We are Lavoro. Retailer in Latin America. We provide valuable services to farmers across the region, advising our clients on key decisions all year long. We work to empower small and medium-sized farmers so they can adopt breakthrough technology, innovation that transforms the land and nourishes our global population sustainably. The heart and soul of Lavoro is our world-class team of technical sales representatives or agronomists. Our agronomists meet with well over 50,000 farmers every season in the fields and at our retail locations. We provide a wide portfolio of seeds, crop protection, fertilizers, biologics, and other specialty products to serve farmers' needs. Our agronomists are trusted advisors to farmers. At Lavoro, we operate at the forefront of agriculture and technology. Our vertically integrated specialty ag inputs business, Crop Care, is a rapidly growing supplier of biologics and specialty fertilizers in Brazil.
At Crop Care, we use technology to help farmers nourish and protect crops from disease, pests and weeds with a growing selection of natural and sustainable products. We are a scaled, profitable, growing business with significant headroom for years to come. We are now taking the next step in our evolution by partnering with The Production Board. TPB was founded by Dave Friedberg, who pioneered the ag tech sector by founding The Climate Corporation. TPB builds and invests in exciting businesses at the very frontiers of science and technology. Together, we will work to bring the best solutions to farmers so they can farm with confidence.
Thank you so much for being here after such a long time. This is a very special day for Lavoro, as you know, it's our first investor analyst day, and we're very happy that you took the time to be here, either here in New York or also virtually. My name is Daniel Fisberg. I'm a managing director at Patria Investments. I lead our investments in the agribusiness space, and I'm also a board member at Lavoro. Just before we dive into Lavoro and the partnership with The Production Board, just very quickly on Patria. We are a leading alternative asset manager in Latin America. We manage today north of $27 billion, and the firm was founded more than 30 years ago.
We have offices around the world, more than 10 today with 600 employees, and we do have a lot of experience in private equity, infrastructure, real estate, credit, and so on. Private equity today represents around a third of everything we do at Patria, and Lavoro is part of our Fund Five. We started this thesis or this investment back in 2016, and our first investment was in 2017. This has been really a very successful case, a remarkable case for us, and we are very happy with the journey that the company went through. It was a really incredible combination of strong organic and inorganic growth over the past 5-6 years.
When we do look ahead, we still see a mosaic of opportunities for this company, either being more M&As, introducing new products, new technology, new services, entering new regions, new markets, et cetera, opening new stores. Very excited with what's ahead for Lavoro. Really to take the company to this next level, to this next stage, we are very excited with the partnership with The Production Board. You will hear a lot about it today. We are also very excited about the opportunity to list Lavoro in the U.S. to really fund all these opportunities that we are envisioning for Lavoro. Hope you'll find this day entertaining, interactive.
We'll try our best and to really kick off the day, I'll ask my colleague, the CEO and founder of The Production Board, Dave, to guide you through the rest of the day. Thank you so much.
All right. Good afternoon. Thank you. Thank you all for joining us this afternoon. Please read the legal disclaimers and risk factors at your convenience. You know, I'm thrilled to be joined by the management team from Lavoro here today. I think you'll understand by the end of the session why we at The Production Board are so excited about the partnership with Lavoro, and the significant investment that we're making in the business. We're gonna cover over the next two hours, I think a really great overview that provides a little bit more depth and clarity than we've shared previously on the business. I'm gonna share some high-level points on what I think frame up a tremendous macro thesis for this business that extends beyond what I had shared in the previous presentation.
Gui and the rest of the management team will walk through each of the elements that we believe will drive growth, success, and future potential opportunities for the business, as well as highlighting one of the partnerships that's been forged between Lavoro and one of The Production Board's portfolio businesses, Pattern Ag. Rob Hranac from Pattern Ag will be sharing an overview of that product and a demo. We'll be doing a deeper dive on the financial model build, and have an opportunity for Q&A. Following Q&A, we have a few breakout rooms, and so we can spend some more time together before the cocktail hour. As mentioned, I'm gonna highlight why I think this opportunity in Latin American agriculture is so unique at this moment in time.
I've highlighted in our previous presentation this slide, and I think that most folks in this room are familiar with this broad set of theses that there is you know a high level of instability in global food supply chains as a result of climate change and the lockdowns associated with COVID and supply chain disruptions that have arisen, and more recently the conflict in Ukraine. You know, I think the WASDE report recently showed that we're in kind of ten-year lows in terms of stock ratios globally. Latin America has so much production potential. You know, I think we've got a couple of the key ratios that we'll be walking through here in a moment.
Given its geopolitical isolation, we think that the region really will be called upon to produce more calories in a more meaningful and sustainable way in the years and decades ahead. The small to medium farmer represents about two-thirds of the acreage in the region, and the way to drive behavioral change and increased productivity ultimately has to happen with boots on the ground, with the ag retailer, with the trusted advisor that helps inform each of those growers what to buy and how to use those products to improve their productivity and their sustainability. That's why we are so excited about Lavoro. Just taking a step back once again, Latin American agriculture, we think, is at an inflection point in terms of growth. Our thesis is that there are three major drivers for this.
The first is one that I'll highlight, which I think most folks who cover the market in this room are intimately familiar with, which is the emerging technologies that are really transforming agriculture and global productivity. The second is why there's a unique demographic profile with the Latin American farmer. And finally is where we think there's an opportunity to have a much more integrated service offering in this region than we see elsewhere. Starting with the technology trends, I think it goes without saying, but we are seeing, you know, call it a renaissance in technology, multiple types of technologies being applied to the agricultural markets that are really transforming our, as a species, ability to produce more with less.
We're seeing this come from three key pillars of technology, digital, genome engineering, and biologicals, each of which have the potential to improve yield per acre at a lower cost and do it in a more sustainable way. I'm gonna just take a moment on each one of them. We sold The Climate Corporation to Monsanto in 2013, and I think a large part of the success that we had in building that business to that point, and in the years that followed, was the ubiquity of cellular access in the Midwest, particularly in the Midwest of the U.S., that arose with the proliferation of 3G networks beginning around 2006, 2007, 2008.
It was really around 2008 that we saw mobile internet adoption climb in rural areas in the U.S., if you think about it, farmers are not knowledge workers. They did not grow up using desktop computers in an office. Their first access to the Internet really happened when cell phone networks reached into those rural areas, and they had their first cell phone. You know, there are a set of technology trends that are driven by Moore's Law. The cost of technology declines by roughly 50% every 18 months. One of which is that we're seeing ubiquitous cellular access, so the ability to connect to the internet from nearly anywhere on the earth. The second is that the ability to sense the physical world has been transformed in the last two decades.
The cost of little sensors that can be used to pick up everything from weather data to farm equipment data, to cell phone data, to scouting imagery, the cost of those sensors has declined so precipitously that they too are basically ubiquitous. The cost of transmitting the data from those sensors, processing that data, and building predictive models using all of that data has declined with Moore's Law. As a result, we see tremendous ability for software to make highly predictive, agronomic recommendations to growers. This is really gonna transform every crop input market. What seed to buy, what fertilizers to use, how much to use, when to apply them.
There's a spectrum and a continuum that we've been seeing realized in the markets over the past decade and a half that we think is really just in its nascent stages in Latin America. All of the technology stack exists to do this today. It's estimated that north of 80% of combines and planters in the United States have a planting monitor or yield monitor in the cab. That data is being utilized to drive these agronomic models and make personalized recommendations back to growers. Those recommendations can be delivered wirelessly, and almost all of the farm equipment, as many of you know, is already equipped to handle variable rate technology. Prescription maps delivered into the cab, driving the equipment, and ultimately delivering higher yield with less inputs. The second key technology pillar is in genomics.
Plant breeding, you know, goes back to the dawn of agriculture, and historically, plant breeding was done using phenotyping, looking at a plant when you do a cross and choosing which plants to progress in your breeding cycle. As DNA sequencing costs declined faster than Moore's Law over the past 20 years, what used to cost $100 million now costs $100. We've now had the ability over the last several years, or the last decade or so, to use molecular breeding or marker-assisted breeding. We're seeing a revolution in seed technology, where instead of measuring the phenotype, we're measuring the genotype to advance breeding programs.
More recently, in the last 10 years, with the advent of CRISPR and other precision gene editing technologies, we're seeing very specific edits being made that can actually do a much more engineered advancement of breeding in a non-transgenic way. I think this really is a very important trend because the potential of seed and the yield potential of seed is accelerating. When yield potential accelerates, we see obviously farmers spend more per acre and adopt that technology in an accelerated way. The third key technology category is biologics. Because of that low cost of DNA sequencing, as we mentioned prior, we've seen an ability to understand what's going on in the soil, in the microbial world that was never possible or visible to us before. Rob from Pattern Ag will share more on this in a moment.
It has really allowed us to take the concept of biologics, which is the idea of using microbes or the proteins produced by microbes as an alternative to traditional synthetic crop chemistry and make it a reality. Because historically, the products were selected ad hoc, randomly, field trials would fail, and there would be a long development cycle with not a lot of success. Today, we're able to see much more success coming out of biologics programs. As a result, the efficacy of these products and the ROI for farmers is quite significant across many categories. We're seeing that in terms of the growth of the biologics market, particularly in Brazil, which will be highlighted here, in a moment. These three key technology trends are underscoring the opportunity for improved ag productivity and improved sustainability in agriculture for the years and decades ahead.
We think that Latin American farmers, and particularly Brazilian farmers, which I'm going to highlight details on in a moment here, are uniquely poised to adopt these technologies and benefit from them. As a result, we believe this will translate into more dollars spent and the benefit will ultimately accrue to a business like Lavoro. A couple of key statistics that we think are highly relevant when looking at this market. You know, in the United States, it's estimated that roughly 39% of acres are rented. You know, when you get into corn and soybeans in the Midwest, this number is actually higher. In Brazil, the rented acres is just under 9%. The operating margin, according to the USDA, for the average U.S. farmer is 4.3%.
