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Innovation in the biologicals space is being a deeper scale in ways that that we can’t do right
driven not just by goals to reduce greenhouse now.”
gas emissions in corporate supply chains, but by Joyn Bio is working on what Miille calls a “pro-
the impact of the changing climate on farming, grammable platform” that would allow microbes
said Joyn Bio’s Miille. to be engineered to address specific problems such

“Agriculture has a responsibility to come up with as pests or nutrient deficiencies. He likens the
innovations and ways to provide new solutions microbes to a “chassis” that can carry a “cargo”
in a much shorter timeframe,” he said, noting such as an enzyme or protein that, for example,
that new seed traits or chemicals can take more would allow the plant to fend off a specific pest.
than a decade to get to market. “We’re looking for a very small set of microbes
Because of climate change, farmers face “a out there that colonize a specific plant really
really uncertain future about what’s going to hit well, is easy to engineer and has a nice safety
them next,” Miille said. “There are going to be profile,” he says. “Once we have those, that’s
diseases and pest problems that spring up in new where we think we can then have a platform
places. Agriculture is going to be challenged by where you sort of dial up what you want.”
how fast change is coming, and how fast you can Once a chassis has been registered, Miille said
come up with solutions to combat that.” “the registration process should be much easier.
Seed traits also are a way to demonstrate resil- This is where we actually believe that we could
ience. Syngenta says its Agrisure Artesian corn get the development cycle down to five to six
hybrids contain “multiple genes for season-long years, or roughly half of what it is today” for
drought protection” and consistently deliver chemicals or seed traits.
higher yields than competitive products. “You can start to imagine almost a plug-and-

“These are pretty incredible,” says Warren Kru- play platform where you can dial up a solution,”
ger, newly appointed head of North American he said. “The dream would be that we could
Seeds Development at Syngenta, linking the per- engineer a microbe that could both capture
formance of the hybrids to research Syngenta and keep CO2 in the soil and at the same time
conducts under “managed-stress” environments. increase the yield of the crop.”

In a presentation at the recent Syngenta Media METHANE DIGESTERS
Summit, Kruger said the challenge in a cli-
mate-changed world “is to create winning reli- Benefits: Significantly reduce methane
able genetics that are going to perform consis- emissions from livestock operations, replac-
tently, even though the conditions on the farm ing some fossil fuel use. Reduce farm odor.
are constantly changing.”
Prospects: Deployed on many large
At the same summit, Laura Potter, global head dairy operations, and now they’re being
of Analytics & Data Sciences at Syngenta, added to some swine operations.
talked about improved tools to measure plant
performance under different conditions. Challenges: Equipment costs millions of
dollars, and they require access to a lot of
“As the satellite technology continues to improve, manure to make them cost-effective.
we get higher and higher resolution images,” she
said. “And then the ability to have different kinds Driven in part by climate change regula-
of spectral images coming in gives us the chance tions enacted in California, the installation
to be able to measure phenotypes at a larger and of methane digesters on dairy and swine

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