INERA, the agricultural biotechnology business of Absolute, has entered a strategic commercial partnership with Bayer to widen the reach of a biological crop-nutrition product designed to improve nutrient-use efficiency and support soil and plant health, AgroSpectrum reports. Bayer will market and distribute the product through its sales network; commercial work has already begun.
The companies have not disclosed the product's name, its price, sales targets or the scale of the first rollout.
INERA's pipeline draws on a repository of more than 35,000 microbial strains collected from extreme habitats around the world, analysed with Absolute's artificial intelligence platform, Nature+, which predicts functions and designs candidates for laboratory and field testing. Beyond crop nutrition, the company is developing RNA interference-based biocontrols, peptide-based inputs and AI-discovered bioherbicides.
INERA says it has run more than 50,000 field trials and farmer demonstrations on over 100 acres of dedicated trial ground. It holds product licences in 19 Indian states and is growing in the United States, Africa and Southeast Asia.
Agam Khare, founder of Absolute, said the partnership would bring science-led biological solutions to more farmers and help them get more value from every acre. Simon Wiebusch, head of Bayer's Crop Science division for India, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, said it would combine INERA's biological expertise with Bayer's knowledge of farmers' needs and its ability to scale products.
AgroSpectrum notes that the commercial test will be whether the product delivers consistent results on farms: biological inputs can vary with crop, soil, climate and application, and adoption will depend on evidence, ease of use, price and measurable benefit. The deal fits India's PM-PRANAM scheme for alternative fertilisers and its BioE3 biotechnology policy.
Photo: kiran kumar / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)
Source: AgroSpectrum
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