I believe for corn and beans, it's between 6% and 8% on average. You compare that to the report from Rabobank of 46% average operating margin for a Brazilian farmer. It really speaks to the reason that we've seen such a tremendous growth curve in the region as Brazilian farmers have more profitable dollars to reinvest in new technology to expand their operation and improve their production cycle. There's more room to grow and to accelerate that growth. That's because we might argue the Brazilian farmer is under-levered and underprotected. The crop insurance market in Brazil only represents about 21% of the growers, compared to 74% in the United States.
As the crop insurance market grows and matures, we would expect, like we have seen around the world, the adoption of a safety net mechanism will increase the spend per acre of the farmer as they're willing to take on more risk and make a bigger investment. Similarly, in the credit to production ratio. This ratio is the total credit outstanding divided by the total agricultural production value in that market. The credit to production ratio in the United States is 1.15x, compared to 0.34x in Brazil. Again, as the credit markets mature in Brazil, we would expect those farmers to have more capital to continue to invest in their ag inputs and to drive greater productivity out of their farms.
Demographically, we think that Brazilian farmers are also more likely to adopt new technology or to accelerate technology adoption. The average age of a Brazilian farmer is 40 years old, compared to 57.5 years old in the United States. Very internet-native and very digitally native, much more so than perhaps the U.S. farmer. They're already adopting genetically modified seed technology at the same rate as the U.S., which is near ubiquity. There's opportunity that we think will arise in accelerated growth just to get to parity with the U.S. market. Biopesticides, which you'll hear a little bit more about today in terms of the portfolio of solutions that Lavoro's Crop Care division offers, is only a 3% adoption rate in Brazil, compared to 12% in the United States as a percent of the total crop protection market.
Variable rate technology, we talked a little bit about the tools that digital enables and the equipment that has now become standard with variable rate technology. It's still only utilized at an under 10% rate in Brazil, compared to 70% in the U.S. When we sold Climate Corp to Monsanto in 2013, I think this number in the U.S. was closer to what we see in Brazil today. We really do expect this inflection point to kind of kick in in the next couple of years. Finally, soil testing. We talk a little bit about those digital tools. Those digital tools and the decisions that farmers are making on what to buy, what products to use and how to use them requires data.
One of the key pieces of data required in agriculture is a measurement of the soil. What is the chemistry? How much nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, and other micronutrients are in that soil? Nearly 98% of U.S. farmers have done soil testing at least once in the prior five years. We don't know what that number is fully in Brazil. There's a tremendous opportunity because we think once Brazilian farmers start to run soil testing, it becomes a great services business like we see in the U.S. It also provides a mechanism for increasing productivity and increasing spend per acre. I'll highlight one more point that I think presents an opportunity over the longer term.
Those are all the, you know, digital technology and the demographic profile that I think is really gonna drive adoption and acceleration of investment cycles by farmers in Brazil. I think there's also another opportunity beyond that, and that is to offer integrated services. In the United States, the average farmer has roughly five or more trusted advisors, as they would call them. They go to their crop insurance agent to get their crop insurance. They go to their loan officer to get their credit to get their loans. They go to their agronomist at their retail or co-op to get recommendations about what to buy and what products to use. They go to their equipment dealer to buy their equipment, and they, you know, go to a merchandiser or co-op or an elevator to sell their grain.
Each of these different advisors arose in the United States because of the way that the market evolved starting in the 1930s with the federal government's role in providing debt and insurance to support the farming communities. We think that the Brazilian and the Latin American market may not evolve in the same way, and that it is more likely to evolve into a much more integrated service offering, where you could see many of those services being offered by one or a fewer number of unified service providers that doesn't necessarily mean that an ag retailer necessarily needs to only offer agronomic advice, but may also offer things like financial services, credit, crop insurance, and so on.
You'll hear more about those opportunities from the Lavoro team as we go through the sessions here today. You know, I think one way to kind of think about, you know, how much upside there is across each of those categories is to look at these relative ratios. When we look at the total harvested acreage in Brazil versus the United States, it's roughly 86% of the acres. Ag production, however, is only 44% of U.S. ag production. Remember, this is a region that potentially has generally two seasons and sometimes more per year. Theoretically, we should see a ratio that's greater than parity between these two countries. The crop input market is only 54%. The ag equipment market's only 43%.
I think the bottom two really highlight a tremendous financial services opportunity in the region, which is the credit and crop insurance markets at 15% and 14%, relatively speaking, respectively speaking. Again, I wanna bring this up because these markets should mature. They should ultimately reach parity, and in some cases, we believe exceed that of the U.S. market. We think that there's an opportunity to be a singular service provider to help accelerate this change. We think that the market is already realizing this outcome. You know, you'll hear more from the Lavoro team today. I'll restate a slide that we shared in our original investor deck and explain, you know, why we're so excited about Lavoro. The macro obviously speaks for itself. We believe in this thesis.
We believe in the opportunity for Brazil and Latin American agriculture. Lavoro is the number one ag input retailer in Brazil, servicing over 50,000 farmers with nearly 900 RTVs across nearly 200 stores. They're the market leader, but only have 10% market share. Tremendous opportunity for further consolidation, and you'll hear from the team today why they are, in our opinion, the best in terms of identifying targets, executing against those opportunities, integrating them, and driving value. And then you'll hear more about the Crop Care business, which, as we mentioned before, we think represents the next evolution in crop inputs. This is a business that's a market leader in a growing market, a market that we believe is at an inflection point.
It's rapidly growing, it's profitable, and we're paying, we think, a very reasonable multiple, as part of this transaction, to become shareholders in the company. We'll review the comparables on the transaction multiple, towards the end. Really excited, for you to hear more from the management team and really appreciate everyone taking the time. I know it's not often that you're asked to come and do an in-person investor day or analyst day. We've all kinda moved to Zoom. We're really appreciative of your time, and thank you guys for being here. Ruy?
Thanks, Dave, and welcome everybody. Thanks for being here today. I'm Ruy Cunha, CEO of Lavoro. I think I've met some of you guys, but for those who I haven't met, I've been working in Lavoro since 2018. At that time, Lavoro was a small retailer with a big vision. Prior to Lavoro, I worked for AGCO, an ag machinery global company. I've been really dedicated to farming in LatAm for the last 12 years. Over that decade, I could see the amazing growth in production and growing importance of Latin America in the global ag scenario.
As Dave was mentioning, we strongly believe in the potential of this region, not only because of what already happened, but what we see as that can happen in the near future. Brazil is a leading force in the agriculture of LatAm, so I would like to start talking about Brazil. If you just take a look on the production of some of the main commodities in Brazil, so we're talking soy and corn. You see that over the last decade, Brazil has experienced a significant growth in the production. We see over the last decade, something around 70% growth in the production of soy and corn. You also see a higher penetration of corn as the second season becomes more prevalent, so farmers are producing more.
Brazil already represents 9% of global production of corn and 35% of global production of soybean. We see that happening because of higher investments, as Dave mentioned, higher investments that farmers are making in their property. As they make higher investments, they become more productive, and they're investing in technology. Just as an example, technology in seeds. Better seeds have enabled us to produce two, sometimes three crops per year. With that, farmers are getting more income per acre in their land. With more income per land, they're also investing more in their property, in more technology, and this creates a positive momentum. Brazil also has an amazing capacity to expand area.
If you just take the current pasture land and we expand the agricultural land, we have an opportunity of almost 116 million acres of potential expansion of farmland just by entering in pasture land. This is equivalent to the harvest area in Argentina today, so it's a pretty big opportunity that we see over the next years. Now, we expect that a significant part of this growth will come from a very specific segment, which is the mid and small-sized farmers. Why is that? For a few reasons. First, because this is a very relevant segment. They represent 65% of the agricultural land. We're talking about farmers that have between 250 and 25,000 acres. They are not only relevant, but they also have an important technology gap.
If you see the production and the gains in productivity over the last years, you see that the large farmer, they increase more production than the mid-size and small size farmer. This trend is actually changing now. As we mentioned, they are making more money and they're investing more. They have a big technology gap to close, but now they have the right conditions to do so. They have higher income, the equipment in Brazil, the fleet of equipment in Brazil has been updated over the last years, and also the access to technology is becoming easier and cheaper as infrastructure improves. A lot of the growth will come from this particular segment in the market. Retailers are the critical link in the value chain in this market.
If you take all the inputs that flow that move from manufacturers to farmers, 41% of this flow comes through retailers. Retailers are basically dedicated to serve small and mid-sized farmers. Their importance in the value chain is obvious, and the retailer plays a very important role in the sense that the retailer is the trusted advisor to farmers. Differently from big farmers, small and mid-sized farmers, they have retailer as their trusted local advisor who helps them to take better agronomic decisions. This relationship is based on trust and is based on the historical between retailers and farmers. Now, the retail segment is passing through an interesting movement, and it's a wave of consolidation. For us to understand this wave of consolidation, let's first understand how the retail came to be in Brazil in the first place.
Retailers, the typical small mom-and-pop retailer was formed by former multinational employees. We're talking about salespeople that came from Bayer, Syngenta, BASF, that they were incentivized by those companies to leave, open a channel to help them access a specific part of the market that was not being well-served because the cost to serve was way too high. Then they became a channel that was almost exclusive to this brand. I would become a Bayer channel or a BASF channel. They have a limited portfolio and also limited size. Usually they had one store. Now, as they grew, they started to add new products to their portfolio. They started to add fertilizers and then also seeds. Then they also started to open up new stores and putting together a small network of retailers.
This marks the second part of the transformation. We have expansion in the portfolio, a small expansion in area, but the way to serve the client hasn't fundamentally changed. It's just doing the same thing in more stores. Now comes the third part. Now, farmers need to increase yield, and they are actually increasing yield, and they are investing more, and they demand better products, and they demand higher technology, and they want more from the retailers. In order to offer better services, retailers need to have scale. To have scale, retailers need to have capital. This is why players like Lavoro, well-capitalized strategic investors are gaining share, creating this new breed of retailers, a large-size independent retailer, which is now being the consolidation movement in this market.
