no other financial terms, saying only that they would share in development costs and profits from microbial products commercialized from the new alliance. With the deal, Novozymes’ portfolio of already commercialized microbial products transferred to Monsanto, which is now using its global scale and market reach to sell those products worldwide.
Novozymes is best known as an enzymes company whose products are used in a wide array of applications such as laundry detergents, biofuel production, and wastewater treatment. Food industry applications of enzymes include baking bread and brewing beer. But Novozymes sees agricultural applications as a growth opportunity.
“When you think of it, 60 percent of Novozymes’ business touches agriculture in some form—fields, food production, beverage, starch business, or bread,” Bletsky says. “At the root of this was primary agriculture, which Novozymes wanted to get into.”
Since the process of making enzymes employs microbes, they pose an obvious entry point to agriculture for Novozymes. A single gram of topsoil can contain more than 1 billion microbes, including 20,000 species of bacteria and 10,000 fungi. The challenge is figuring out how a particular microbe helps a particular plant.
The idea is not a new one. Legumes such as peas, beans, and soybeans all have a well-known, symbiotic relationship with so-called rhizobia bacteria, which convert nitrogen from the air into ammonia that the plant can use. The legumes, in turn, produce nodules that provide these microbes what that they need to thrive. The benefit of nitrogen-fixing bacteria was observed by the ancient Romans, says Gwyn Beattie, a professor of plant pathology and microbiology at Iowa State University. They would take soil from legume fields and apply it in another field. The new crops grew better. The Romans may not have understood the science of microbes but by transferring soil they were also transferring beneficial bacteria, Beattie explains.
But a centuries-long awareness of the benefits of microbials is only now beginning to translate into new microbial products. Researchers in the 1990s had hopes of developing biological controls for agriculture that could replace chemicals, but it did not happen. Beattie says identifying beneficial microbes and understanding how they worked proved difficult. New technology, including advanced gene sequencing, is changing that.
“Our molecular tools and our scientific tools to work with microbes have increased greatly in the last decade,” Beattie says. “We can actually answer questions we couldn’t answer 20 years ago.”
Novozymes was formed in 2000 when it spun off from pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk. It added microbials to its business portfolio in 2001 with its acquisition of Salem, VA-based Sybron Biochemicals, a company that developed and sold microorganisms for applications such as wastewater treatment. At the time, Sybron was also developing microbes for grass and crops. Sybron became part of Novozymes’ biologicals business unit.
In 2007, Novozymes bought Philom Bios in Canada. With a new critical mass, Novozymes formally established bioagricultural business as its own business unit. Executives also set a goal: $250 million in annual bioag sales by 2018—up from $15 million in 2007. The unit making progress toward that goal, with sales topping
