A seed tumbles through a planter quickly. There is barely time for drama. It leaves the meter, meets a measured dose of treatment, disappears down the tube, and enters the soil. Yet Nick Iwig has built a company around the decisions packed into those few seconds. Which product? How much? On this part of the field, for this crop, under these conditions, is the treatment likely to earn its cost?
For most of modern seed commerce, many of those choices have been made well before planting day. Treatment is applied upstream, then the farmer receives seed carrying a fixed package. Iwig’s argument is that a field is too variable, and new biological products can be too particular, for every useful choice to be locked in so early. His company, Inflexion Point Technologies, has spent years developing POP-ST, a prescriptive on-planter seed treater that moves application to the machine already crossing the field.
It is an idea about machinery, but its sharper edge is timing. Better information becomes useful only if a farmer still has permission to act on it. POP-ST is designed to preserve that permission until planting, varying products and rates by management zone and applying them to seed just before it reaches the ground.
01 / The long apprenticeship
Beer first, soybeans later
Iwig’s route to the planter began with agronomy. He graduated from Truman State University in 2000 with a bachelor’s degree in agriculture science and an agronomy emphasis. He continued at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, studying agronomy with an emphasis in range and forage science. The course list mattered less to him than its width. He later credited Truman’s “well-roundedness” and broad science requirements with giving him a flexible way to think.
Then came beer. After graduate school, Iwig and his wife, Becki, moved to northeast Wisconsin, where he managed a malt house for Anheuser-Busch. Malting is agriculture wearing industrial shoes: barley arrives with the biological potential to become something else, and the job is to control that transformation reliably. Iwig worked with brewmasters, consulted with ADM and Cargill malt plants, and encountered August Busch III. The setting was corporate, but the raw material was still a seed.
Five years later, he moved into hybrid corn as a district sales manager at Wyffels Hybrids. Nine months after that, DuPont Pioneer recruited him. He spent nearly three years as an account manager before moving into soybean product strategy. By 2011, he was describing the exciting part of the soybean pipeline as “the integration of improved genetics and traits that get the greatest value from each acre.” The sentence could sit comfortably beside his current work. The scale has simply narrowed from acre to seed.
At Pioneer, Iwig worked between long-range global product thinking and North American operating teams. Later roles at DuPont Crop Protection, Incotec, and Aginnovation added more layers: sales, commercial leadership, seed-treatment products, new product development, and emerging markets. He was learning the farmer’s economics, the seed company’s channel, the product maker’s constraints, and the equipment seller’s reality from inside each room.
“The most exciting thing is the integration of improved genetics and traits that get the greatest value from each acre planted to soybeans.”Nick Iwig, 2011
02 / The decision gets smaller
A treatment for this patch of earth
Inflexion Point Technologies was formed in Iowa in 2014. Iwig co-founded it with Steve Smith, whose background in agricultural licensing and patent law complemented Iwig’s commercial and agronomic experience. The pairing matters because farm hardware lives at an awkward intersection. It must be mechanically credible, agronomically useful, legally protectable, commercially legible, and simple enough to operate while weather is closing the planting window.
The company’s answer is modular. POP-ST is intended to fit new or existing planters across makes and ages. Prescription software chooses the product and rate for a management zone. A planter-mounted applicator delivers treatment into the seed flow. The treated seed is planted moments later. Different soil, hybrid, yield history, pest risk, or management practice can justify a different instruction.
The few seconds where the idea becomes soil
The commercial logic is as important as the application. A treatment that makes sense on vulnerable ground may not return its cost everywhere. A biological product may perform better when kept in its preferred state until use. A specialty treatment may be valuable but awkward to fit into a conventional pre-treatment channel. Applying on the planter creates another route to market and another way for farmers to decide.
“Our POP-ST technology increases the number of valuable technologies a farmer can apply to seeds compared to current practices,” Iwig said when the company announced field work with Beck’s. He emphasized the ability to keep biological treatments in an optimal state until real-time deployment. It is a practical version of optionality: delay the commitment, preserve the product, use it where the case is strongest.
03 / Hardware needs friends
The partnership is part of the machine
A patent can describe an elegant sequence. Planting season is less polite. Dust gets everywhere. Components vibrate. Operators have work to finish before weather changes. A company with a small public headcount cannot manufacture every controller, validate every crop treatment, reach every farmer, and service every planter alone. Iwig’s operating method has therefore been a chain of partnerships.
Beck’s agreed to run field trials beginning in spring 2022. ALMACO research planters carried POP-ST equipment. Biological product companies participated in the trial network. Those relationships let each participant bring a familiar piece: farmer-facing seed research, specialized planter engineering, treatment chemistry, or system integration.
Agronomy, seed strategy, business development, and agricultural intellectual property meet in Urbandale.
The prescriptive seed-treatment patent family begins with a filing that later reaches the United States and Europe.
Beck’s tests POP-ST using research planters equipped by ALMACO, with biological partners involved.
Patent No. 12,102,027 names Iwig, Smith, Mark Iwig, and Pat Parks as inventors.
TeeJet and Inflexion Point Technologies announce a commercialization partnership.
The TeeJet relationship addresses the next problem: scale. TeeJet contributes electronics, controllers, and a global application-technology platform. Inflexion Point contributes the treatment system and its intellectual property. The partners say the resulting setup is designed for installation without asking a farmer to replace the planter or abandon existing working relationships.
“POP-ST was built to expand farmer choice and unlock the next class of seed treatments.”Nick Iwig, 2025
That quote reveals Iwig’s role in the company. He is not presented as the lone tinkerer at a workbench. His public biography emphasizes business and product development and the relationships with seed and equipment companies. His career has been spent translating between people who see the same seed differently: as genetics, inventory, machinery throughput, crop potential, treatment opportunity, or farm expense.
04 / The broad education pays rent
A generalist at seed scale
Iwig once advised agriculture students to consider graduate school even when the benefit was not immediately visible. He also credited continued networking with helping him work across diverse groups and recognize unfamiliar opportunities. Those comments now read like a description of his company-building method. POP-ST requires depth, but commercialization requires range.
The same pattern appears outside his paid work. His public volunteer history includes mentoring Truman State students, serving with youth ministry, registering players for a soccer club, organizing an elementary-school fundraiser, and founding a youth basketball program called STARS. The acronym stood for Sportsmanship, Teamwork, Attitude, Respect, and Success. It is earnest, unmistakably so, and consistent with a profile that describes him as faith-based and entrepreneurial.
There is also a quiet lesson in how long the work has taken. Inflexion Point Technologies began in 2014. The patent application that became U.S. Patent No. 12,102,027 was filed in 2015 and granted in October 2024. Field demonstrations continued in Iowa in 2026. Farm technology advances through legal calendars, engineering calendars, funding calendars, and the stubborn annual calendar of planting. Urgency cannot make spring arrive twice.
What Iwig appears to want is specific: more farmer choice, more room for biological and regenerative products, and treatment spending directed to places where it can create value. None of that guarantees a result on any acre. It does change the precision of the question a farmer can ask.
A highway view turns a field into one green rectangle. The planter experiences it foot by foot. Iwig’s career has moved in the same direction, from large product portfolios and broad markets toward the brief passage of a single seed. The destination is not smaller ambition. It is a smaller unit of decision, made later, with more of the ground’s own evidence in hand.