If you see, in 2016, the top ten companies in Brazil, they had 22% of the market, and now these top ten retailers in Brazil, they have almost 40%. The movement is already happening, even though we still see a lot of potential to continue doing this consolidation. Now, looking at the market, we see three main models of retailers. The first one is the traditional small mom-and-pop retailer. Those guys, I already mentioned, their main characteristics. I think one thing that is interesting to say is that, according to ANDAV, which is the main retailer association in Brazil, 89% of their associates, retailers are still owned by their original founder. Almost 90% of those companies are still owned by the original founder.
Three out of four of each one of these, in three out of four in this segment, they are open to M&A discussions. They already understood that in order to prevail in this market, scale will be critical. Now, we have a second type of retailer, which is the retail arms of ag input suppliers. Retail arms of ag input suppliers is more a recent phenomenon that a few manufacturers or a few suppliers have adopted this model. In our understanding, it was basically to solve some specific regional access problems that they had. They'll have a problem with access in a specific part of the market, and then they will start opening their own retail stores. We do see this movement as having challenges to expand, though.
First, because it's not the priority of those manufacturers, and second, because by definition, they are not independent. It's almost like having a drugstore that only sells Pfizer products. It limits the capacity of this model to expand. You have the third model, which is the scaled, fully independent retailers. Those guys have a more complete portfolio. They offer a broader set of services. They're starting to invest in technology, and they are, in our case at least, also accelerating the M&As. We believe that this model will be the prevalent model in the future, and Lavoro is the leading player in this segment. Let's understand a little bit more about this new model. Farming is a complex operation.
Farmers put their net worth at stake every year, and they do so in a complex environment, so they have to take 70-80 critical decisions in every crop season. Those decisions affect their productivity, affect their income, and they count with the retailer as a trusted advisor to help them to take the better decisions. Now, not all retailers are well-equipped to make these recommendations. If you take a good part of the retailer in Brazil, they have the experience, they have the sales team trained in that specific region, but that's it. They don't have too many additional tools. This is what is changing in the new model, and I'm gonna explain a little bit more how.
If you look what makes Lavoro's sales guys effective, the first thing is those guys are well-trained to do what they do, right? The vast majority of them, they have an agronomy degree from a university. If they came from the university, they will stay training for two or three years before becoming a full-fledged RTV. We also have cases in which we hire sales guys from the market, or they come with an acquisition, but in any case, they will be passing through the Lavoro training program. We also provide better tools to those sales guys, and this includes CRM tools. This includes digital tools like our app, that we're gonna talk a little bit more about this in a minute.
Better training, better technology tools, and we're also helping them by using specialized sales teams for more specific categories, more technical categories. Categories, Rachel. The more technical categories and talking about seeds and specialty fertilizers, for instance. Lavoro has dedicated teams for those highly technical sales. These guys, they go along with the RTV, who has the relationship, to make sure that the recommendation on those categories that make a higher impact in their productivity, those decisions are done properly. In addition, talking about the responsibilities, they usually serve 20-40 clients. They live in the region that they operate, so they know the region and they know the farmer. They establish this relationship. They spend the majority of their time on the farm. Sales are done on the farm. Sales are not done in the stores.
Finally, looking at the incentives alignment, they have fixed salary and then variable pay as well. Variable pay reflects their ability to meet their goals that are usually related to revenues, gross margins, and cash flow metrics. The variable compensation is approximately 1% of what they sell. We strongly believe that we have a well-prepared team, well-equipped, well-organized, and with the right incentives. Now that we mentioned about sales guys, let's talk about the stores. Really, Lavoro's retail stores, and I would say most of the retail stores, they serve as a warehousing, logistics, and administrative hub. Those stores are there to mainly support the RTVs which are on the field, to help them fulfill the orders whenever needed. The inventory sits on the stores, and whenever we need, we can do this fast delivery.
CapEx for opening up a new store is not that big, so we're talking about 100K, $100,000 per store, and basically we're talking this to invest in security, IT infrastructure, and a few remodelations. It's really a CapEx-light model. Lavoro has built a massive presence with almost 200 stores covering approximately 120 million acres in LatAm. In this map, I'll leave for a moment for you guys to see, Lavoro has a presence in Colombia and Brazil. We also have an operation in Uruguay, and we have recently announced an entry in Chile and Peru. With that, Lavoro is actually quickly spreading its presence throughout Latin America. I would like to summarize this part by talking about the business model that we believe is a winning business model.
We have created over the last 5 to 6 years, a large scale platform, and it's also a resilient platform. It's resilient because we have all this geographic and client diversification. The scale also allow us to create better services, to leverage operational efficiency, and to continue investing in our M&A capabilities, which are unique in this market. It also allow us to invest in Crop Care, which is our vertical business. Crop Care, in turn, also help us to grow sales by providing Lavoro exclusive products and also improving our margins as Crop Care, as you'll see in a moment, has very accretive margins. With this additional money, we can also continue to invest in R&D, so we have a strong pipeline of products also for the next years. This will also allow us to invest in technology to improve the effectiveness of our sales team.
Technology also help us to collect data for the almost 53,000 clients that we have, and this data can be transformed into valuable information to provide new services for farmers. In summary, the more we grow and we continue doing this operation, the higher is the strategic advantage that Lavoro has. Now, to talk more about each one of the components of Lavoro's flywheel, we're gonna have a session to discuss each one of these components, and I'd like to start with the M&A component. I would like to call here our Head of M&A, Luis Spinardi, to talk about how Lavoro advances in the M&A area. Thank you.
Hello, everyone. I'm Luis Spinardi, Head of M&A, and I'm here to talk about our M&A opportunities. We've seen a very intensive consolidation process in the sector over the past five years. As you can see here, there were more than 60 transactions. Despite all of the consolidation and acquisition, we still believe there is plenty room. Since the top ten players still have less than 40% of the market. In this very competitive environment, we've been the most successful company with 24 acquisitions so far. We have our unique strategy. We are focused on our proprietary deal flow. We are verticalizing our operations in high product margins, such as biological and specialty fertilizers. Last, we are the only player who is focusing in Latin America.
Why we're being so successful in M&A, we have some capabilities that give us a strong advantage, and I'll talk about it. First, we have a dedicated team. We have 15 people working from two countries, Brazil and Colombia, fully dedicated to M&A. Probably this is the largest M&A team in agriculture in Latin America. Second, our proprietary deal flow. We don't rely on banks or financial advisors to build our pipeline. Over the past five years, we contact more than 200 companies. It's important to mention that we build relationship with those companies. We not just contact them because sometimes it's not the right time for us to acquire.
Maybe the company is not ready, maybe it's not a region that we want to be present. When the moment is right, we are the first one that the company they call. We have a couple of examples. The company that we monitor for 2-3 years before we close. Third, our associative approach. We build a reputation as a friendly acquirer. That's because we have flexibility in the way we structure our acquisitions. We can buy either 100% of the company or we can buy a majority stake and leave the sellers with a stake in the business. This flexibility give us an edge for us because the good companies, they also believe in the market, but they don't have the structure and the tools to grab this growth opportunities.
That's why they partner with us. The majority of our acquisitions, we kept the sellers with a stake in the business and our interests were aligned. Fourth, the structured process. I'll come back later and talk about our investment process. Fifth, the disciplined execution, and here I want to highlight our discipline in terms of valuation. Since we can rely on our proprietary deal flow, we don't need to be part of the auctions, so we are very disciplined in valuation. Last, the integration expertise. We have a dedicated team, and I'll talk more about it later. To give an example of the differentiators of our M&A team, I bring here a case of one of our acquisitions.
We show this as one acquisition, but in fact, we acquired five companies at the same time. This is the case of Disampar. We first contact the company in 2017. It was a group of five companies that operate independently. It was considered a group because it had one common shareholder. It had a controlling stake in one of the company and a minority stake in the other four. He tried to build a mini Lavoro by merging all the companies. He did not make because the structure, the shareholder structure was very complex. There were 18 legal entities and more than 30 shareholders. In June 2020, we reached an agreement to buy all the five companies altogether.
It was not an easy due diligence, but since we have a large team, we were able to conduct the five due diligence at the same time. In April 2021, we closed this deal. As soon as we closed this deal, we negotiate with suppliers to match Lavoro's price and conditions, so we gain a few points in margin. In the end, we turned those five companies, who operate independently in our big business units in Paraná, and now they have around $200 million in revenue. In the case of Disampar and all our acquisitions, we follow this five-step process. First one is screening, where we first contact the company. We spend a lot of the time on the ground traveling, opening doors.
Once we engage with the company, we move what we call due diligence alert, when we get all the relevant information about the company, especially financials. We spend a lot of time on financials. Once we complete our analysis, we discuss with the management team and the board to get an approval for a non-binding offer, which is the MOU, number three. Once we reach an agreement with the company, we start our due diligence. We have a very comprehensive due diligence process covering all areas, financial, legal, environment, IT, grants, et cetera. If there is no red flag in due diligence, we start to build our business plan.
In this phase, we have all the functional areas of Lavoro involved in the process, so we can map all the synergies in the acquisition. Here we have our final approval with the management team and board to go ahead with the acquisition. Currently, we have more than 80 active targets in our pipeline, out of which we have 7 MOUs. We have 4 companies in due diligence, and we have 3 companies that we are building the business plan. If everything goes well, we should announce more acquisitions in the coming months. In the same way, we have a very structured investment process.
We have very structured integration process where we want to capture synergies as soon as possible, but we want to take care not to cause any disruption in the company. The first phase is takeover. It's our 9-day span where we focus on taking control of the operation. We put our team there. We sit on the cash. The second phase is growth and synergy. We start to execute our growth strategy, such as opening new stores. At the same time, we start to collect synergies by centralizing procurement. Finally, the full business integration, where we can capture all the synergies. Since we have, like, a lot of recent acquisitions, we think there is a lot of value to unlock once we can fully integrate all those businesses.
