It was a great privilege to connect with  Travis Bayer, founder of the recently launched biotech crop development company, Decibel Bio, and previously, founder of the hugely successful microbial biostimulants company, Sound Agriculture.
Some highlights

• Biggest driver for startup success: identify the unique business approach, the value proposition, including how to reach consumers, and then fit the science around that.
• Sound Agriculture: Core focus is using small molecule chemistry and natural products to signal to microbes for a more efficient and productive crop.
• How Decibel Bio is different: This is a nucleic acid, biotech platform, aiming to disrupt the $100 billion seed industry using plant epigenetics to control the crop genome, turning genes on and off, during the growing season.
• Targeted crop traits: For example, drought tolerance, by turning on aquaporins, the proteins needed to transport water across cell membranes and cell tissues.
• End product: Traits would be delivered via a crop spray, instead of a seed. The spray could be marketed alongside the seed, as a package, or as an alternative vehicle for trait investment.
• Success evidence: Decibel is gearing up for field trials in North America, at dozens of different sites, to develop a product pipeline. The main focus is corn and soy.
• Tariffs: “Trade protectionism is not good for ag. In U.S. agriculture, especially in corn and soy, we rely on export markets. If you want to spook a room of farmers, you walk in and start talking about tariffs.”
• Microbials impacts on yields: Gains from microbials are real but small – say 2 bushels of corn per acre. “The benefit is marginal. It’s a nice to have. In a tough farm economy, the nice to haves are the first to go.”
• Next 10 years of crop production: We’ll see an automation of the whole agronomic process. Today – you walk a field, spot disease, and recommend a spray. In future – big soil, weather, crop, imagery data will be collected from the field, processed by predictive AI-based models into interventions in an automated loop.

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