Pam Marrone is fired up about biologicals. At the 2022 BiocontrolsSM USA Conference & Expo earlier this year, she predicted that within 20 years, sales of biological products would equal those of more traditional synthetics. Asked recently if she would elaborate on her prediction, Marrone says there are many reasons, but it all gets down to the one thing growers care about: Performance.
As more growers adopt biologicals, they will learn these new products can outperform synthetics in the field, which Marrone says they absolutely will. Not only that, biologicals are superior for many reasons, and the fast-talking scientist-turned-CEO — she hasn’t worked in a lab for decades, but she was originally an entomologist — says as that superiority becomes more evident, a sea change in crop protection is coming.
Marrone sat down recently for an interview with the host of the annual Biocontrols Conference, Meister Media Worldwide, in a conference room at Marrone Bio Innovations, which she founded in 2006, and where she remains on the board of directors. A true serial entrepreneur who founded lasting companies — her first, AgraQuest, was acquired by Bayer CropSciences — she’s now CEO of Chestnut Bio Advisors in Davis, CA. It’s an aptly named firm as it is advice these often youthful fellow start-up founders crave. Marrone’s hard-won wisdom costs a pretty penny in 1-1.5% equity – but not cash — as she says startups need to shepherd their funds carefully. But for that, you get someone who’s been in your situation you can consult anytime. More often than not, she says with a shrug and an understanding nod, they call at night.
But most of these young entrepreneurs involved in agricultural biological products need not worry. Marrone is excited about this new crop of biotech innovators and the new products they will be bringing to the industry in the future. She ticked off a few of the promising technologies she says will be used to improve biological products in the future, including gene editing, RNAi, fermentation methodologies, genome characterization, and synthetic biology. These will be game-changers, she says, improving biological products rapidly over their current, relatively primitive forms.
It may seem hard to grasp now, with biological products having just 5% of the market, how much agriculture will change in the coming two decades, Marrone says. A lot of it just has to do with the numbers. She notes the relative cost to develop a new synthetic product is now estimated at $300 million, so it’s no wonder there is just a new product or two approved each year. Compare that to the 20 to 30 promising new biological products being developed annually — thoroughly tested products, a far cry from some of the unproven biologicals of yesteryear — at a relative pittance compared to their chemical counterparts and in a greatly reduced time frame.
Another important factor for growers to consider is the improved biological products of today will likely pale in comparison to those of tomorrow, as vast improvements will be made. Such advancements have already been realized with familiar products that are constantly being updated, but the rate of change will only increase in the future.
Don’t get Marrone wrong, chemicals are certainly not going to disappear. For example, the industry’s frustration is there is no biological herbicide that has the potency of glyphosate, the long sought-after “organic Roundup.” Marrone says we will see it, too, in less than 20 years. But even at the end of that timeframe, there will still be a need for synthetic products in certain limited situations.
The frequency of such high-pressure episodes should decrease, she believes, and the conventional approach won’t be synthetic, it will be biological. Marrone says for that very reason she doesn’t like the term “conventional,” that “mainstream” is a much more descriptive term going forward so as not to confuse growers. In any event, she says synthetic won’t be mainstream. Rather than a farming system based on synthetics and supplemented with 5% biologicals, as we have today, in 20 years we will see a biological system supplemented with 5% chemicals. Using today’s language, the conventional approach in 2022 is synthetic; the conventional approach in 2042 will be biological.
A systemic biological approach will gradually begin to dominate the care of certain crops, Marrone says. Such a system already dictates control of some common pests today, such as the proverbial “worm in the apple,” the codling moth, a bane to many Western U.S. fruit and nut growers. “Right now, most of your codling moth control is done with pheromones, and it’s all biological as the base of the program,” she says. “Chemicals are only dialed in when there is a very high pest pressure.”
The key to this new approach is that it requires growers to take a more active, preventative approach to farming in general, and crop protection in particular. Rather than wait for pests to build until they reach the pressures of a certain economic threshold, as they do in today’s IPM programs, growers will need to try to prevent the buildup of such pests in the first place.
A whole new system starts from the ground up, and that’s where this transition will have to start, with the soil. What growers will reap from this new biological approach, Marrone says, is an increase in yields of quality product achieved with far fewer crop inputs. It should add up to more profits, and there’s nothing unconventional about that, though it will take a whole new approach to integrated pest management.