Now I want to talk more about our M&A strategy, starting with Brazil. Our main goal, first, is to be present in all relevant states in Brazil. As Ruy mentioned, we are covering 100 million acres. In all the states we are, they represent three-quarters of the area in Brazil. For the near future, we are targeting to expand Rio Grande do Sul and Bahia, which is a new market for us. Once we are in the state, we try to strengthen our position by increasing our footprint. I'll give you an example here with the acquisition of a company in Minas Gerais. Minas Gerais was the seventh largest state in Brazil in terms of area.
We entered there in 2020 with the acquisition of Produttiva in the northwest of the state. After the acquisition of Produttiva, which was the light blue pin here in the northwest of the country, we acquired AgroZap, which is the yellow blue pin here, which was based in a region called Triângulo Mineiro. This is a very strategic region for us because it represents 45% of the area of the state. After these acquisitions, we were the second-largest retailer in Minas. Lastly, the acquisition of Floema. Floema was also based in the same region as AgroZap, Triângulo Mineiro, but in a complementary footprint.
As you can see by the balls here, which represent the sales of each company, Floema had a very strong position in the north of the region, while AgroZap was very strong in the south. With the three acquisitions, we became the number one retailer in Minas Gerais. This was our playbook for Minas, but we have the same playbook for each state. We know what the regions we want to be, and we have it very clear in our strategy. Now, as I said, we want to be a Latin American player. Why? Because we see here as a $5 billion market opportunity. In the same way in Brazil, we want to be present in all relevant states.
Here in LatAm, we want to be present in all relevant countries. In Colombia, where we've been since 2017, we've already done four acquisitions, and we have a solid presence there. We are the leading company. Now we want to do the same with Chile, Peru. As we mentioned, we just announced acquisition of NS Agro that allow us to enter in those country, which is very interesting because they represent about BRL 2 billion market. In the same way we did in Colombia and Brazil, we want to do in Chile and Peru by expanding our footprint with new acquisitions in complementary regions. Besides Chile and Peru, Paraguay is also in our top priorities.
It's a very interesting country, a BRL 2 billion market, and it's interesting because it has a lot of similarities to Brazil. The main crop is soybean and corn, and it has a lot of similarities with the states close to Paraguay, such as Paraná and Mato Grosso do Sul. That's why we want to enter in the next few months. Finally, I want to highlight our strategy for Crop Care, which is our private label that Marcos is gonna talk to you in a few minutes. In biologicals, we are targeting companies with a good portfolio of products and R&D power, so we can add to Agrobiológica portfolio. In special fertilizers, we are looking for companies with a portfolio of high-end fertilizers and adjuvants, so we can add to União Agro portfolio.
In both of these segments, our rationale is to cross-sell with our distribution business and expand our margin. Just to conclude here, I just want to say that we have a proven track record in M&A with 24 acquisitions. We have a very strong pipeline, and I do believe that we are well positioned to keep leading the M&A arena of this sector. Now I call Marcos to give you about Crop Care.
Hello, everyone, my name is Marcos. I'm the head of strategy for Crop Care. First, what's Crop Care? This is Lavoro's private label. We sell not only, but mainly to Lavoro, and we operate in three main divisions. First, biologicals. What are biologicals, right? These are microorganisms that are applied on the seeds, or the soil or even the plant, and it can be either biopesticides or biofertilizers. Biopesticide basically will attack the weed or the insect. Biofertilizer will promote better soil health and increase the uptake of NPK. Specialty fertilizers, these are products that will supply nutrient deficiencies to the plant. For example, we're talking about cobalt, we're talking about molybdenum. For products, we have foliar and soil fertilizer. We're also talking about adjuvants. Agrochemicals.
Here we're talking about post-patent generic agrochemicals that will offer cost-competitive products to Lavoro. Fungicides, herbicides and insecticides. Now let me talk a little bit deeper about our companies. Agrobiológica, our biologicals company, we're talking here about high growth, high margin products. We have specialty fertilizers, União Agro . Basically, this is a one-stop-shop model for this product category. We sell cost-effective to premium high growth and also high margin products. I'm gonna detail that for you. Also have post-patent agrochemicals with Perterra, partnering with the right suppliers in Asia and offering alternative complementary products to Lavoro. In 2022, our revenue was nearly $8 million, and we aim to reach almost $250 million in 2024. Before I go into the details of our strategy and numbers, let me show this benchmark case, Nutrien.
Nutrien has this private label, Loveland, and Loveland operates in seeds, in fertilizers, pesticides. What's interesting about Loveland is that the results they're achieving, right? You can see really high growth and high margin products. Basically, Crop Care has a similar strategy. Ultimately, what we're gonna do is offer our high margin products to increase Lavoro's margin. How are we going to do that? In 2022, we said we have a gross profit of BRL 34 million, and we're gonna achieve BRL 111 million gross profit by 2024. We have three main growth pillars. Agrobiológica, investing heavily on new product development, innovation. We also have investing in operational capacity.
Second, União Agro with a wider portfolio with almost 100 products, and we keep putting more products in the pipeline and also increasing the speed that we are selling to Lavoro. Third main pillar, Perterra, with more relationships with key Asian suppliers to offer similar or better price for agrochemicals, generic agrochemicals to Lavoro. Now let me talk a little bit deeper about biologicals. What are the main benefits that we have, right? So first, the insects, the weeds, the pests, they're getting more and more used to the traditional agrochemicals. With that, they're creating a resistance. When you introduce biologicals, you introduce a new element. Just by doing that, you have a tendency to have better results. Second, biologicals, they create better soil health. We have more microorganisms inside the soil and the plant.
You have a longer root in general, and with that, you accumulate more water inside that soil. The plant becomes healthier, and it's less subject to new diseases and pests, so higher productivity. Sustainability. I could mention a couple of points here, but one is, there is definitely a lower carbon emission with biologicals. For instance, in Brazil, for soybean harvest, you have to spray biologicals twice during the entire harvest for soybean. While with agrochemicals, you have to spray 6-7 times. You save the plastic packages, you also save on fuel with the sprayers. I can also mention safety aspects of biologicals. I think you all know that, but if you spray biologicals in a fruit, you can eat it. It's harmless to humans. Talking about the market.
The market today is $400 million in Brazil, but the growth rate is really significant. The last two years' growth rate was 44%. Why is that? We had the adoption of the row crops only recently, in the last five years. Soybean and corn are starting to choose more heavily the biologicals. With that, you see the penetration. By penetration, David mentioned that. By penetration, I mean the total biological market divided by the total agrochemical market, you see only 3% in Brazil, while you have 12% in U.S. That's why we are so optimistic about this market and this company. Now the growth pillars for Agrobiológica. First, let's maximize our sales through this great access that is Lavoro, 200 stores for us.
Second, I told you before, now I'm going to emphasize, we have an intensive focus on new product development. We have a team of 14 people in R&D, in marketing that intensively communicates with our sales representatives, get insights from the farmers of what are the new pesticides that we can offer to cope with their problems. We also have a well-established new product development process. We know the market size and the market growth of each active ingredient in the biopesticide market. Once we know we understand that, a product is effective for us, we analyze our technical capabilities inside our house, so lab capabilities, production capabilities. If we're not able to produce that product, we are going to start to try to partner with another company and do a B2B. Third, that is also very important.
We're currently working with 100% capacity, so the demand was much higher than we expected and we acquired a large site earlier this year. I'm gonna talk about that, 121 acres. That's going to be very easy for us to upscale production. Now let me zoom in this site that we just acquired, right? First, it's really well centrally located in the countryside of São Paulo. It's close to Brazilian Midwest, Mato Grosso. It's also not far from the Northeast and close to the South, really well located. Second, it's so large, 121 acres. In the middle, we can have our production site over there, as you can see. Then the top right-hand corner is state-of-the-art R&D station.
In the middle up, we're going to have a few tests for our biologicals. Once this factory is ready, that's going to be next year, it's going to be one of the largest biofactories in Latin America. Now let's talk about our specialty products, Union Agro. Why do we like this company so much? It's really a one-stop shop solution for the farmer. It offers soil products with lower prices and also offers concentrated suspension, high margins, high price. We can even have the same product with different formats, solid, liquid, concentrated suspension. Each different format will have a different price and a different effectiveness in the plant, but the client, the farmer can choose whatever he wants.
Union Agro is in a market that is much larger than the biologics, so it's a $2 billion market, but also with a very significant growth rate of 17% year-over-year growth rate. Then we have Perterra. Perterra is an agrochemical post-patent generic agrochemical company. How do we operate? Basically, first, we carefully select our portfolio. We make sure that we're going to select suppliers in Asia and offer products to Lavoro, where we can be competitive, where we can offer prices that are similar or better than what Lavoro already have. Second, we also act as a supply chain risk mitigation. For instance, last year we had a risk of shortage of glyphosate. I think you all know that, right?
Perterra was able to partner with the right suppliers in Asia and offer glyphosate, and our farmers would be not with a problem of this product. Lastly, our ultimate goal is to improve Lavoro's consolidated margin, right? I mean Perterra's margin and Lavoro's margin. We'll do that by capturing the tier three supplier margin. We offer complementary products to Lavoro in the tier three supplier segment. Okay, now I want to wrap up with some key messages for you. First, we are a highly differentiated company. We offer high margin products and high growth sales. Then we combine these very nice products with a great access to the market as Lavoro with 200 stores. We have the perfect match. With that, you can see the results on the left chart.
In 2021, the year that we acquired Agrobiológica and Union Agro, we represented only 3% Crop Care sales of Lavoro's sales. Represent only 3% of all the specialty product sales. In the following year, it was already 18%. This is because the farmers are demanding our products, okay? In 2021, we represented 4% of Lavoro's gross profit, and we definitely see a lot of room to grow and that's why we think that we can quadruple our sales and achieve 17% of gross profit, total gross profit, of Lavoro's number. Okay, so I know that most likely you would have a lot of questions for me. I'll be happy to answer them in the break.
