Highlights and Analysis from the 2026 AgbioInvestor Agrochemical Product Discovery, Development and Registration Report

Going back to 1995, AgbioInvestor has been releasing a report overviewing the expenditures and timelines surrounding the largest agrochemical companies’ bringing new crop protection products to market. The survey work is done on behalf of Crop Life International.

Access the Full Report Here.

As many would expect, the cost of bringing a new crop protection active ingredient to market continued to increase over the assessed period. Notably, this is the smallest increase over a 5 year period since the inception (30 years), moving from $301 million to $307 million, or <2%:

Research chemistry is the single biggest line item in bringing a new active ingredient to market. Synthesis and formulation costs climbed 17.4% between 2014-19 and 2020-23 to $75 million, pulling ahead of every other category in the R&D stack:

Field trials sit second at $59 million, essentially flat (+0.7%) versus the prior period.

The other takeaways is that large-scale field trials jumped 22.9% to $28.4 million, offset by a 14.0% decline in registration field trials to $30.4 million.

Companies are spending more to prove products work at commercial scale and less on the dossier-fill trials that regulators historically demanded.

The biggest change was in biological screening, down 9.9% to $46 million and now just 15% of total discovery and development spend. A decade ago it was the largest single cost in the process. The decline is concentrated in efficacy testing (glasshouse), which fell 15.4%. Small plot trials more than doubled off a low base, but the category is being structurally reweighted away from broad screening and toward targeted, late-stage validation.

The report shows that spending is migrating toward chemistry-intensive synthesis work and commercial validation, and away from high-throughput biological screening. It is consistent with that the industry has emphasized from broad combinatorial discovery toward AI-assisted, hypothesis-driven discovery (eg: Syngenta's metproxybicyclone work being a representative example) where you synthesize fewer, better-targeted molecules and need less brute-force screening to find hits.

Notably, time to commercialization data showed a decrease in the most recent period, consistent with what was experienced from 2010-2014:

Maybe it is a blip, particularly given that there has been more pronounced AI driven progress over the last ~2 years, and in 2020, 2021 and effectively all of 2022 there would have been very little related to LLMs integrated into supporting discovery.

I have, generally speaking, been skeptical that we would see a large reduction of costs to bring a molecule to market and a decrease in time to bring molecules to market, as gone in depth in AI-Powered Active Ingredient Discovery: What Traction is the Crop Protection Industry Seeing with AI?

It will be interesting to see if this is a trend or just a blip in the coming years. Hopefully, I am proven wrong and it is a trend and there is some bucking of Eroom’s Law, and potentially improve the trend towards more molecules being commercialized:

Agrochemical companies' efforts to bring innovation to the market has become more multi-pronged over the last decade. While main efforts are still related to internal R&D capabilities, there has been a more pointed effort to look at other avenues to bring new innovation to market, such as venture capital and an approach to “open innovation”: