Syngenta’s Jeff Rowe on making Big Ag less ‘easy to hate’

Jeff Rowe is a fifth-generation Illinois farm boy running a Swiss company owned by a Chinese state-owned enterprise. And from the cabin of a tractor that costs more than some Ferraris, he has the future of his family’s corn and soybean fields, the productivity of farmers from Brazil to Ukraine, and the security of the world’s food supply on his horizon.

Helping out on the 2,500-acre property, which his 82-year-old father still farms in denim overalls, has been just a side job for Rowe for some time. Since January 2024, he has been CEO of Syngenta, a Basel-based agrochemical giant owned by ChemChina with annual revenues approaching $29 billion and 56,000 people on its payroll.

But the Midwestern farm where Rowe grew up feeding hogs gives him a valuable connection to the customers who use Syngenta’s fungicides, seeds, and digital tools. It has also provided him with an all-American canvas on which to paint a human-scale picture of his company at a moment when many consumers distrust “Big Ag,” US politicians view Chinese-owned companies with suspicion, and Rowe has been tasked with getting the business in shape for a public listing.

Responding to Big Ag’s critics

“We’re a big industry; we’re easy to hate,” Rowe admits, sitting in the back room of his barn as a woodpecker hacks at a tree outside. But “this isn’t the kind of place where you’re trying to destroy where you live. If the environment goes away and you can’t farm it, we go away.”

Rowe spent more than 20 years with then-DuPont Pioneer before joining Syngenta to run its seeds business in 2016. For most of his career, he says, his industry believed that it could tune out its critics because “the people we talk to know we’re doing good things.” But agrochemical companies “completely underestimated” the importance of explaining what they do, creating a situation where “people have never cared more about where their food comes from but known less about how it’s produced.”

Rowe is on a mission to change that, saying that he opens his farm to outsiders because his industry has “a responsibility to tell our story.” He has also told his team to spend more time engaging with its doubters, he adds.

Some of those critics hold public office, however, and are doubly suspicious of a company with Chinese owners in a sector as critical as agriculture. In October 2023, Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders told Syngenta to sell its land holdings in the state, saying “this is about where your loyalties lie.” Just this month, the Trump administration announced plans to limit ownership of US farmland by “foreign adversaries.”

Syngenta now owns less than 1,000 acres of farmland, but the incidents illustrate how the growing hostility between the US and China complicates Rowe’s position. When ChemChina bought Syngenta for a record-breaking $43 billion in 2017, it was part of a concerted effort by Beijing to improve the country’s agricultural output.

Rowe is at pains to say that he runs Syngenta as “a global multinational,” and to persuade US audiences that China’s agricultural advances need not come at the expense of American farmers like his father. Beijing imposed tariffs on US soybean imports in 2018, but the country remains the biggest buyer of US soybeans — in a tacit reminder of the two countries’ interdependence, Rowe says “a lot” of his farm’s crop will end up there. Meanwhile, he argues, US farmers stand to benefit from the growing demand for protein from a country that has 20% of the world’s population and just 8% of its arable land. And he is counting on farmers’ loyalty to products like Syngenta’s Golden Harvest corn seeds, signs for which line a nearby field. “People all over the US have been customers of Syngenta for a long time. They know Syngenta,” he says.

“There’s no question that there are political games. We’re going to be attacked, we’re going to be challenged,” he admits. But “if there were some wild scenario where Syngenta were to go away from the US market, that would be a very negative thing for US farmers. Political leaders, particularly in agricultural states, understand that.”

The path to a long-delayed listing

The tensions between the world’s two largest economies are serious enough, though, to make it unlikely that Syngenta will pursue the public market listing that its owner has wanted for years on a US exchange.

When Rowe took the top job, the company was already well advanced in its planning for an initial public offering. The expectation was that Syngenta could raise up to $10 billion for a valuation of about $60 billion by listing in Shanghai.