We're gonna do just a very short break, 5 or 10 minutes, and then we'll come back and do the last half of the presentation. Thank you. Presentation is on the TPB website and Lavoro's website, so all of the information is there. It's also on the top of your inbox. Got a lot of places to see it.
That was a very quick break. My name is Gustavo. I'm the Chief Strategy Officer of Lavoro. Myself and Rob will be presenting this digital and services section to you. For those of you who had the opportunity to see our prior presentation, this is just a recap of our growth equation. Don't worry, we'll get back to that on the financial review section. Just to place what we're gonna talk about, the services and digital opportunity, we are very excited about it. We think TPB brings a lot of value and accelerate Lavoro in this path. Given its first stage, we are not accounting for it in our projections, right? This is a potential upside to the plan.
Let me start with where we advanced the most since our last presentation, which is in the soil testing space. Since the beginning of Lavoro, by being on the ground, boots on the ground, we understood that the soil analysis in Brazil was not anywhere near the U.S. market is. In the U.S., as Dave said, almost everyone does it. In Brazil, there's not even a reliable statistic about what is the adoption rate. When you talk to farmers, you see that some guys do it once every two years, others do once every year. Some collect the soil samples themselves, others rely on the retailer, others rely on the labs. The supply structure of the market is not there.
We saw that as a channel, as a trust advisor of the farmer, we could help them to fulfill this space, but there was no solution in the market until we met TPB, and with them, Pattern Ag. Over the past months, we had multiple sessions to discuss this partnership. A few weeks ago, we announced that we signed a sales partner agreement with them, with which we will have exclusivity in the retail space until 2024, and we will pilot it with 50,000 samples in the field. This set up period is important to adjust the products, the technology, and test the best business model with farmers in Brazil. We expect to roll it out by August 2023, and we then.
Our plan is to pilot it with most technified farmers. We see it as a good fit with Crop Care clients, mainly the biological clients. I'm not an expert in this space, so I'm gonna invite Rob, our black belt, to talk more about the product and the technology.
Thank you, Gustavo. I'm Robert Hranac, I'm the CEO of Pattern Ag, and I'm really excited to be here today to talk to you about our partnership with Lavoro. I'm first gonna just take a quick step back and talk a little bit about what we do at Pattern. We really sit at the intersection of two of the trends that Dave talked about earlier, specifically digital agriculture and computational biology. What we've done fundamentally is that we build a predictive ag platform on top of a unique biologically-based soil analysis. I'm gonna just step back for a moment and talk a little bit about what that opportunity looks like from a fundamental scientific point of view.
Today, the way that farmers understand the biology of their fields is typically through individual scouting sessions, where they essentially walk through their fields and try to look at the phenotypes of the plants in their fields to understand what's going on. Scientifically, underneath their boots as they walk through those fields, every pound of soil has hundreds of billions of organisms inside it, and that pound has maybe 50,000 unique species among those organisms. That biology is fundamentally what's driving the agronomic outcomes at the end of the year for that farmer. Those organisms are interacting with the seeds that they plant as they grow into their crops. Some of them are symbiotic, some of them are antagonistic. All of them are impacting their agronomic outcome. Traditionally, we have not had the tools scientifically to understand soil biology at scale.
Thanks to the huge drop in DNA sequencing costs that Dave covered earlier, we can now apply genomics technology to take that 1 pound of soil and turn it into 10 million data points, specifically 10 million DNA reads that serve as biomarkers about what's going on agronomically in that field. How do we do that fundamentally from a technology platform perspective? We run in-house a next generation DNA sequencing laboratory. We've invested in, and in some cases, designed and built our own high throughput robotic systems to go fundamentally sequence soil at scale. That's enabled us to have the highest throughput metagenomic soil sequencing facility, commercially available in the U.S. today. One thing I just wanna cover quickly is what makes genomics data so uniquely powerful. In part, it's that there's so much of it.
You know, traditional soil testing, which is traditionally looking at kind of chemical markers, you get maybe, you know, 12 data points, you know, on a per acre basis. With genomics data, you get about 1 million data points per acre. In addition to that, you know, traditional scouting, you're kind of looking at plants, sort of trying to categorize them in some sort of taxonomy. What we get from the genomic data is very detailed data about the exact species and even in some cases, strains of organisms that are in that field. What it makes it really a game changer fundamentally in agriculture is the same thing that makes it a game changer in human health, which is that genotyping is fundamentally predictive in the sense that DNA is predictive of the potential of life.
Just as on the human health side, you see huge investments going into genomic-based testing to look ahead at diseases before they happen. We're applying that same technology in plant health fundamentally. What we have built is a unique predictive agronomy platform. For years, we've been able to understand the physical properties of soil and the chemical properties of soil. What's been missing is this complete picture of the physical, chemical, and biological properties of soil, and that's what we've built our platform on. We've started off with very basic risks in the US that farmers face, predictive risks around pests and disease, and have since expanded this season into biofertility, and looking forward into soil health and a bunch of other areas. There's really no limit to what we can do with this technology today.
Let's talk about the value proposition from a US farmer perspective, what we see. Typically in the US, farmers are spending about half of their per acre costs on agronomic inputs. Those agronomic inputs are not only a big part of their cost structure, they are determinative in what kind of yield outcome that farmer's gonna have at the end of the season. These are critical input decisions. Today, Ruy mentioned this a little bit in one of his slides. A lot of that is driven by agronomic advice from a trusted advisor who typically is looking at what historically happened in that field, and making some calls for the farmer fundamentally.
Because we can actually predict ahead of time, what's gonna happen based on our genomic technology, what we found is that in every of the roughly two dozen biological analytics categories that we measure for farmers, they're either underspending or overspending on inputs. To make that concrete, let me give you two quick examples. In the U.S., farmers tend to underspend on soybean cyst nematodes in their soybean crops, because if you have a low level of that disease in your crop, it's very hard to see, but you lose, say, your top five bushels of yield per acre. And that is a $50-an-acre top line revenue opportunity for soybean farmers today that's hugely distributed throughout the Midwest. On the other side of it, corn rootworm is an extremely nasty pest in corn crops.
You definitely don't wanna get it. But it only impacts about 20% of US corn crops today. Farmers, because they can't see it ahead of time, tend to dramatically overspend on it. What our test allows them to do is to pick up the corn rootworm eggs that have been put in their soil in the fall, and predict what their pressure will be when those eggs hatch in the spring. That's a very, very powerful bottom line increase opportunity for farmers in the US. We've taken this product into the US and distributed it over the last 3 years. What we're really excited to do is bring this to Brazil with Lavoro and do what we've done in the US, which is supercharge the advice that the trusted agronomic advisors can go give farmers with data.
Just for a couple minutes, I'm gonna walk you through what our product looks like, so you can put your agronomist hats on, and see what the experience is for the RTVs, who are advising farmers. It starts with a digital map and a plan of what farmers are going to spend agronomically next season. Fundamentally, you digitize the field, then you start to make decisions with the farmer leveraging this data. Farmers typically aren't super interested in seeing lots of new data. What they care about is a concrete recommendation that's going to increase their profitability, and that's what you see here is us helping a farmer select a seed that is optimal for their field based on our soil test that will optimize the yield for that field. Then you need to think about crop protection.
How do you protect from the pathogens that are out here? You can see our little stoplight chart of pathogen risk here. This helps farmers come up with their crop chemistry plan for protecting against yield loss. Previously, you know, they're really using intuition and history to guide those decisions as opposed to data. You can do the same thing with weed pressure. Just as you have issues with pests, you have issues with plants, and you can do the same thing to really dial in your fertility recommendations for farmers with this exact same technology. Last but certainly not least, in a world of growing biologicals that Marcos talked about, this test is particularly critical to understand how to effectively place biological products in farmers' fields.
This is something that we've spent the last four years developing in the U.S. and commercializing over the last three. We've gotten huge traction here that we're really excited about, and we're delighted to be partnering with Lavoro to bring this technology to their RTVs. With that, I'll turn it back over to Gustavo.
We are really excited to implement and roll out this solution, not only Brazil, but Latin America as a whole. Let's move to another area in which we already made a lot of progress, which is our Minha Lavoro app. What we're trying to solve here, we're trying to streamline the relationship of the farmer and the retailer. By doing that, also to save very precious RTV time so they can focus on high-value activities. Just to give you an example, there are a lot of frictions on the day-to-day interactions of the clients and our retailers. For example, if there is an unforeseen rain, the farmer needs more fungicide. He needs to talk to the RTV. The RTV may not be available because he's traveling the deep ends of Brazil.
The RTV needs to contact the store to segregate the product to be shipped immediately to the farmer. This product may exceed the existing credit line the farmer has. This whole process can take a few hours to be solved and creates headaches for everyone involved. By streamlining this process and having the app, we also create the possibility of developing our own marketplace with the traffic of our clients. That opens up opportunities to add more products and services to our offering. Just some examples of the functionalities that this app already has. It's fully integrated with our e-commerce platform. It has pre-approved credit limits, and also very interesting, real-time grains pricing. Just anecdotally as well, like how does it work in Brazil for the farmer to sell his grains?
Typically, the store has a whiteboard, and the price of the day is written there. The price changes every minute, every hour. With the app, he's able to get more rich data to take better decisions and come to our app. Another area that we're really excited about is the financial services space. That ties back to what Dave said about how the U.S. market evolved in a fragmented way, and the Brazilian market can evolve in a different path. The financial services for rural producers in Brazil suffers from the huge distance that exists between the providers and the clients. There's a lack of data and a lot of information asymmetry and adverse selection involved.
Since we are there, we know the clients, we're visiting them every week, we have access to better data, and we are able to channel these products and solutions effectively to them. What we're focusing mostly as of now is on the opportunity for credits, crop insurance, which also suffers a lot from adverse selection. The farmer wants to insure only the part of the farm where the soil is poorer, has more sand, and the insurer is very afraid to underwrite the insurance to him. Also grain derivatives by leveraging all of our knowledge and our team, doing barter.
