Upstream Ag Professional - October 12th 2025

Welcome to the 114th edition of Upstream Ag Professional

Index

1. Revolutionizing Wheat: A look at Corteva, and Competitors, Hybrid Wheat Initiatives

2. Vive Secures $10 Million in Oversubscribed Financing Round

3. Icafolin-methyl ‘a completion of glyphosate,’ not a replacement: in conversation with Bayer

4. Profluent announces multi-year collaboration with Corteva to accelerate sustainable, AI-powered crop innovation

5. OerthBio Shuts Down

6. FBN: Marketplace Supply and Demand

7. The Invisible Competitor: When Creating Value is Better than Fighting for It

8. Other Interesting Ag Articles (10 this week)

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This week’s audio edition can be found here and covers the following:

1. Revolutionizing Wheat: A look at Corteva, and Competitors, Hybrid Wheat Initiatives

2. Vive Secures $10 Million in Oversubscribed Financing Round

3. Profluent announces multi-year collaboration with Corteva to accelerate sustainable, AI-powered crop innovation

4. OerthBio Shuts Down

1. Revolutionizing Wheat: A Look at Corteva, and Competitors, Hybrid Wheat Initiatives - Upstream Ag Professional

Key Takeaways

• Corteva’s nuclear gene–based sterility system marks a credible path to scalable, economically viable hybrid wheat in North America.

• Hybrid wheat still faces hurdles in North America— high seed production costs and uncertain farmer adoption in a traditionally low-margin/expense crop.

Two weeks ago I listened to Revolutionary Wheat Breeding: Hybrid Wheat, an episode on Corteva’s Agriscience Explained podcast.

I have been curious on Corteva’s breakthrough capability to make hybrid wheat commercially viable in North America and the podcast did a fantastic job of explaining. It also made me curious to look more at where major competitors to Corteva, like Bayer, BASF and Syngenta are on their route to hybrid wheat.

Index

1. What is Hybrid Wheat

2. Why Wheat Is Harder Than Corn and Corteva’s Breakthrough

3. Apomixis

4. The Commercial Hurdle and Pioneer Channel

5. Competitive Dynamics

   1. BASF

   2. Bayer

   3. Syngenta

6. Final Thoughts

Hybrid Wheat

Hybrid wheat has long been pursued for the same reason corn hybrids transformed agriculture: yield gains from hybrid vigor and stress tolerance.

Hybrid wheat is created by crossing two different wheat plants to produce offspring that combine the best traits of both parents. The goal is to capture hybrid vigor — where the first-generation seeds are more robust than either parent line alone, just like in corn or canola for example.

Developing hybrid wheat has taken decades because wheat naturally self-pollinates, making controlled crosses difficult and costly. But once perfected, hybrid wheat could help farmers achieve more consistent yields, better yield stability and improved quality.

Corteva is moving Hybrid Wheat closer to commercial reality with a 2027 target launch, combining three decades of research with genetic breakthroughs and clever seed production systems.

Why Wheat Is Harder Than Corn

In 2011, I remember sitting in a presentation where the statement was that hybrid wheat would be launched in North America in 2020.

2020 came and went without hybrid wheat in North America, with many entities entering, and leaving the hybrid wheat efforts.

Wheat physiology and reproduction work against hybridization:

• Wheat is self-pollinating, unlike corn’s natural cross-pollination.

• Each wheat head contains dozens of tightly packed florets, making manual or mechanical sterility control nearly impossible.

• The crop cycle, specifically for winter wheat, is long (planted in fall, harvested next summer), slowing breeding progress.

• Wheat only flowers for a short time, leaving a narrow pollination window, meaning lower success rates.

• Wheat produces very little pollen compared to other crops. What pollen it does produce is very heavy, making it more difficult to move from male to female plants. 

In November 2024 Corteva announced a breakthrough that would enable them to scaleably and cost effectively commercialize hybrid wheat in North America.

