Sustainable Podcast: Micropep CEO Thomas Laurent Discusses Insights from the Field
31 January 2024 AgriBusiness Global recently interviewed Thomas Laurent, Chief Executive Officer for Micropep — a U.S. and France-based company developing crop protection solutions based on micropeptides. Laurent traveled in the EU and U.S., speaking to investors and growers to find out what the market looks like for biopesticides in the coming months.
Podcast Transcript:
*This is a partial and edited transcript of the podcast.
ABG: What were some of the top three conversations you had and what did you learn?
Thomas Laurent: There were three main takeaways. The first one, I think, might be obvious to everyone, but it is how climate change is influencing the way growers are farming.
Climate change also has a big impact on our own activities. We are running trials on all products, and this season has been kind of extraordinary. In fact, it’s been a few years of being extraordinary in terms of climate, which is becoming the new normal. To give examples, we are running trials on potato and grapes in Europe, in the U.S. and soybean in Latin America.
For our trials, we had some places with a lot of disease pressure coming from a combination of droughts, high temperatures, followed by excessive rainfall. There is a lot of humidity surging at the moment, and because of this we’ve seen very heavy disease pressure, especially in grapes and potatoes in Belgium. The big change in climate is affecting farmers and also companies like us developing products.
The second takeaway is that we’ve seen a lot of resistance and regulatory impacts on the toolbox that farmers have to work with. To give an example on the resistance, we’ve been running trials in California on grapes. When doing those trials, we compare our results with chemical standards. Our choice partner and the growers were surprised to see that the chemical program was not performing as expected.
This was so surprising because chemical products have a reputation of always performing very well in all situations. Now data is showing that in some cases these chemicals are not performing anymore.
This is a big concern for growers around the world. Of course, there’s differences between crops grown in different regions, but the resistance issue is definitely there, not only for disease but also weeds and insects.
A third takeaway are the effects of the regulatory environment. We’re running trials for potato and grapes in Europe and checked in with the growers. There’s a big pressure in Europe for growers to avoid using key chemicals that have been banned. Because of an increase in diseases coming from the impact of the climate, farmers are left without many options.
They are putting more and more sulfur into the fields, which is not always a good response depending on their crops in rotation. I think farmers see that their toolbox is really shrinking, which is why they need new solutions to help replace or at least offset the chemicals showing resistance or being banned.
And I find it somewhat ironic that at the same time Bayer is being held accountable for 1.5 billion on the Monsanto lawsuit for Roundup, Europe decides to reapprove glyphosate for ten more years. There’s definitely proof that we don’t have the answer yet to replacing chemicals.
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