Scientists want to replace pesticides with bacteria
Tue Apr 17 2018
Fresh snow coats the sidewalks
outside Indigo Ag Inc.’s Boston offices, but inside the temperature is
calibrated to mimic spring in the Midwest. Hundreds of almost identical soy
seedlings sit beneath high-intensity arc lamps, basking in the artificially
sunny 60F weather.
The plants aren’t destined to
stay identical for long. “We haven’t imposed the stress yet,” says Geoffrey von
Maltzahn, the company’s lanky 37-year-old co-founder. The MIT-trained
microbiologist gestures toward photos showing what happens when you apply Indigo’s
signature product — a coating of carefully chosen microbes — to some seeds but
not others before planting, then dial back the water supply: One shows a tall,
flourishing stalk; the other, what looks like a tangle of shriveled leaves.
In humans, a healthy microbiome —
the universe of bacteria, fungi, and viruses that lives inside all of us — is
increasingly recognised as critical to overall health. The same is true of the
plant world, and Indigo is among the dozen or so agricultural technology startups
trying to take advantage of the growing scientific consensus. Their work is
enabled by advances in machine learning and a steep reduction in the cost of
genetic sequencing, used by companies to determine which microbes are present.
Approaches vary: AgBiome LLC, with funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates
Foundation, is studying how microbes can help control sweet potato weevils in
Africa, while Ginkgo Bioworks Inc announced a $100 million joint venture with
Bayer AG to explore how microbes can encourage plants to produce their own
nitrogen.
Indigo is the best-funded of the
bunch, having raised more than $400 million. To develop its microbial
cocktails, Indigo agronomists comb through normal fields in dry conditions to
see which plants seem healthier than average. They take samples of the thriving
plants and “fingerprint” their microbiomes using genetic sequencing; once
they’ve done this with thousands of samples, they use statistical methods to
pick out which microbes occur most often in the healthiest plants. These
proceed to testing, then large-scale field trials.
The company’s first commercial
products are focused on improving drought tolerance, one of the most difficult
traits to address through genetic modification. “It’s like a symphony,” founder
von Maltzahn says of a plant’s reaction to water stress, “and GMOs are like
slamming down on one note on one instrument.” Drought conditions are likely to
become a greater threat to agriculture because of global warming. Indigo is
also investing heavily in research and development efforts to see how microbes
influence factors such as nitrogen use and pest resistance, aiming to reduce or
even eliminate the use of synthetic pesticides and fertilizers as well as
genetically modified seeds. With the general public rejecting chemical
treatments and GMOs in favour of “natural” foods, Indigo is counting on a
potentially multibillion-dollar market. So far, its microbe coatings have
boosted cotton yields by an average of 14 percent in full-scale commercial
trials in Texas and wheat yields by as much as 15 percent in Kansas.
Indigo chief executive officer
David Perry doesn’t want to just market a suite of seed treatments, however. He
wants to reshape the structure of the agriculture industry completely,
competing not only with chemical companies such as Monsanto and Dow Chemical,
but also with agricultural distributors like Cargill and Archer Daniels
Midland. Perry, a biochemist who grew up on a small farm in rural Arkansas,
founded two pharma-related companies, a drugmaker he eventually sold for
multiple billions of dollars and an online marketplace for research supplies
that went public in 1999. After joining Indigo in 2015, Perry quickly zeroed in
on a fundamental business challenge: Most farmers have no choice but to sell
their harvest at commodity prices. Without the opportunity to earn more for
using environmentally sustainable methods, they have little incentive to alter
their ways.
For farmers to adopt Indigo
technology, they’d need a buyer willing to pay a premium for non-GMO,
pesticide-free products. So, Perry reasoned, Indigo would facilitate the sale.
Today the company contracts upfront with hundreds of farmers to buy their
entire harvest of, say, Indigo Wheat, at a hefty premium. “Now you’re growing a
value-added product, and that starts to go directly to farm profitability,” he
says. Indigo then sells the wheat to end users such as breweries, flour mills,
and food companies, which have become more interested in transparency and
control when it comes to the origin of their grains. Perry says he’s betting on
a long-term shift away from commodity agriculture and toward specialty markets,
as the coffee and cocoa industries are seeing.
While the science behind
microbiome treatments is promising, Indigo has a long road ahead. Its success
depends on proving that microbes can meaningfully influence more than just
drought tolerance while at the same time scaling up to the kind of sprawling,
complex operation that can buy and sell millions of bushels of grain from tens of
thousands of farms.
Michael Dean, chief investment
officer for the venture capital investment platform AgFunder Inc, sees Indigo’s
technologies as potentially disruptive but suggests that one of the biggest
challenges the company will face is persuading farmers to turn their back on
comfortable relationships with Big Ag. “Farmers have tended to buy seed from
the guy their dad bought from, and sold it to the same grain elevator,” Dean
says. “This is going to make waves, and not everyone will be happy about it.”
Source: http://www.mydigitalfc.com/miscellany/scientists-want-replace-pesticides-bacteria