Historically, there are two methods used in hybrid production. Cytoplasmic Male Sterility (CMS) systems breed sterility into the female line and restore fertility in the hybrid through a restorer gene, but they’re difficult to stabilize in wheat’s genome and can cause inconsistent performance. Chemical Hybridizing Agents (CHAs), temporarily suppress pollen formation through a chemical spray, simplifying breeding but adding cost, timing risk, and environmental sensitivity — all challenging in wheat.

Apomixis has been considered a potential avenue for hybrid wheat. It is a form of asexual seed formation where plants produce seeds genetically identical to the mother, effectively cloning themselves through seed rather than fertilization. For breeders, it could lock in hybrid vigor, allowing one high-performing hybrid to be replanted indefinitely without losing yield or consistency. The challenge is that apomixis involves multiple, poorly understood biological steps such as suppressing meiosis, forming embryos without fertilization, and developing viable endosperm, which no one has yet replicated reliably in wheat. Even if solved, its commercial incentive is limited, since farmers could save seed indefinitely.

Newer nuclear gene-based sterility systems have been shown to be better overcome both issues by controlling sterility directly within the plant’s genome. They’re more stable, precise, and scalable— offering a clearer, lower-cost path to consistent hybrid seed production.

Corteva’s key innovation is a nuclear male sterility system.

For the full article, including a base overlook of the Corteva system and where Syngenta, Bayer and BASF are on hybrid wheat, check out the link above.

2. The Insight is the Edge: Vive Crop Protection - Upstream Ag Professional

• Vive Crop Protection raised a $10 million round.

• Unique companies are built with a counterintuitive approaches to the markets. Vive’s view is that the economics are better in novel formulation and specific product development rather than discovery.

This week Vive Secured $10 Million in an Oversubscribed Financing Round:

Vive Crop Protection has a unique approach to the market, too that I did a deep dive into.

True strategic advantage rarely begins with technology or talent. It begins with insight.

An insight is more than a piece of data or an observation. 

It is the ability to see clearly, often counterintuitively, into a market, a customer, or a capability. When acted upon, it becomes the foundation of a differentiated strategy.

As Michael Porter famously argued, competitive advantage is a function of choice: a firm must not only decide where to compete but how it will do so differently. The worst outcome is strategic ambiguity— being stuck in the middle, pursuing multiple directions at once and achieving none.

Insight is what prevents that. It clarifies direction. It exposes opportunities that others overlook. And it provides the conviction to commit.

In today’s ag input sector, an industry long driven by blockbuster chemical discovery and global-scale product launches, one example of a company demonstrating the power of insight-led strategy is Vive Crop Protection.

Rather than chase billion-dollar molecules, Vive is rethinking the structure of crop protection product development. Its model is not built on invention, but on a sharper understanding of where value is being lost and how it can be recaptured through formulation, delivery, and farmer-first design.

As I wrote in The Insight is the Edge:

Historical Product Development is Discovery Led

For decades, the crop protection industry has operated under a high-capital, long-cycle model of product development. As recently as the early 2000s, the best return on an R&D dollar came from discovering novel active ingredients that addressed broad pest challenges. Companies that uncovered these new molecules could command a premium, protected by patents, regulatory exclusivity, and reinforced their dominant market access. Everything else, formulation, even regulatory navigation, was viewed as either a cost of doing business or a technical necessity to enable the molecule’s launch.

In crop protection, a company’s period of exclusivity was essentially the length of its patent and regulatory data protections, such as the U.S. EPA’s data exclusivity period, minus the length of time the molecule spent in development. The result? A 10 to 15 year window of limited competition, pricing power, and high-margin.

But the landscape has changed. In line with Eroom’s Law — the observation that in pharmaceuticals, discovery is becoming slower and more expensive, can be appropriately applied to crop protection molecules too.

The low-hanging fruit has been picked. Regulatory scrutiny has intensified. The cost of bringing a new active ingredient to market has soared, as has competition from generics, part of the contributor to challenges in declining crop protection manufacturers’ margins:

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