Upstream Ag Insights Patent Breakdown: Crop Agnostic Nitrogen Fixing Technology

Upstream Ag Insights Patent Analysis: Uncovering Innovations Shaping Agribusiness

In early 2025, Upstream Ag Insights launched a new series designed to peel back the curtain on innovation driving agribusinesses forward: looking at company patent portfolios.

In each breakdown, we analyze what unique patents represent, looking at how these innovations could impact farmers, change the competitive landscape, differentiate a business and reshape agribusiness strategies.

Patent Breakdowns promises insights you won’t find anywhere else, helping you gain deeper insight into what’s shaping the future of agribusiness.

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Previous Editions

Five Technology Patents from John Deere and What They Might Mean for the Future of Precision Agriculture - Upstream Ag Professional

Crop Protection Company Patent Analysis: Formulation Technology and Fighting Generics - Upstream Ag Professional

Index

1. Crop Agnostic Nitrogen Fixation

2. Pivot Bio: Remodeled Microbes

3. Pivot Bio: Novel Packaging

4. Switch Bioworks: Density-dependent microbial gene switch

5. Kula Bio: Microbes with a “Built-In Fuel Tank”

6. Bioconsortia: Gram-Positive Nitrogen Fixing

7. Intrinsyx Bio: Compositions Including Endophytes for Improving Plant Nutrition, Growth and Performance

8. Final Thoughts

Overview: Crop Agnostic Nitrogen Fixation

Nitrogen-fixing microbes beyond legumes have immense potential.

Crops like corn or wheat fixing even a portion of their Nitrogen needs can increase yields and quality, minimize farmer costs, decrease deleterious environmental impacts of synthetic nitrogen fertilizer plus streamline logistical costs and efficiency across a farm operation by minimizing application needs.

In the US there is more than 13 million tons of Nitrogen fertilizer applied every year, with over 6 million applied to corn alone.

The agribusiness and venture capital world knows the potential in providing a less bulky and logistically demanding product that has a lower environmental footprint, too:

Pivot Bio has raised over $617 million to date and has its products on millions of acres.

Sound Agriculture, the maker of Source, has raised over $150 million.

Kula Bio has raised over $70 million.

Corteva Agriscience purchased biological company Symborg in 2022 for $370 million, a company whose most prominent product has the active ingredient Methylobacterium symbioticum, a nitrogen-fixing bacteria.

Bioconsortia has raised $95 million.

Intrinsyx was acquired for $79 million.

The list of companies is large (and growing), too:

Developing a non-legume, nitrogen-fixing product is incredibly challenging, though.

As early as 1917, scientists attempted to cultivate the rhizobia from legumes and inoculate these into other crop species. To date, however, none of these attempts to transfer the complex root nodule to non-legume plants have succeeded.

This is why much of the effort has been focused on free-living diazotrophic (nitrogen-fixing) organisms.

There are many challenges to consistently overcome before Nitrogen-fixing microbes will become a standard application. 

Even though strides have been made with several commercial products, many of which are above, they have seemingly been imperfect at delivering a response consistent with expectations and economic demands, as a study across 61 sites and 10 different universities highlighted in 2023 or illustrated in grower survey data from Stratus Ag Research:

The gap in performance and perception of performance is likely due to a number of challenges:

• poor expectation setting by companies

• poor product handling

• poor supply chain viability (low survivability)

• poor microbe fitness (in soil)

• high application of nitrogen leading to lower performance

• high soil mineralization rates leading to lower fixation

And a host of other factors or combination of factors.

All living microbes added to the soil run into challenges in order to prove efficacious, some specific to Nitrogen are illustrated below:

What I wanted to do was look at the patents from many of these companies to see if there were any new and interesting ones and see if there was a trend in the areas of challenges that the patents skewed towards.

Broadly speaking in reading more than 40 patents this week across a dozen companies, there was a lot of work on microbe “fitness” to improve soil and root establishment, along with “other,” meaning improving supply chain and shelf life stability.

1. Pivot Bio Patent on Remodeled Microbes

The first patent goes through what Pivot Bio highlighted at their 2025 Investor Day: Genetically engineering N fixing microbes to fix N no matter what is in the soil:

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