This year brought an unusually powerful set of mergers in the agricultural arena, Successful Farming reports. “The Big Six in the agricultural seed, chemical and traits area — BASF, Monsanto, Bayer, Dow, Syngenta and DuPont — are rapidly becoming the big four — BASF, Bayer-Monsanto, DowDuPont, and ChemChina-Syngenta. Acquisitions also took place in the machinery arena with AGCO’s purchase of Precision Planting. Ditto for data, as evidenced by DowDuPont’s purchase of Granular. It’s even happened on the farmer level, as some farmer-owned cooperatives merged.” The article gives a merger-by-merger rundown of the fallout from the biggest deals. That hits home in Greater Des Moines, where the DuPont Pioneer campus in Johnston is a major cog in a new company formed under the DowDuPont umbrella.