Taking a step back, we see Lavoro as uniquely positioned to develop these services and digital solutions, because not only we have the public information that AgTechs or banks have, but also we have our own proprietary database. As we merge the two together and we apply data analytics, we are able to further reiterate the flywheel that Ruy described by providing better agronomic recommendation, like with Pattern Ag, new products and services, and while also incurring in a lower financial risk than what currently exists in the market. This is a new agenda we're working on. We're very excited with the opportunity, but once again, it's not included in our projections. Okay, what is included in your projections? Let's talk about it in this section. Once again, this is my favorite slide, our equation of growth.
We say that we have four engines of growth. The market expansion, growing our footprint either through M&As or organically, adding new customers in these regions, and with Crop Care. One question that we heard from many of you guys during the meetings we had, so how do you translate that mathematically into your projections? We brought the answer today. Our plan for 2024 is to grow CAGR our top line by around 50%. This is driven by the expansion of the market. This is a huge component. Just to remind you, the market has been growing at 16% CAGR in the past years. Second, M&A. M&A accounts for around 40% of this CAGR, so give or take 20% per year.
Our organic expansion with new stores and new RTVs and Crop Care. Crop Care, as Marcos said, in terms of top-line contribution, is not that large, but in terms of gross profit and EBITDA is really accretive. Luis Spinardi talked about M&A, Marcos talked about Crop Care. Let me just give you some color on our organic retail expansion. Over the past years, we have developed and honed this methodology about how to add more capacity to currently existing stores and where to place a new store. We start with a very detailed market analysis, looking at the size, growth, risk, competitive environment by, and once again, looking at public information and our proprietary information that our commercial team gathers.
Based on that, we do our business plan of how many RTVs, which stores, when, what is the potential, the ramp-up curve. We go on by implementing it and implementing a PMO as well to make everything run smoothly. This is what we've been doing the past years, and we will continue to do so. Moving from top line to profitability. This is our projections for EBITDA margin for the coming years. We expect it to grow to 9.2% by 2024 fiscal year, driven by four levers. The first one, and very important, the growth of Crop Care in our sales mix, reaching 17% of our gross profit as a whole. Second, by capturing procurement gains due to our scale and the rollout of the integration of the recently acquired companies.
Third, by focusing even more on high gross margin categories, which are seeds and specialties. As we said, we have dedicated teams to work with that, dedicated managers. Fourth, with operating leverage, so SG&A dilution, driven by the ramp-up of our commercial efficiency, given that many stores are new and many RTVs are still ramping up. Capturing the synergies from recently done M&As and economies of scale of our headquarters and et cetera. Now looking at the coming year, which we are currently into. How are we bridging the last year EBITDA result of BRL 89 to the 2022 result of BRL 211? First, there is the organic contribution that I'm gonna give you a little bit more details in the next slide.
On the inorganic part, there are 2 subcomponents. First, there are BRL 25 million of M&As that are already closed, were closed during this fiscal year and will be part of our results. There are BRL 53 million of future M&As, of which 2 are actually closed already and announced. Casa Trevo, which marks our entry in Rio Grande do Sul, the southernmost state of Brazil, and Provecampo in Colombia. 2 that were announced, they are binding MOUs, but they are not yet closed. We have NS Agro in Chile and Peru, and Sollo Sul, a distributor in Paraná. We have other 6 MOUs signed to fulfill the remaining part of that. How do we have foresight of our organic results?
It comes from the way that the seasonality of the business works. On the upper part of the page, in blue, you can see our cumulative revenue profile, right? The bulk of our revenues, they are recognized in the second and third quarter of the year. Which is when you look to the bottom part of the page, is when the summer crop, usually soybean, is being developed and harvested. That's when we are shipping most products and recognizing most of the revenues. However, the farmer that is planting this soybean, he has already planned this cycle many months before. He already negotiated what he was gonna buy from whom and when, at which price, and placed his order, his sales order.
As of the end of September, typically, we already have 60%-70% of our year sales as bookings. With that, we have very good confidence about where we're gonna land in terms of sales and margins. You can also see in this page that the revenue doesn't come together with the receivables, right? In Brazil and in Latin America as a whole, typically the payment is made at the end of the harvest with the money the farmer gets by selling his production. Having said that, how does the working capital of this business work? Typically, as a rule of thumb, our working capital is around 20% of net sales. During the year, it hovers around this level, not necessarily following the seasonality of the harvest plantation.
In terms of payment terms, around 80% of our sales are paid in credits. At the end of the harvest year and 20% in cash. This varies year to year, depending on the willingness of farmers to pay in advance, how confident they are, how their balance sheet looks like. With that, we plan our purchases, our procurements. This year, we're purchasing like 77% of what we buy on credit, the same on the harvest term as well, and 23% we pay in advance. What is interesting about this dynamic is that when we pay in advance to suppliers, we typically get a very hefty discount of 1.5%-2% per month, mainly used to buy seeds and fertilizers.
This payment cycle and the procurement cycle and the inventory levels drive these working capital dynamics. Given that credit is such a pivotal part of our business, it is also a part of it that we invested a lot in the past years. Currently, we have a team of over 75 professionals working in this department of credit and collection. We work with partners that provide technology for the processes and evaluations of credit, but we developed our own algorithm to assess the rating, the credit rating of the farmers based on, again, public and private information. We also have the collateral for the sales as the grain production of the farmers.
I'm selling to him the inputs with which he's growing the soybeans, and the soybeans are the collateral for me to be paid in the future. Having said that, how risky is that, right? Historically, our allowance for credit losses has been below 0.5% of net sales. Yeah, not a very large number. One way to do the credit sales, I think you heard about it, or it's a doubt that many of you guys have or may have had is, what is this barter thing, right? Bartering is a way to do credit sales that is very common in Brazil. How does it work? Instead of negotiating the input treatment in Brazilian reais, I negotiate with the farmer in bags of soybeans.
By translating the price in cash to bags of based on the commodity, the market commodity price of that day. Operationally, how does it work? I deliver the products to the farmer, the farmer will deliver his grains to the trading, and the trading will pay Lavoro. This modality of sales exists because farmers see a benefit in it. When they do it, they are locking in part of their commodity risk. The retailer likes it, and we like it because first we get the best collateral there is, which is their grain production. The supplier also likes it because I can provide this right to him, reducing the credit risk of the chain. When we do that, the supplier incentivizes me with commercial discounts, so I get better margins.
When you're negotiating grains, there is more flexibility for the RTV to negotiate cross-selling and upselling products to farmers because you don't have the item-by-item negotiation. It talks and it's related to the financial services opportunity that we discussed before, right? If I have their currency, the grains, I can open a digital wallet, I can provide credit, et cetera. Having said that, what are our projections? In terms of revenues on the left part of the page, our plan is to achieve $3.576 billion in sales. On the bottom, you can see the split of the organic growth year-over-year, which is around 20%-25% per year. The 2023 figure, it's higher because there is a grain component in it due to the barter negotiations.
The fiscal 2022 year was very weak for bartering because the commodity was very volatile and farmers didn't wanna negotiate in this modality. In 2023, it's coming back to normal levels. If you isolate this effect, our sales are really growing at around 25%, so very much in line with our historical performance. When you add the M&A effect, you go to the 41%, 68%, and 29% per year. On the right part of the page, you can see the pro forma adjusted EBITDA projections. Organically growing at a faster rate than the sales due to gross margin and SG&A expansion. On the upper row, the growth accounting for M&As. This is the plan that we built, and we are very confident in delivering the next years.
Having said that, I'll invite Dave once again for concluding remarks. Thanks.
I think we've shared this in the past, the transaction details on the merger with the TPB Acquisition Corp. SPAC vehicle. We have highlighted here some of the updated market comparables, and we've shared a few more than we did in the last presentation that we put together. I think across whatever dimension, you know, we look at the business and the multiple on the transaction, we feel very good about the entry price here and consider it to be a very, you know, attractive valuation.
We've highlighted in particular as we did in the last presentation, the implied multiple on Nutrien's Ag Retail business by subtracting out their fertilizer EBITDA and using the industry average for the fertilizer comparables, which are footnoted here, to get an implied current market multiple of 8.4x and 7.4x compared to Lavoro's 7.1x and 4.3x pro forma adjusted EBITDA. We've also seen some significant price movement in some of these Brazilian ag retail businesses that trade on the Bovespa. Again, lighter volume, but you know seeing market multiples start to look a lot more like some of the internationally traded ag retailers.
Obviously we've included a few comps for what we consider to be, you know, a decent for the Crop Care business. You know, that's obviously a significant component and growing component of the overall business. We thought it was prudent to include them here. You know, in summary, I'll highlight once again our enthusiasm for the transaction, for the business. I hope some of the materials and the presentations today helped everyone here understand the business a little bit better and understand why we've developed a, you know, a good degree of confidence in the thesis and in the management team and in the opportunity for the years ahead for the business.
We're really excited to partner with Lavoro, think that we can add a lot of value as we've demonstrated in our partnership with Pattern Ag, which we consider to be just the beginning of a long road of work together. We're gonna be very active and hopefully supportive and helpful with management in building value here for years to come. We're gonna do Q&A now. We'll bring some chairs up and open the floor for questions. Thank you guys so much for your patience.
Feel free to just fire off your questions. I'm actually able to start with a question that we got from the audience virtually. Let me just start right now. For biologicals R&D, how much will be performed in-house versus outsourced?
I can take this one. Biologicals R&D, basically what we're doing is, most of our investments in new products are basically done in-house. Okay, I cannot disclose the figures, but the majority of our products were developed in-house. This actually help us with creating even a higher margin. We saw an opportunity for the products that don't have the technical capabilities to partner with other companies that currently represent the minority of our portfolio, and they are good to have a, even a better, scale in terms of portfolio can offer Lavoro and also cross-selling of other products. It's definitely the majority of our portfolio to be developed in-house.
