Monsanto Co. is aiming to tackle a looming global food shortage, in a move seen as potentially improving its frayed reputation and boosting its bottom line long term.
In a strategic alliance with Danish enzyme maker Novozymes NZYMB, -0.10% NVZMY, -1.34% the agricultural biotech giant MON, -1.00% is tapping into the almost $2 billion microbes market in trying to unlock the potential from the latest hot trend in farming: using nature’s own organisms to boost crop yields and reduce the use of fertilizers.
This so-called biological agriculture, or just BioAg for insiders, is a non-chemical way of coating plant seeds with microbes to help them better take up nutrients from the soil, improve water usage and help plants fend off pests and diseases. Sort of like eating probiotics, which are naturally found in the human body, to improve health.
“The world’s going to add 2 billion people by 2050. And the world’s getting hotter, drier, dustier, climate change is happening, water is becoming scarce. We’re using 70% of fresh water today and we won’t get any more. We won’t get any more land. We’re using all the land we can use,†said Brett Begemann, Monsanto president and chief operating officer.
“It’s about yields and how do we get the yields higher. And this is another effort to drive yields to increase the productivity of food and manage the sustainability of our planet,†he said.
he United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that farmers will need to produce 70% more food by 2050 to meet the needs of a global population estimated to grow to 9.6 billion people by then. In a report from 2011, the organization warned that about a quarter of all farmland is significantly degraded, calling for a major revamp, or “sustainable intensificationâ€, of existing land resources.
And this is where biological farming comes in. Farmers were already using naturally-occurring microbes before pesticides and chemical fertilizers entered the scene, but in a less targeted way and without knowing where and how they worked.
The latest push into microbes research is helping identify which organisms can work on specific crops, where and to what extent, with the aim of helping the industry optimize output. It could alter the economics of Big Ag companies, if the microbes help increase yields in industrial crops, such as corn and soybeans that are used for animal feed. Another upside of microbes is that they can be used without chemical fertilizers and therefore leave less of a footprint on the environment.
“One of the big things microbes can really do for us is ... to restore the soil back to a productive state. So it’s not just a yield increase, but you’re talking about pulling land back into production,†said Gwyn Beattie, professor of biology at Iowa State University in Ames and a specialist in microbes.
This is particularly the case in the developing world, where farmland has been depleted of nutrients and degraded over time, she said.
