the sector's growth for a generation. Right now, it's breaking down, and the industry hasn't fully reckoned with what that means.

Big Ag Built the Bench, for Everyone Else

Look at the leadership page of almost any ag inputs start-up or scale-up and the pattern repeats itself. A former commercial lead from a Tier 1 crop protection business. A regulatory affairs veteran who spent fifteen years at a major seed company. An R&D director who learned their craft inside a multinational's discovery pipeline before bringing that expertise to a leaner, faster-moving business.

This wasn't an accident. Big Ag has historically had the scale to train people properly: deep functional expertise, exposure to global regulatory frameworks, discipline around commercial rigour, and the kind of institutional knowledge that only comes from years inside a large, complex organisation. Start-ups and scale-ups don't have the time or resources to build that from scratch. They've relied on Big Ag to do it for them, then recruited the graduates.

The Last Down Cycle Had a Release Valve

The sector has been through consolidation and down cycles before, and cost-cutting at the top of Big Ag is nothing new. What made the previous cycle different was what happened next.

There was buoyancy in the market. Funding was more readily available, start-ups and scale-ups were able to raise, grow, and scale headcount at pace. That created seats, and those seats were filled by exactly the people being displaced from Big Ag's restructuring. It was, in effect, a release valve. People who had spent their careers building deep expertise inside the majors found new homes where they could keep working, keep contributing, and critically, keep passing that knowledge on to the next generation of talent coming up underneath them. The flow of competencies kept moving in the right direction.

This Cycle Doesn't Have the Same Release Valve

The current down cycle looks different. Cost-cutting at the top of Big Ag is continuing, but the landing spots aren't there in the same numbers. Funding into start-ups and scale-ups is tighter, growth plans are more conservative, and headcount expansion has slowed. The result is straightforward: fewer seats for the people who don't survive restructuring in Big Ag to step into.

This isn't a story about individual companies making bad decisions. It's a structural shift in how the two ends of the market interact, and it's changing what happens to talent once it leaves a major.

The Cost: Skills and Knowledge, Lost Piece by Piece

Without that release valve, the sector isn't just losing headcount. It's losing capability. Every experienced professional who leaves the industry entirely, rather than being absorbed into a start-up or scale-up, takes their expertise with them. That's knowledge that isn't being transferred to anyone.

We're seeing people move to neighbouring sectors instead and not coming back. Each departure is small on its own. Collectively, it adds up to a slow erosion of the depth the sector has always relied on, and the funnel isn't being topped up to replace it.

The Funnel Problem Doesn't Stop at the Top

If the exit end of the talent pipeline is under pressure, the entry end is arguably worse. Bringing junior talent into the ag inputs workforce has rarely been harder. Investment into junior hiring and development has pulled back across the sector, AI is changing the shape of entry-level roles before companies have worked out what to do with the change, and the same cost-cutting pressure that's thinning out the top of the market is closing off opportunities at the bottom too.

That matters because the junior pipeline is where the next generation of the leadership benches described earlier gets built. If fewer people are coming in, and fewer experienced people are staying in the sector long enough to mentor them, the compounding effect over the next five to ten years is significant.

Where the Next Generation of Leaders Might Come From

One underused lever is bringing in competencies from outside the sector entirely. Biopharma, animal health, and nutrition all sit close enough to agricultural inputs, in regulatory complexity, commercial structure, and technical rigour, to be genuinely viable talent pools. It isn't a like-for-like transfer. It requires investment in learning and development, a realistic ramp-up period, and a willingness to back people who don't arrive with an ag inputs CV on day one.

That investment is exactly the kind of thing that gets cut in a down cycle, which is part of why this route remains underused. But for companies willing to take it on, it's one of the more reliable ways to keep the funnel topped up while the traditional Big Ag pipeline is constrained.

Where This Leaves the Sector

None of this is a crisis that arrives all at once. It's a slow leak: a few departures here, a few unfilled junior roles there, a few years of experience walking out the door without anywhere to land. The sector has weathered down cycles before because the system had a way of recycling its talent. Right now, that system isn't functioning the way it used to, and the companies that recognise it early, and start building alternative pipelines rather than waiting for the old one to recover, will be the ones with the leadership bench to compete when the market turns.

Barclay Hamp works with businesses across synthetic and biological crop protection, seeds and traits, and AgTech to build leadership teams and talent pipelines across North America, Latin America, and EMEA. If you're thinking about where your next generation of leaders is coming from, we'd welcome the conversation.