The Biologicals Boom
Getting small is already big business. The new biologicals take many forms: Some can be sprayed like the biological equivalent of chemical pesticides, herbicides, or insecticides. Sprays and seed coatings derived from naturally occurring microorganisms can also act as catalysts to enhance nutrient intake and stimulate growth.
For farmers, it's not simply about boosting plant health; they need to see a sufficient yield to justify the added expense, and, as one trade report from investment bank Piper Jaffray put it recently: "In many ways the industry is tracking in a similar manner to the seed industry in the 1980s as it is just waiting for one blockbuster product to open up a multi-decade stretch of unrelenting growth."
For instance, last month, Monsanto and Novozymes held a field day in Iowa to announce "transformational microbial products" that improved yields for corn and soybeans in field trials.
In recent years, Bayer acquired a bacterial seed treatment called Poncho/VOTiVO; Syngenta bought a company that controlled nematodes on soybeans with a bacterial seed coating that is toxic to the parasite. Others are working on fungal organisms that can enhance drought tolerance in corn. The advances are not expected to replace genetic modification or traditional breeding, but are seen as additional tools to feed the growing world.
Pam Marrone, who worked as an entomologist with Monsanto and is now CEO of Marrone Bio Innovations in Davis, California, has been developing new pesticides against a range of insects and mites derived from soil bacteria. Biologicals, she told me, are finally being recognized as the next big thing in agriculture. "It's like we're really at the tipping point," she says.
While 40 to 50 percent of our drugs are from natural sources, such as from plants and microbes, she says, only 11 percent of pesticides are. "There have been a lot of bio-prospectors in the drug world ... There's only a small percentage of pesticides that have been from the natural world, and so there's a lot of opportunity."
Correction: An earlier version of this story misstated the number of years since the Centralia coal fire began burning. It has been burning for more than 50 years.