Just along the same line, given your approach, would there be at some point, as a major ag retailer, interest in stocking and channeling competitive biologics, U.S.-based biologics through your unit?
For sure. I mean, that's one of our topics of our discussion the last past weeks that we have been discussing with TPB. We have been learning a lot about the American biologicals market, which much more advanced in so many ways. For example, biofertilizers, right? Biofertilizers only start in Brazil, and I showed you guys the new biofertilizer we just launched and now that the sales is booming for this product. It's pretty unique for Brazil, this product. There are things that we can definitely learn here and apply there.
Okay. I have two questions, one for each of you. Maybe starting with Ricardo. I was wondering if this product that works so well in the U.S., this predictive model where you can try to anticipate what's going to happen. Does it work, or do you need to take it to Brazil.
Number of years to develop this capacity for making
Yeah, great question. Our view takes about a year of R&D to go calibrate it, to a new geography. Of course, Brazil doesn't have a perfect overlap in terms of the organisms that are impacting farms agronomically from the US. It's kind of like 70% overlap, if you want a very round number, on that. What we do, whenever we enter a new geography, is first we go take a set of what we call groundbreaker samples. You need to go generate, a fair amount of data for our machine learning models to go get calibrated to new geography. We enter commercially. That's roughly the timeline as we see it.
The expectation is, will it add value after one year on the farm?
The product can add value right away, but the full value takes kind of more like a year to really start to kick in.
That's why the date in the presentation was for August 23.
For your model, when you do those projections for the future, how much the model gets impacted by commodity prices, interest rates for different states of impacting the funding business?
Yeah. Very, very interesting question. In terms of commodity price-
Savio, will you repeat it for people at home that can't, 'cause they don't have microphones?
Oh, okay.
Yeah. It'd be good to repeat the question.
The question was about, for our financial projections, how do we take into account the impact of commodity prices and interest rates in Brazil? What really drives the growth of this business is the farmer profitability, right? The more money farmers make, the more willing they are to invest on their land to increase their yields. Commodity prices by themselves so they can move together with input prices. The correlation is not perfect, but if you look at the barter exchange rate, what we call the exchange relation over time in Brazil, typically it hovers around 24 bags of soybean to buy the treatments. This is a price that farmers think it's attractive.
Having said that, the input price that mostly is more volatile in what we sell are fertilizers, but fertilizers only account for 24% or 22% of what we sell. We have been maintaining this product mix relatively stable despite the recent boom in fertilizer price. Regarding interest rates, first talking about our financial costs, right? Our business really has a really low leverage differently from competitors in the space. With this transaction, we will have the net cash, right? Doesn't really impact. What we also see is that historically the discounts you get from suppliers, they haven't been related to the interest rate in Brazil. They work with a separate dynamics, so it doesn't really impact us.
From the day you close the price based on a factor with the supplier, and to the day they deliver the soybean, the risk of price evolution is yours or the hedge?
We
Can you repeat the question?
Yes, when we do barter and we exchange the inputs for grains, how is the commodity price risk handled, right? How does it work? When we... Every day we have the commodity quotes in that region from many companies and also based on international prices, freights, Brazilian premium, et cetera. At the delivery date on the future date. When we are buying the grains from the farmer because we're selling inputs, at the same time, I'm selling it to the trading company. I don't incur commodity price risk. This has been a policy we implemented since the beginning of Lavoro because our intent is not to be a trading company that speculates on grain prices.
Yeah.
All right. Can you hear me? Okay, great. I was just to follow up on that question, on the credit part of the business, where the farmers have to pay you at the end of the season in cash, I presume, how high has the credit loss provisions gone in the past? I know it was not so bad last year, but during a bad crop, in a particular year, what have you seen the last 10, 15 years or so?
We do this analysis to look at the long-term past. We need to look at the companies prior to Lavoro acquiring them because Lavoro is a very new company. When we do the M&A financial analysis, we run their financial bad debts, their historical bad debts, and our figures audited also, right? Historically the benchmark in the market is what? 1% risk, something like that.
Hi. I wanted to ask about sort of the market opportunity as you see it, because one of the areas that you talked about being a difference between U.S. and, say, for example Brazil, is the access to credit and sort of the maturity of the credit markets for farmers. You have what you can control in your own growth trajectory, but how do you sort of influence or what should folks be looking for, as an external factor to demonstrate that maturity of the market in such a way that they will then spend more with you?
I don't know if I got the question.
What should we be looking for externally that really helps to unlock the spending ability of your farmer customers?
Okay. From the top of my head, and maybe Ruy and my colleagues can complement me here. First we see that in Brazil, the public credit that the government gives hasn't been growing at the same rate as the agribusiness in Brazil. The agribusiness in Brazil is booming, but Brazil has this fiscal situation that it doesn't allow for the government to provide that much credit. You see this like this separation in the trajectory of the curves, right? Another thing that you could look at is the benchmark that they've brought, that the Brazilian farmer only has a 0.3 something of his production in credit versus more than 1 in the U.S. In addition, like there is a...
I don't know how to quantify this now, but there's a pent-up demand to renew machinery. Like they want to buy machinery with variable rates. They know that it's good, it will improve their yields, but they don't have the money, right? What we see on the ground as well is that there is this very relatively large informal market of credit. One farmer asks for money from his friends when there's a month or two in which his cash flow is not equal, is not matching.
Per month.
Per month. That happens because like the banks can't assess properly, they are not there with the capillarity, and it's very difficult for them to assess the credit risk of the farmer.
Anyone else wanna add to that?
Go ahead.
Okay. Okay.
Hi, Kevin McCarthy with Vertical Research Partners. Two questions. The first one will be for Luis, maybe. Can you discuss the average multiples of EBITDA that you've paid in the past for ag retailers? As the industry consolidates, has that multiple been generally stable or have you started to observe some upward drift?
Let's start with the first one. As I said, we are very disciplined in terms of valuation. As I said, we don't. We see the price going up when we have some auctions with like maybe some large players in Brazil, maybe higher banks. That's the only case when you see the prices going up. We stay out of this kind of auction process. For us, we have kept our multiples like low single digit in the acquisitions. We kept this since the beginning. We kept our policy. That's why it's so important for us to build our own pipeline, so we don't rely on this process, and we can keep the acquisition multiple low.
My second question would be to do with the subject of density. You've talked about expanding inorganically within Brazil, but also opportunities in Chile, Peru, Paraguay and elsewhere. How important is it or unimportant is it to have density of your stores and your assets? How do you weigh the pros and cons of being more aggressive within Brazil versus outside of Brazil?
Yeah. I'll start and she maybe-
I can help her.
Yeah. For us, it's not a one or another. We think there is an opportunity both in Brazil, like in each state, we see like We know where we want to be. Like we have, you know, when we have the shadows, where we want to be. In Latin America, I think we see a lot of opportunities, so we are not, okay, either I go to Latin America or I stay in Brazil. I think we can follow both of the strategies and become a larger Latin American player. We have this team in Colombia that they have a lot of knowledge on the ground from Colombia, Peru, so they know where to be in those countries.
Here in Brazil, we know we have all the companies that we invest. They know where we want to be, where the market is growing. It's not a mutually exclusive strategy. We really think we can follow both of the strategies in Brazil with our team and our capabilities.
Yeah. I think as Luis has mentioned.
Pass the mic.
Yeah. Can you guys hear me?
Yep.
As Luis has mentioned, I think the density is important. It's even more important we enter in a market in which we believe we can be relevant. We enter in a market in which we see either inorganic opportunities to open up new stores, inorganic opportunities to buy new companies or open up new stores. There are some synergies in the back-office operations, yes, this is part of why we are organizing clusters. For instance, in Brazil is a more mature market. We have three clusters, we are buying companies and we have the administrative team shared in those companies. There's yes, some synergies there. I would say the most important driver is our ability to serve that market and to expand.
Great. Question from the queue here. Will small to mid-size Brazilian farmers have similar financial capacity and interest levels as U.S. farmers for Pattern Ag's very sophisticated analytics?
Yeah, I can maybe start with that, and then, Lavoro folks can follow up. If you look at the market segment that Lavoro targets in Brazil, it's almost exactly our key market segment in terms of farm size, in the U.S. If you look at the penetration of soil testing in Brazil, obviously there's a ton of low-hanging fruit compared to the U.S. market. Really as we work with Lavoro to access this new market, from our perspective, we just think there's a huge amount of opportunity to do even just some of the basics around soil testing in addition to some of the more advanced testing that we do.
Just to add up, like, if you remember the statistics that Dave brought up, the Brazilian farmer is very profitable. He has room in his P&L, and he has the balance sheet to invest further in his production.
Charles.
Fast-forward to 2024, we're looking back. Let's say you haven't hit your business plan.
Mm-hmm.
Why would that be? We're gonna ask you to take a risk to your planning report.
I think I can start with that. As mentioned, we were very thoughtful of our projections. Now, there are things that in agriculture we may not control as related to climate events or farming income. We do not see any meaningful risk. In particular regarding farming income, which is a key metric, we don't expect our projections to be, you know, off. We're comfortable with that.
Yeah.
Of the 2023 projections, I think, BRL 93 million is from M&A.
Right.
Of M&A they've yet to announce.
Yeah.
It's an MOU. We know that MOUs fall apart all the time, and it may take longer than we expect. It's interesting that you didn't highlight that as one of the risks. Maybe you can just address. It sounds like.
Yeah.
Very high.
Yeah. Yeah. Do you want to talk about the M&As?
Yeah. I think first, as Gustavo said, we have two deals that we announced and is binding MOUs.
We have six MOUs.
Yeah. To give an example, historically in the beginning when we started these deals, like, our death rate was around 50%. In the past year we can see it's around 20%, because as an HR in our process, we spend a lot of time to understand the financial ceilings of the company. In getting the due diligence, which was a part of most of the companies die, we don't have to drop the deal. Historically, we have a learning curve in the M&A. After looking more than 200 companies, we've done like more than 50 due diligence. We learn, so we are pretty confident in the pipeline and the MOUs we have.
