OCTOBER 2026 | SEEDWORLD.COM/EUROPE I SEED WORLD EUROPE I 65 PARTNER CONTENT A bag of seed contains years of decisions made before anyone knows what a particular growing season will bring. The technology may be changing rapidly, but the measure of suc cess remains practical: does the seed deliver when it reaches the field? CROP PROTECTION IS BECOMING MORE PRECISE If plant breeding tries to anticipate what a crop will encounter, crop protection has to respond to what actually shows up. From outside agriculture, that can look deceptively straight forward: there is a weed, disease or pest problem, a farmer applies a product and the crop is protected. Seeing the research behind that process makes it much harder to think of crop pro tection as simply chemistry in a jug. One scientist we met at Monheim was standing inside a chamber built to simulate everything from light precipitation to tropical rain. Knowing that a molecule works isn’t enough. Researchers also need to understand how it interacts with plants and performs in the real world. “I’m fascinated by chemistry because I’m a chemist by train ing, but I acknowledge the importance of the interaction with the plants,” said Silvia Cerezo-Galvez, one of the many multi-disci plinary scientists I met during my visit. “We need to know how the products are going to perform under a variety of conditions.” The challenge is understanding the molecule, plant and environment well enough to make control reliable. That gives precision a broader meaning. It can mean designing molecules for specific targets, but also knowing more precisely when, where and how an intervention is needed. We heard about research that could eventually allow an application to target only an infected plant rather than treating every square metre in the same way. As one researcher put it, “80% of what the scientists do in the labs was not possible five years ago.” That pace is key. Pests evolve, resistance develops and growing conditions change. The question is increasingly not simply whether we can control a problem, but how selectively and reliably we can do it. MAKING NATURE RELIABLE IS HARD The word “natural” sounds deceptively simple. Spend time with scientists trying to turn a beneficial organism or plant-derived compound into a dependable biological product and that sim plicity disappears quickly. “[Biologicals] are more influenced than synthetic products when it comes to their soil or the climate or their environment,” Frank Terhorst, VP Strategy & Sustainability, said. Then come the practical hurdles. “They need to go through steps of fermentation,” explained Florian Jupe, EMEA & Asia Plant Health Hub Lead. “Quite often, shelf life may not be exactly what we currently have with a chemistry standard.” Finding an organism or compound that produces a useful response is different from turning that response into something a farmer can depend on. Consistency, formulation, manufacturing, storage and application turn promising biology into a practical agricultural tool. Perhaps the most interesting comment I heard was also one of the most measured. “This is a journey. I think a scientific journey in the first place. So I would define us at the beginning of a journey,” Terhorst said. I appreciated that perspective because biologicals are sometimes discussed as though agriculture is choosing between biological or synthetic. What I saw at Bayer was much more pragmatic. “Biological products will play a very important role, but I also do believe that synthetic crop protection products still have a role. The combination of both, we believe, is a very powerful tool,” Terhorst added. That makes sense to me. Farmers need effective tools, evi dence about where they work and enough knowledge to choose the right one for the problem, crop and conditions in front of them. THE VALUE OF SHOWING THE WORK By the end of the tour, what connected these areas for me wasn’t any individual technology; it was the work required to make agricultural innovation dependable. A genetic combination has to perform across environments. A crop protection molecule has to work under field conditions. A biological response has to survive formulation, manufacturing, storage and the variability of the farm. Bayer has the scale to tackle these enormously difficult questions through genetics, chemistry, biology, data and increas ingly the connections between them. Just as important was its willingness to open the doors and show the complexity, the questions researchers are still wrestling with and the distance between a promising idea and something a farmer can depend on. For those of us working in the seed sector, there’s a lesson in that openness. Showing agricultural science only when the answer is fin ished misses part of what makes the work credible. Innovation means testing predictions, finding where technologies fall short, improving them and testing again. People outside agriculture rarely see that process. They encounter the final seed, product or farming decision without seeing the science, uncertainty and trade-offs behind it. All of us who work in this sector have a role in opening that door wider: showing the science, introducing the people behind it and being candid about both the progress and the complexity that remains. What I saw in Monheim wasn’t science eliminating uncer tainty from agriculture. I’m not sure that is possible. It was science getting better at understanding that uncertainty, and building tools farmers can rely on despite the uncertainty. That may be a more useful way to think about what agricultural innovation actually looks like.
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