Scaling soil restoration requires effective, economically viable solutions. Biofertilizers and biostimulants are emerging as critical tools for this effort.
“We are the only ones we know of [developing biological products using predatory bacteria] in the field of agriculture,” says BioArmix CEO Dr. Tzvi Zvirin.
“Put it this way,” says Kevin Helash. “If you’re trying to fund an eight-year regulatory process with investors who have a window of five years, there’s a disconnect there.”
If traditional pesticides are blunt instruments for killing pests, RNAi (RNA interference) is the polar opposite, says Dr. John Husnik, CEO at Vancouver-based Renaissance Bioscience. “It’s exceptionally precise.”
From fungi to bacteriophages, biologicals have been developed to tackle everything from bacterial blight to fungal infections, says Santiago-based startup Exacta Bioscience. But many of them are not (yet) ready for prime time.
Success in biologicals is about so much more than the actual products, said a panel of investors at the recent Salinas Biologicals Summit
While it is true, as the saying goes, that ‘healthy soils produce healthy plants’, the question is: “What creates healthy soils?” asks John Kempf.
Through innovation, six major trends, from agrifintech to farm management software, are repositioning the sector and unlocking its game-changing potential.
Vive Crop Protection, a Canadian developer of crop protection products, plans to hold a second close of the round later this year as other investors continue due diligence.
When it comes to crops, biologicals are all the rage as a means to reduce agriculture’s environmental footprint – and increasingly as a solution to supply chain disruption. Decoy says livestock will be next.
Startups developing biological crop inputs secured a total of $892 million in funding last year.
Italy’s Valagro produces biostimulants and specialty nutrients for farming, as well as specialty ingredients for use in food, cosmetics, and animal feed.
Switching sharply to developing a vaccine for Covid-19 appears to have proved a boon for GreenLight Biosciences, a company that previously focused on developing biological pesticides.
You’ve probably heard of microbials used as seed coating and soil amendments but what about incorporating them directly into seeds?
Chemical fungicides are a tried and tested way to get rid of fungal outbreaks like powdery mildew and botrytis; but many of these are coming under scrutiny from consumers and regulators. So Biotalys is working to produce biological alternatives by mimicking the immune response of certain animals, such as llamas.
Boost’s microbe discovery platform enables it to conduct multiple micro-experiments to measure the performance and interactions of different microbes in agriculture.
Although it’s interested in biologics, it claims farmers still need the high rate of efficacy that chemical agriculture has to offer.
UK-based BigSIS has closed a pre-seed round of funding, AFN can reveal.
The Swiss company has secured an undisclosed amount of funding from California-based Agroecology Capital, an agtech venture capital firm.
Belgium’s startups are not always so easy to spell. For Ghent-based AgroSavfe, dire misspells have been an unfortunate but perhaps an avoidable feature since its founding and naming back in 2013.
