By Patrick Thomas Sept. 17, 2023 9:00 am ET The Wall Street Journal
Agricultural giant Bayer has dominated for years, but Corteva has taken the lead
There is a new king of soybeans on the American farm—for now.
For years, one company dominated the roughly 80 million acres of soybeans planted in the U.S. after Missouri-based Monsanto revolutionized farming with seeds genetically engineered to tolerate the weedkiller Roundup.
Bayer, the German agriculture and pharmaceutical company, became the top crop-seed maker after its 2018 acquisition of Monsanto. A rival agriculture company, Corteva CTVA has been flexing its muscles since it was spun out of DowDuPont DD in 2019. It has pulled ahead with new biotech soybeans that the company says now make up more than half the market.
Together, Bayer and Corteva sell roughly 70% of all corn and soybean seeds planted in the U.S., up from about 40% two decades ago, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
The companies are in hot competition for the billions of dollars that farmers spend each year on seed-and-chemical combinations designed to combat hard-to-kill weeds. Bayer and Corteva also make hundreds of millions of dollars licensing to other seed suppliers the genetic technology that enables crops to resist specific weedkillers.
In the U.S. market for soybeans—the nation’s second-largest crop by acreage behind corn—the companies’ acts of rivalry have ranged from pitching individual growers at summertime farm shows to fighting over patents in court.
Bayer got a jump on Corteva in 2017 when it began selling its Xtend and later XtendFlex soybeans alongside a powerful herbicide called dicamba, which the seeds were engineered to withstand. As weeds grew to resist other widely used herbicides, farmers were looking to broaden their arsenal to keep their fields clean.
Dicamba, however, can evaporate off crops and drift in the wind, sometimes damaging neighboring crops that lack resistance to it. Some farmers were fearful of the headaches and liability that came along with the spray.
Bayer says it stands behind the technology and that most of its customers using the company’s dicamba-based herbicide, XtendiMax, had success this growing season. It said it appreciates grower efforts to follow the product label or complete training on how to properly use it. Visit The Wall Street Journal for the entire article.
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