Rowe pulled the plug, in one of his first decisions as CEO. “The market had turned and we missed the window,” he explains. “Our shareholder wasn’t very happy.” But “it was very clear the IPO effort had gone on far too long and it was a major distraction.”

Continuing to pursue a goal that had become “mission impossible” could also have damaged leadership credibility at a time when he needed to concentrate on fixing performance issues, he adds. Syngenta’s latest quarterly results, released in April, showed a small drop in sales but an 18% jump in its earnings and improved cash flow.

Those results, coupled with healthier agricultural markets and encouraging investor sentiment, have left Rowe hopeful that he will be in a position to try again for a listing in the second half of 2026. “That doesn’t mean we’re going to, but I think we are on pace. We’re hitting the milestones that we set for ourselves,” he says. He does not say where Syngenta might list, but observers now expect Hong Kong or London.

Rowe became CEO when Syngenta needed to tackle a cost base that was looking unsustainable. That meant focusing on the markets that mattered most to it, pulling back from others, and cutting about 4,000 jobs. “I wasn’t sure as a new CEO how that message was going to land,” he says, but he began with a policy of transparency, sharing details of the company’s cash flow issues and debt that many employees had been unaware of. “I told them, ‘I don’t want anyone to panic when you see these numbers, but I want you to see these numbers.’”

Rowe came into the role after turning around a seed business that Syngenta had been tempted to sell due to years of poor performance. His playbook in that division involved clearing out “people that didn’t understand the industry” and injecting new blood. (“I kept a list of people we brought into the company. I stopped keeping track when it reached 250,” he recalls.)

As CEO, similarly, he has replaced or reshuffled every member of his executive leadership team. “If that first level of the organization isn’t getting along, you can maybe get a message out [to the rest of the company], but it’s hard,” he reasons. And he has had little patience for colleagues who show no feel for the markets Syngenta serves. On one trip to Brazil, he recalls, he stepped into a field to examine the crop. “Why are you looking at an ear of corn? Don’t they all look the same?” a local executive asked him. “That leader didn’t stay in the company very long,” he says.

Insights from the Illinois cornfields

In the field across from Rowe’s barn, the discards from last year’s corn crop lie scattered on top of the soil between this year’s rows of soybeans. He leaves them there to limit wind and rain erosion, and as an example of the regenerative agriculture methods that he is testing out on various patches of land.

Syngenta is investing more heavily in areas from soil health to biologicals — products derived from natural sources designed to advance more sustainable farming practices — and Rowe’s experiments help him see their impact through his customers’ eyes, and build his case that his company is on their side.

Rowe frames innovation as the answer to global food security and environmental concerns, saying it will allow farmers to produce more from the land they already have without cutting down forests in search of growth. But he also holds up the fruits of his $2 billion-a-year research and development budget as another rejoinder to Big Ag’s doubters.

Opening his laptop, he demonstrates an app that uses drone footage of his fields to show the spots where weeds are taking hold. The high-resolution images can pick up discoloration on the leaves of a single plant, and point farmers to the precise areas where they need to apply fungicide, improving their yields.

“One of the things people misunderstand is they think companies like Syngenta are all about volume. We’re not. We want fewer products applied but with better results,” Rowe says. “The innovation we’re bringing helps the US farmer.”

Rowe’s trips to the family farm are sporadic these days, though he makes a point of being there for planting and harvesting. On this trip, Rowe says, he was out mowing when some wire got stuck in the machinery. “Myself, my dad, and my son were all working on it; nobody was going to give up,” he says. In the face of such obscure challenges, farmers soon learn to work out solutions for themselves, he notes. “It’s not like you can Google it.”

The incident reminded him of when he was young and he would radio to his father from the tractor whenever he encountered a problem. “Finally, he said, ‘figure it out,’” Rowe recalls. He sees that now as useful training for his current role: As a CEO, as on the farm, “There is no manual.”