Achal Shah is VP, strategic development, at Monterey Holdings’ biotech division. He has spent over a decade advising and building alongside investors, startups, and large corporations across global food and agriculture value chains.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of AgFunderNews or Shah’s current or former employers.
The 2026 Farm Bill arrives at a defining moment: the US has been enforcing pre-2020 ag biotech regulations for over a year after a federal court vacated USDA’s modernized framework [which exempted certain gene-edited plants from regulation and shifted to a more streamlined, risk-based system].
On the other hand, Brazil and China have been deploying ag biotech at a pace and scale that should alarm anyone who believes food production is a matter of national security — and increasingly, it is.
I’ve worked on both sides of this industry — advising growers, investors, and food companies on strategy, and now building from inside it. The view is the same from every seat: America doesn’t have an innovation problem. It has a deployment problem.
How can policy help solve that problem? It comes down to three tests that US biotech policy must pass — speed, scale, and staying power — and on all three, the US is closer to the edge than Washington’s optimism suggests.
Speed: We are losing the biological clock
The US leads the world in ag biotech, but that lead is eroding, not in the lab, but in the gap between discovery and deployment.
The EU’s shift to a tiered New Genomic Techniques framework [which treats simpler gene-edited crops more like conventionally bred plants while keeping stricter GMO-style regulation for more complex genetic changes] was a regulatory achievement, not a scientific one. Gene-edited crops with no foreign DNA deserve a faster pathway, and European biotech companies are on track to operate on commercial timelines their US counterparts may not be able to match.
China has moved faster still on ag biotech regulations. According to USDA Foreign Agricultural Service reporting, industry estimates suggest that Chinese genetically engineered corn and soybean plantings in 2025 reached approximately three million hectares — more than four times the 2024 total. Beijing approved its first gene-edited rice variety in December 2024, with timelines shorter by design.
A genetically engineered trait developed simultaneously on both sides of the Atlantic — or the Pacific — will reach those fields first. That is a market share problem, an investment signal problem, and eventually a price problem for American growers.
The USDA’s “Farmer and Rancher Freedom Framework” is a genuine attempt to address this. Reducing administrative “lawfare”, i.e. duplicative data requests, unclear jurisdiction across USDA, EPA, and FDA, is necessary but not sufficient.
What would move the needle on ag biotech regulation? A single-window review for low-risk traits, a firm 18-month target for products currently taking 3+ years, and AI-assisted safety assessments that remove bottlenecks from low-stakes decisions. The new Farm Bill’s AI integration provisions give us the hook. We need the will to use it.
Scale: The Brazil bio-input story and what it means for the US
Specialty crops — fruits, vegetables, nuts — generate over $75 billion in annual farm-gate value in the US. They are not a niche, and they are dramatically underserved by the ag biotech investment that transformed corn and soy.
This is not a market failure — it is a regulatory economics problem. The fixed cost of federal approval makes sense when you are selling a trait into hundreds of millions of acres of corn. It may not make sense for a walnut cultivar bred for heat tolerance in the Sacramento Valley. The math doesn’t work, so the investment doesn’t come but the agronomic need still remains.
While we have been stuck in that trap, Brazil has been building something remarkable. Its bio-input market grew 15% in the 2023/2024 season and has averaged 21% annual growth over three years, four times the global average, according to CEPEA researchers at the University of São Paulo.
Brazil’s 2024 bio inputs law reduced biological product approval timelines by 50%, and its Plano ABC+ program reimburses up to half of verified biological spending. The result: Brazilian farmers deploy biologicals across cropping systems, from soy and corn to sugarcane and coffee.
If the US remains a “row-crop only” ag biotech nation, our dependency on imports for the healthy half of the American plate becomes a permanent strategic vulnerability.
The fix is available: commercialization vouchers [that would subsidize or expedite federal regulatory approval for low-risk biotech traits] to offset approval costs for specialty crop startups, regional trial networks for smaller developers, and policy language that treats bio-inputs as infrastructure.
The 2026 Farm Bill’s existing Biorefinery and Biobased Product Manufacturing update [that provides loan guarantees to support the development, construction, and retrofitting of commercial facilities that produce advanced biofuels, renewable chemicals, and other biobased products] proves we know how to design such programs. Apply the same logic to biotech.
Staying power: Margin is the mission
None of the above matters if farmers cannot survive long enough to use it. Production expenses have outpaced commodity prices for two consecutive years, and farmers are not asking about gene-editing timelines — they are asking how to make next year’s numbers work. The policy conversation must shift from yield metrics to margin metrics.
Brazil points toward the model. Its government didn’t just approve nitrogen-fixing biologicals — it embedded them in farming’s financial architecture through reimbursement programs and carbon-credit linkages that make first-season adoption rational.
American growers face the opposite: yield uncertainty during transition can put an operation underwater before the savings materialize.
The solution is bridge mechanisms that shield early adopters, conservation programs that reward dollars saved per acre rather than acres enrolled, and investment in on-farm biomanufacturing that cuts exposure to the volatile chemical markets that drove input inflation. The policy framework to support this already exists — what’s needed is the political will to point it at this problem.
The honest caveat
I want to name the tension directly: faster approvals, specialty crop access, and margin protection all benefit the companies developing these tools – the companies I work for. However, the question Washington should be asking is whether these policies also benefit the person in the tractor.
My answer is yes — but only if the design is intentional. Vouchers should be conditioned on access agreements that don’t replicate seed industry concentration. Trial networks should include grower representation. Bridge mechanisms should be structured so risk reduction flows to the farmer, not just the technology licensor.
The Farm, Food, and National Security Act of 2026 is a genuine opportunity and a test: how can “national security agriculture” truly serve American farmers? Brazil and China are not waiting for the US to decide. Speed, scale, and staying power are the right rubric — but only if the staying power belongs to the farm operation.
That distinction, in my humble opinion, is worth fighting for.
