The Haber-Bosch course of, which converts atmospheric nitrogen to make ammonia fertilizer, revolutionized agriculture and helped feed the world’s rising inhabitants, but it surely additionally created big environmental issues. It is likely one of the most energy-intensive chemical processes on the earth, liable for 1-2 p.c of worldwide vitality consumption. It additionally releases nitrous oxide, a potent greenhouse fuel that harms the ozone layer. Extra nitrogen additionally routinely runs off farms into waterways, harming marine life and polluting groundwater.
Rather than artificial fertilizer, Pivot Bio has engineered nitrogen-producing microbes to make farming extra sustainable. The corporate, which was co-founded by Professor Chris Voigt, Karsten Temme, and Alvin Tamsir, has engineered its microbes to develop on plant roots, the place they feed on the foundation’s sugars and exactly ship nitrogen in return.
Pivot’s microbial colonies develop with the plant and produce extra nitrogen at precisely the time the plant wants it, minimizing nitrogen runoff.
“The way in which we’ve got delivered vitamins to assist plant progress traditionally is fertilizer, however that’s an inefficient method to get all of the vitamins you want,” says Temme, Pivot’s chief innovation officer. “Now we have the flexibility now to assist farmers be extra environment friendly and productive with microbes.”
Farmers can substitute as much as 40 kilos per acre of conventional nitrogen with Pivot’s product, which quantities to a few quarter of the entire nitrogen wanted for a crop like corn.
Pivot’s merchandise are already getting used to develop corn, wheat, barley, oats, and different grains throughout hundreds of thousands of acres of American farmland, eliminating tons of of hundreds of tons of CO2 equal within the course of. The corporate’s influence is much more hanging given its unlikely origins, which hint again to one of the difficult instances of Voigt’s profession.
A Pivot from despair
The start of each college member’s profession could be a sink-or-swim second, and by Voigt’s personal account, he was drowning. As a freshly minted assistant professor on the College of California at San Francisco, Voigt was struggling to face up his lab, entice funding, and get experiments began.
Round 2008, Voigt joined a analysis group out of the College of California at Berkeley that was writing a grant proposal targeted on photovoltaic supplies. His preliminary position was minor, however a senior researcher pulled out of the group per week earlier than the proposal needed to be submitted, so Voigt stepped up.
“I stated ‘I’ll end this part in per week,’” Voigt remembers. “It was my large likelihood.”
For the proposal, Voigt detailed an formidable plan to rearrange the genetics of biologic photosynthetic programs to make them extra environment friendly. He barely submitted it in time.
A number of months glided by, then the proposal opinions lastly got here again. Voigt hurried to the assembly with among the most senior researchers at UC Berkeley to debate the responses.
“My a part of the proposal acquired utterly slammed,” Voigt says. “There have been one thing like 15 opinions on it — they had been longer than the precise grant — and it’s only one after one other tearing into my proposal. All essentially the most well-known individuals are on this assembly, future vitality secretaries, future leaders of the college, and it was completely embarrassing. After that assembly, I used to be contemplating leaving academia.”
A number of discouraging months later, Voigt acquired a name from Paul Ludden, the dean of the Faculty of Science at UC Berkeley. He wished to speak.
“As I stroll into Paul’s workplace, he’s studying my proposal,” Voigt remembers. “He sits me down and says, ‘Everyone’s telling me how horrible that is.’ I’m considering, ‘Oh my God.’ However then he says, ‘I feel there’s one thing right here. Your thought is nice, you simply picked the mistaken system.’”
Ludden went on to elucidate to Voigt that he ought to apply his gene-swapping thought to nitrogen fixation. He even supplied to ship Voigt a postdoc from his lab, Dehua Zhao, to assist. Voigt paired Zhao with Temme, and certain sufficient, the ensuing 2011 paper of their work was well-received by the nitrogen fixation group.
“Nitrogen fixation has been a holy grail for scientists, agronomists, and farmers for nearly a century, ever since any person found the primary microbe that may repair nitrogen for legumes like soybeans,” Temme says. “Everyone at all times stated that sometime we’ll be capable to do that for the cereal crops. The thrill with Pivot was that is the primary time that expertise turned accessible.”
Voigt had moved to MIT in 2010. When the paper got here out, he based Pivot Bio with Temme and one other Berkeley researcher, Alvin Tamsir. Since then, Voigt, who’s the Daniel I.C. Wang Professor at MIT and the pinnacle of the Division of Organic Engineering, has continued collaborating with Pivot on issues like growing nitrogen manufacturing, making strains extra secure, and making them inducible to completely different indicators from the plant. Pivot has licensed expertise from MIT, and the analysis has additionally acquired assist from MIT’s Abdul Latif Jameel Water and Meals Programs Lab (J-WAFS).
Pivot’s first objectives had been to achieve regulatory approval and show themselves within the market. To realize approval within the U.S., Pivot’s crew targeted on utilizing DNA from throughout the similar organism reasonably than bringing in completely new DNA, which simplified the approval course of. It additionally partnered with impartial corn seed sellers to get its product to farms. Early deployments occurred in 2019.
Farmers apply Pivot’s product at planting, both as a liquid that will get sprayed on the soil or as a dry powder that’s rehydrated and utilized to the seeds as a coating. The microbes stay on the floor of the rising root system, consuming plant sugars and releasing nitrogen all through the plant’s life cycle.
“At present, our microbes colonize only a fraction of the entire sugars supplied by the plant,” Temme explains. “They’re additionally sharing ammonia with the plant, and all of these issues are only a portion of what’s doable technically. Our crew is at all times making an attempt to determine easy methods to make these microbes extra environment friendly at getting the vitality they should develop or at fixing nitrogen and sharing it with the crop.”
In 2023, Pivot began the N-Ovator program to attach corporations with growers who observe sustainable farming utilizing Pivot’s microbial nitrogen. By means of this system, corporations purchase nitrogen credit and farmers can receives a commission by verifying their practices. This system was named one of many Innovations of the Yr by Time Journal final 12 months and has paid out hundreds of thousands of {dollars} to farmers thus far.
Microbial nitrogen and past
Pivot is at the moment promoting to farmers throughout the U.S. and dealing with smallholder farmers in Kenya. It’s additionally hoping to achieve approval for its microbial resolution in Brazil and Canada, which it hopes will probably be its subsequent markets.
“How can we get the economics to make sense for everyone — the farmers, our companions, and the corporate?” Temme says of Pivot’s mission. “As a result of this really could be a deflationary expertise that upends the very costly conventional method of constructing fertilizer.”
Pivot’s crew can also be extending the product to cotton, and Temme says microbes could be a nitrogen supply for any sort of plant on the planet. Additional down the road, the corporate believes it could actually assist farmers with different vitamins important to assist their crops develop.
“Now that we’ve established our expertise, how can Pivot assist farmers overcome all the opposite limitations they face with crop vitamins to maximise yields?” Temme asks. “That basically begins to alter the best way a farmer thinks about managing your entire acre from a worth, productiveness, and sustainability perspective.”