We know there is some companies that is gonna die in the due diligence. Some we are gonna not pursue the acquisition, but we still think we have a very strong pipeline, and we are always recycling this.
Would you expect to not pay more than single digits on multiples of EBITDA based historically on these six?
We should bring the multiple.
For sure. We should keep our discipline.
Are there cost or revenue synergies in these pending or potential transactions?
The multiple, the single-digit multiple doesn't account for synergies, but these deals do have synergies, right? Both in terms of revenue, because we're able to accelerate the growth rate of the companies we acquire. In COGS, with our centralized procurements. In the second and third year, on SG&A.
I mean, we have talked publicly about the multiples, right?
Yeah, we have. About what we use to base it. It's something between 5x EBITDA prior.
It's previous year without synergies. More or less, yes.
Can I just ask a question that we got online on the same topic? What have been the characteristics of historic acquisitions that failed to meet internal targets?
Tricky question, huh? No, I think it's very important that, like, we learned a lot through this process. Like, we are a high growth company and there were mistakes during the period, right? One of them that marked me and maybe Ruy can comment and add another one. One of our first acquisitions in Brazil, we put our pedal on the accelerator too soon, too fast. We tried to double the number of stores of the company in one year, and the company was not structured yet. It was fragile in terms of management systems. We didn't have the management system that we have nowadays.
With that, we, for a period, we kind of didn't have the full control of the company, and the margins, et cetera. With that, we learned to balance more the rate of growth, especially in the first years.
I think the integration process is really key. We've learned after more than 22 acquisitions. As Gustavo mentioned, in the beginning, we made mistakes related to accelerating the growth probably way too soon or taking costs out also way too soon. Those are companies that they are not sophisticated. Sometimes they don't have systems. If you take out some of the structure, before, for instance, to take some costs and move through the shared services operation that we actually have. If you do that too soon without preparing the company to do so, you're actually destroying value or you can lose control. What we have developed over the last years is a well-disciplined integration approach.
In the first year, we're really taking care of, you know, taking control of the company, taking control of the cash flows, understanding what is going on, making sure we have the team in place. Then in the second and third year, we're gonna work towards growth and then synergies. It's a much more gradual process to minimize risks.
Two questions. Number one, just the competition around the M&A space, obviously you have, you've talked about Nutrien as one of the players and trying to prepare yourself for them.
Right.
They've been very active in Brazil.
Mm-hmm.
How would you describe the differences between your approach versus Nutrien's approach and why do you think you could win, like why you go after targets that they maybe approach but didn't?
Yeah.
Can the online folks hear that? Because you guys told me they couldn't hear.
Okay. Can you repeat?
Yeah, yeah, I can repeat.
Let's use the mic, please. We're getting a lot of complaints. Or just repeat the question.
Yeah. The question was basically about competition in M&A and specifically the competition with Nutrien, which is a major player, well-capitalized and also doing acquisitions in the region. What we have developed is what we believe is a unique capability to identify good targets, which are usually mid-sized companies with a lot of growth potential. Those are not always well-structured, but we do have a clear roadmap on how to structure them after the acquisition. We developed this technology of doing this fast and in a very disciplined way, using the multiples that I just mentioned. We made on average four acquisitions per year, sometimes more. Nutrien has a different approach. They usually go towards more ready companies, usually larger companies that also goes for larger EBITDA multiples.
I think they have this different approach of looking for, I would say, more developed companies. I would say this is not the vast majority of the targets that we have in the market. By using our approach, I believe we can grow faster and we can accelerate M&A faster than Nutrien. This is what we have seen over the last years.
Okay. Just one more point. Luis mentioned that we are more flexible in terms of the structure of the transaction as well, right? We can buy majority, but we don't have to buy 100%. What we saw so far of Nutrien is they want to buy 100%. The founder not necessarily wants to leave. He wants to get part of the upside. There is segments of the market that is not addressed by Nutrien in our view.
Okay. The second question is just along the lines of that. If we take a look, following up on his question earlier on the future EBITDA contribution from M&A, it's kind of interesting to see if you just quickly do the math of what's been announced already and going to be incorporated has a higher margin profile than what you think you might be adding in 2024. Is there a rationale behind why you see like a slowdown in the margin contribution? Just the EBITDA margin looks smaller for what you might acquire in 2-3 years out versus what you just acquired this year.
I think it has to do with the mix of Crop Care versus distribution targets. Distribution targets have single digits EBITDA margins. Crop Care targets have 20%-30% EBITDA margins.
Thank you. A couple of questions. Firstly, if my math is right, probably you make around $600,000 in EBITDA per location. Is there kind of a target you have or what you think is normalized or a maximum amount in Latin America?
Yeah. I think your math is right. Nowadays our typical store on average, if you just divide the revenues by the number of stores, we're selling around BRL 35 million. $7 million, give or take. But many of these stores are not yet mature. Like, around 40% of our stores have been open in the past 3 years. They're going up in this productivity curve. There's still a long way to go. With that you'll get operational leverage in that cost and in that EBITDA.
Okay, thank you. The second is, at least in the fertilizer business, which I think is like almost a quarter of your distribution revenues there, we've seen tremendous volatility. What strategies are you employing to try to avoid essentially having your margin squeezed or even realize losses during this period? If there are any examples of what happened over the past six months with what we saw in Brazil.
As you're properly pointing out, fertilizer prices have been very volatile. The way that we used to operate is that we try to minimize large buying positions without being covered by a selling position. We try to match what we buy and what we sell. In a market when you see a market with fertilizer prices more stable or even going up, you may feel more comfortable to take a large position of buying and then eventually selling. What we're doing right now is we're trying to match buy and sell, right? We avoid a lot of exposure and we only buy a second batch when we ended up selling the first one.
By doing this different approach, we take smaller positions and then we reduce our volatility as well. Also remember, we are a markup business, so usually we put a margin on top of the prices that we are buying. We also protect our margins in this sense.
Question from the online audience. Are there aspects within AgTech you believe are poorly suited for adoption in Brazil that may be taking market share elsewhere?
I can tell you what I don't believe in AgTech. I don't know.
Maybe just to kick it off, the AgTech space in Brazil is very early stage. It's very rare to see a company doing a series B. They are either seed or series A. Product market fit is not there yet. They're trying to develop their solutions. I think there is a very fervent market there on credit solutions like we mentioned, on automating the gathering of data in the farm. The supply of companies and solutions is not mature yet. That's why we're excited to, as Brazilians like to take a look at the U.S. and what is going on here, because you guys are a few years or decades ahead of us.
Biofertility is probably a good example to answer that question, right? I mean, there's pretty significant biofertility traction in the U.S. with a number of startups I know folks in this room know well, and they have not made their way to Brazil yet. I think it was Tom that asked the question, right? Probably a very good case for a partnership model for these sorts of products with a significant IP to partner. We're seeing the efficacy, we're seeing the uptake, and obviously the growth curve on a few of these that we all know well is quite significant in the U.S. right now.
Yeah. To add to that, biofertilizers, for example, we don't have now a very detailed widespread study about the reduction of the amount of NPK that would have in the plants in soybean corn by using biofertilizers. Right? I know that the U.S. is pretty much well-known, but in Brazil we don't have. This is something that we're partnering with universities to have a serious paper in order to prove to our customers and farmers that, you know, you can save on NPK by using biofertilizers. Right? This is something that we're investing.
The pricing power is pretty significant. I mean, what, $30, $40 an acre with like $60 return to end. I could be off on that by a few dollars, but it's a pretty valuable product set with high margin.
Hi. Just curious on the soil testing side of the business. You know, just curious as to, like, First of all, how spread apart are the samples that you're taking, and what is the genetic variability kind of, you know, within an hectare as far as, you know, percentage of the microbes that you're seeing, and how does that compare U.S. versus Brazil?
Yeah. So if you look at sampling densities, they vary, you know, in some different ways. Roughly you're talking about one sampling core per acre, and that's typically a 6-inch, kinda three-quarter inch diameter core. So that's roughly the density is one per acre in the U.S. If you look at the field-to-field variability, you know, that's both a spatial and a temporal variability question that gets very complex, you know, when you're dealing with tens of thousands of species to really even try to come up with a simple number. If you want a very kind of simple number across a broad geography in agricultural fields, which, to be clear, are, you know, highly engineered systems, you know, at this point, fundamentally.
It's not a natural ecosystem, it's engineered for agricultural productivity. You'll see kind of roughly 60% similarity across time and space, but that's a very, you know, high-level answer in terms of the biological content of that soil.
Great. If I could just follow up on when you think about converting pasture land, you know, to planted crops, is irrigation more of an opportunity? Is that a equipment sale opportunity for the business, or just how to think about that?
Maybe the future. Irrigation is, it's not that well developed in Brazil and in particular, not well developed in retail channels. It's not on the short-term plan. Maybe, you know, in the future, but I think we do have other areas to explore before that. Yeah.
Okay, one more question over here, and then we're gonna go to the breakout rooms after that. It's right in there. Right there. Yep.
Thank you. I was just curious if there were any opportunities to bring Crop Care products outside of Latin America. I guess given current adoption rates, the market potential is pretty big in that region. Curious if you see any potential for those products to be competitive in other geographies.
Yeah. Yeah. Since the acquisition, since the partnership with TPB, we're, as I said, we are learning about U.S., we're learning about other countries, and we are also showing the details of our products and the benefits. Yes, of course, there we have to understand the regulation of applying the biologicals in each specific country, because, for example, we are already applying and are starting to apply our products in Colombia. Why can't we just go to other countries, right? Yes, it's in our pipeline of studies to perhaps move further to Brazil, Latin America with our products. Yeah.
Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you everybody for coming. Really appreciate it, both in person and the Zoom audience. This concludes the Zoom audience participation right now. We have some casual breakout rooms as well, so we can continue the conversation in smaller groups. Very, very casual. All of these guys are gonna be available. Please continue. Thank you very much.