Small innovators advance microbes as alternatives to chemical crop sprays - EmWaltz
Three deals in the last months of 2022 exemplify opposing trends within big ag. Corteva, a major seed and chemical company, in September signed a deal to buy Spanish plant microbe developer Symborg and in November announced it would acquire crop biologicals maker Stoller Group.
Companies have amassed huge libraries of fungi and bacteria sourced from around the world and are testing them in labs, greenhouses and fields to find species that could improve crop performance. Genome sequencing and machine learning algorithms help researchers narrow microbial candidates for testing. Some groups apply selective breeding pressure to microbes or genetic engineering techniques to push the organisms to do more for plants than native strains.
But whether it will be the small players or big ag that innovate and ultimately deliver plant microbials to growers is unclear. The technology is lightly regulated compared with chemicals and bioengineered crop traits. And microbe companies don’t need to own seed germplasm to develop their products, which opens the door for startups to play in this space.
“The reality is that [Bayer] has struggled to generate internal R&D in this space,” says Federico Trucco, CEO at Bioceres in Rosario, Argentina. “After ten years of frustration, they decided to give these things to Ginkgo to see if with synthetic biology they can fine-tune their ability to develop candidates,” he says.
Increasingly, conglomerates such as Bayer may want to leave the innovation to smaller companies and take on a partner role of moving microbial products through regulation and commercialization, says Trucco. “Proving efficacy is the number one issue,” says Wong at Anterra Capital. “There are companies that have multiple years of trial data, but they do vary quite a bit by crop and by region,” he says. This variability has dissuaded Wong’s firm from backing any plant microbe company so far. “We believe that farmers will use microbes in certain areas or for certain things, but the jury is still out on whether these are scalable products that farmers can use in a broad-spectrum way,” he says.
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