The Mosaic Company has built a multi billion-dollar fertilizer business, but the major ag supplier is not afraid of disrupting its own industry by investing heavily in biological innovation, Anne Runkel, the company’s VP of product innovation, told AgNavigator.
Runkel joined Mosaic by way of the fertilizer company’s acquisition of Plant Response in 2022, a biological start-up spun out of the Technical University of Madrid. A year and a half after that acquisition, the ag supplier launched Mosaic Biosciences, leveraging Plant Response’s expertise as it expanded its presence in the biologicals.
Investing in biologics that cut fertilizer usage might seem counterintuitive for a major fertilizer supplier, but bio-based crop inputs provide unique solutions to farmers’ challenges, whether that’s nutrient efficiency or water usage, Runkel noted.
Mosaic offers a portfolio of bio-stimulants and fertilizer complements, including BioPath, PowerCoat, RootHoney Plus, and Refirma HydraGuard.
“We’d rather disrupt our own space and be part of that solution, and Mosaic does think very seriously about what the customer needs are [and] what the problems are that the customers have today. And we’re seeing solutions coming from the biological space that cannot — right now — be solved by some of the fertilizer-based solutions or some chemical-based solutions. So, we want to be on that leading edge,” Runkel emphasized.
Inside Mosaic’s partnership with Elicit Plant
On July 22, Mosaic revealed another part of its biological innovation strategy: a partnership with French Elicit Plant to use its proprietary EliTerra technology platform to develop canola products that maintain yield potential under water stress for the North American market.
“Canola is a strategic crop for Canadian agriculture and is particularly exposed to climate-related risks. Through EliTerra innovative technology, which helps plants optimize their water use efficiency, we aim to develop a solution that can help growers preserve yield potential when water availability becomes a limiting factor,” Eran Kosover, chief commercial officer at Elicit Plant, said in a press release.
Founded in 2017, Elicit Plant’s technology is developed on the science of phytosterols, plant lipids that act similar to cholesterol in animal cells and are crucial to plant growth and stress responses.
With this research, Elicit Plant developed a portfolio of bio-stimulants for corn, sunflower, wheat, and spring barley, which can cut water demand by as much as 20%. As per the partnership, Mosaic and Elicit Plant will develop a similar solution for canola.
This comes as Western U.S. and Canada face inconsistent moisture levels, Runkel noted. Crop genetics have come a long way on improving water utilization, but traits alone cannot address the issue of water scarcity, she added.
“Advances in genetics have really brought us a long way in the last many years to improve crop productivity and yield. But there’s only so much that can be done at the genetic level, or at least some of those opportunities are limited to a certain extent by what the plant is able to do,” Runkel elaborated.
Validating biological crop inputs
Each year, Mosaic runs hundreds of field trials across the globe through a network of facilities and academic partnerships to validate the effectiveness of biologics, Runkel noted. Mosaic shares its field trial — both the good and bad — through its TruResponse platform, she added.
“There are multiple pieces that are interacting with a biological product, and so you do have to make sure you have got that education piece right, and you also have to have that validation across a lot of different places,” she elaborated.
