Synthetic fertilizers are a modern wonder and help feed billions of people, but they are not without costs. Fertilizer runoff from farms led to dead zones in oceans around the world. There, low oxygen levels are normally hungry for the coast of life.
While it’s a high order to eliminate synthetic fertilizers, some startups believe that the bacteria can be eliminated by half of that.
Netzeronitrogen has developed a series of bacterial strains that are applied directly to seeds and allow plants to obtain nitrogen from the atmosphere instead of chemicals.
“This is a precision sniper approach,” Justin Hughes, co-founder and CEO of Netzeronitrogen, told TechCrunch. “In contrast to fertilizer, we want it to spread it all over the field and effectively hope that some targets will hit a kind of shotgun approach.”
The startup recently raised a $6.6 million seed round led by World Fund and Azolla Ventures.
Netzeronitrogen bacteria are the product of more than a decade of research in part of Gary Devine, which studies naturally occurring nitrogen fixation strains. Hughes noted that the company’s bacteria are not genetically modified.
“We’re not in the special moral highlands about it. That means the regulation path is much easier,” he said. “It will also lead you to the organic market.” When the plant dies, the bacteria die from it.
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The company plans to roll out its first rice product. It is partly a convenient marriage. To apply bacterial strains, it is currently the easiest to dunk seeds into the water containing them. I happened to have rice before planting. “Just mix it up at that point and you’re done,” Hughes said.
The company can use large fermenters to grow the strains, so comparable amounts of synthetic fertilizer can modify the bacteria, Hughes said. “The production costs of biomanufacturing are much lower than the Harborbosch process, especially when you start scaling up,” he said, noting the widely used process to make fertilizer.
Hughes’s goal is to sell Netzerogen bacteria to farmers for at least $50 per hectare than they would spend on synthetic fertilizer. In regions like Southeast Asia, that could mean a 30% to 40% discount, he said.
For now, synthetic fertilizers are not disappearing. “Unfortunately, we still can’t completely solve 100% of the problem,” Hughes said. “But of the proportion we can solve, it’s effectively 100% efficiency.”
