Case study · Syngenta, 2011–2026
Global Agricultural Recommendation Platform
Fifteen years building E-Luminate, GHX Fields, and Cropwise for Syngenta: from a regional sustainability tool to seed-recommendation systems that a few hundred advisors use to serve 10,000+ growers per platform, across North America, South America, and Europe. Some details stay at category level out of respect for client confidentiality; everything here is public-safe.
The problem
Every region farms differently
A seed recommendation depends on agronomic data, weather, product catalogs, territory rules, discounts, and sales hierarchies — and every one of those works differently in Iowa, Mato Grosso, and Hungary. Building a separate app per market would have buried the team in duplicate work. The durable value was a set of platform abstractions that absorbed regional differences instead of multiplying them.
Architecture
The shape of the platform
Described at category level — enough to show the shape of the system without exposing client internals.
Commercial Web Apps
Seller and agronomist tools that grew from a regional sustainability app into recommendation systems used by a few hundred advisors serving 10,000+ growers.
Recommendation & Catalog Systems
Whole-farm seed strategy, product catalogs, branded PDF generation, soil and weather characteristics, discount and diversification logic.
Enterprise Integrations
Salesforce, SAP, regional sales hierarchies, product catalogs, and territory abstractions shared across product teams.
AI Analysis
Root Cause proactively analyzes agronomic and environmental patterns across 90,000 fields a week, surfacing concerns and suggested mitigations.
Cloud Modernization
Twenty systems moved from Azure click-ops and .NET Framework to AWS CDK, Fargate, Lambda, and VPC-segmented infrastructure in six months.
Operations & Trust
OpenTelemetry with Grafana, Prometheus/Mimir, Loki, and Tempo, centralized secrets, and the operational maturity behind a 2025 SOC 2 Type 2 audit.
My role
What I was accountable for
Primary technical partner to Syngenta for fifteen years, 2011 through 2026.
Owned architecture and modernization strategy across cloud, services, integrations, data, and UI.
Led delivery across product stakeholders and engineering teams in the US, India, Brazil, Egypt, and Europe.
Mentored and planned the handoff so Syngenta’s internal teams could own the platforms outright.
Outcomes
What the numbers say
- E-Luminate / GHX Fields: a few hundred advisors serving 10,000+ growers across the US and Canada.
- Cropwise: similar scale in international markets including Argentina, Brazil, Germany, Ukraine, and Hungary.
- Azure-to-AWS migration: 20 systems in six months, 25% lower burn rate, 75% faster deployments.
- Enterprise integrations with Salesforce, SAP, and a sales-hierarchy abstraction reused across regions.
- SOC 2 Type 2 passed in 2025, built on observability and processes the team already ran.
- Root Cause shipped to production in 2026: 90,000 fields analyzed weekly, reaching 90% of growers.
Timeline
Fifteen years in five steps
Engagement begins: E-Luminate, a regional sustainability and recommendation tool.
The platform becomes central to North America Seeds digital recommendations; later rebranded GHX Fields.
Cropwise extends the work internationally. Stack modernizes to TypeScript/React, .NET Core, Node.js, and AWS.
SOC 2 Type 2 passed, following the six-month migration of 20 systems to AWS.
Root Cause AI ships; platforms transition to Syngenta’s internal teams.
Technology
The stack, with receipts
Cloud
AWS CDK, Fargate, Lambda, API Gateway, VPC, Azure migration
Migrated 20 systems from Azure to AWS in six months: 25% lower burn rate, 75% faster deployments.
AI
LLM APIs, Root Cause, report generation, vLLM, Ollama
Root Cause analyzes 90,000 fields a week in production; local-model experiments with vLLM and Ollama.
Observability
OpenTelemetry, Grafana, Loki, Tempo, Prometheus/Mimir, Datadog
Instrumented the Syngenta platforms end to end; the same telemetry became SOC 2 audit evidence.
Enterprise Integrations
Salesforce, SAP, internal systems, sales hierarchy abstraction
One sales-hierarchy abstraction serving commercial workflows across three continents.
Backend Platforms
.NET, .NET Core, Node.js, REST APIs, Redis, RabbitMQ, Temporal
Service boundaries, caching, and workflow engines for systems that have run for over a decade.
Frontend & Mobile
TypeScript, React, Knockout migration, iOS, Android, React Native
From Pocket PC field devices in the early 2000s to the React tools advisors use with growers today.
Deep Systems
MySQL internals, GPS hardware, geospatial math, rendering/performance
Custom MySQL storage engine: daily data growth cut from 1TB to 12GB, 20-minute jobs down to 20 seconds.