The phone calls from potato growers started arriving at GreenLight Biosciences in early 2024, shortly after the EPA approved the company's Calantha spray on January 4, 2024. They wanted to know if the new insecticide really worked—not just whether it killed Colorado potato beetles, which it did, but whether it worked differently. Whether it might be the thing that finally broke the cycle.
For decades, the beetle had been winning. Cornell's Integrated Pest Management program counts more than 50 active ingredients to which the pest has evolved resistance. Farmers were running out of chemical options, and the ones that remained were increasingly scrutinized for what they did to everything else in the field. Including the bees.
The numbers framing that scrutiny are bleak enough to command attention even in an industry accustomed to loss. Between April 2025 and April 2026, U.S. beekeepers lost 39.9% of their honey bee colonies, according to the U.S. Beekeeping Survey published on June 24, 2026. An improvement over the catastrophic 55%-plus losses recorded in the prior two years, yes. But still nearly double what the industry considers sustainable.
And honey bees, for all their symbolic weight, are just part of the equation. A European study published in Nature Communications in November 2025 calculated that a wild pollinator collapse would trigger a €34.4 billion annual global welfare loss and push producer prices for pollination-dependent crops up 18.6%. The dependency, in other words, is no longer theoretical. It's on the balance sheet.
Which is why a growing cohort of biotech startups and retooled agrochemical giants are racing to develop pesticides that kill what farmers need dead without touching what they need alive. The technologies span RNA interference, designer peptides, and species-specific pheromones—tools that promise molecular precision in place of the chemical carpet-bombing that defined 20th-century agriculture. The capital is following, cautiously but noticeably. The global biopesticides market reached $9.91 billion in 2025 and is projected to hit $11.48 billion in 2026, according to Fortune Business Insights' June 2026 update. Long-range forecasts approach $40 billion by 2034.
Whether the technology can move fast enough to matter is the question that hangs over every pitch deck and field trial.
The Slow Pivot
The transition from broad-spectrum chemistry to molecular precision is happening, though not in the tidy, linear way the early evangelists predicted. Biologicals have entered the mainstream, yet 98% of agricultural retailers report that growers use them as supplements to conventional products rather than replacements, according to CropLife's 2026 Ag Retailer's Guide. McKinsey's 2024 Global Farmer Insights survey found that 63% of farmers plan to maintain or increase biological spending regardless of conventional chemical price movements.
Translation: biologicals are earning their place in the toolkit. But they're doing it by integrating with existing systems, not overthrowing them.
The competitive landscape now includes the full spectrum, from four-person startups to multi-billion-dollar incumbents retooling entire divisions. BASF commissioned a new fermentation "BioHub" in Ludwigshafen in May 2026 to scale biological production. Syngenta opened a 22,000-square-meter biologicals facility in Orangeburg, South Carolina, in 2025. Corteva laid out a target of roughly $1 billion in biologicals revenue by the end of the decade at its September 2024 investor day. Sumitomo Chemical reorganized its U.S. biologicals units into Sumitomo Biorational Company, operational as of 2026.
The sector isn't emerging anymore. It's industrializing.
U.S. agricultural biologicals revenues exceeded $3.5 billion in 2025, according to CropLife's Biologicals Survey. Different market-sizing methodologies produce estimates ranging from $7.6 billion to $10 billion for the global 2025 biopesticides market, depending on taxonomy and source. But the directional consensus is uniform: double-digit growth sustained over the next decade, assuming nothing breaks.
Three Forces Converging
Three pressures are accelerating the shift toward pollinator-safe pest control, each reinforcing the others in ways that make retreat difficult for the industry.
The first is regulatory, and it's tightening. The EPA finalized its Insecticide Strategy under the Endangered Species Act on April 17, 2026, establishing a mitigation framework that will reshape insecticide label requirements and use patterns. The agency updated its Pollinator Risk Assessment Guidance on June 25, 2026, clarifying expectations for individual and colony-level effects testing. Europe's regulatory path has been more chaotic—the European Commission withdrew its ambitious pesticide-reduction proposal in May 2024—but the European Food Safety Authority's 2023 Bee Guidance set a 10% maximum permitted honey bee colony reduction threshold and introduced updated risk-assessment tools in 2024 and 2026.
The second is scientific, and it's cutting away comfortable assumptions. Peer-reviewed studies published between 2024 and 2026 continue to document species-specific and sublethal effects from insecticides marketed as "bee-safe," including flupyradifurone and sulfoxaflor, particularly in bumble bees and wild pollinators. A 2023 PNAS study linked western bumblebee declines to climate and neonicotinoid use. The gap between "safe enough for honey bees" and "safe for the full pollinator community" is widening, not closing. The target keeps moving.
The third driver is technological maturation. GreenLight's Calantha—which GreenLight Biosciences and EPA documentation describe as the first U.S. sprayable dsRNA insecticide—received EPA registration on January 4, 2024. Its active ingredient, ledprona, uses RNA interference to silence genes unique to the Colorado potato beetle, a level of molecular specificity unattainable with conventional chemistry. EPA documents and company communications describe minimal non-target impacts, though the long-term field data is still accumulating. GreenLight's dsRNA for Varroa mite control in hives, branded Norroa and based on the active vadescana, moved through EPA proposed registration with updates as recent as June 10, 2026.
Peptide bioinsecticides are following a parallel trajectory. Vestaron's SPEAR family, which uses insect-specific ion-channel peptides, showed no acute or chronic effects on honey bees, bumble bees, or solitary bees in IR-4 toxicity tests published in 2023. European field trials in 2025 demonstrated that SPEAR-LEP combined with Bt delivered pest suppression comparable to conventional standards on grapes. The question isn't whether the science works. It's whether it works consistently enough at scale to earn grower trust.
From Lab to Field
Molagri, a four-person Toronto startup that went through Y Combinator's summer 2026 batch, represents one end of the spectrum. Founded by Zaky Hassan and Min Jin—both viral structural biologists from the University of Toronto with publications in Nature Communications and Nature Microbiology—the company is developing biopesticides designed to hit precise molecular targets unique to pest insects. The founders emphasize resistance-aware design and bio-based production. As of mid-July 2026, no public funding round beyond Y Combinator had been disclosed, and the company was hiring a scientist for protein biochemistry and engineering. Early days, in other words.
At the other end of the maturity curve sits GreenLight's Calantha, commercialized for the 2024 U.S. potato crop year. The Colorado potato beetle has evolved resistance to more than 50 active ingredients, according to Cornell resources, making it something close to a final exam for any new chemistry. Sequence-specific gene silencing offers a pathway around multi-mechanism resistance, though regulatory dossiers and academic modeling both stress that resistance management remains essential even for novel modes of action. Evolution doesn't stop for elegance.
In May 2026, Suterra—a pheromone mating-disruption leader owned by The Wonderful Company—acquired Vestaron's product lines, active ingredients, and R&D pipeline, including the SPEAR and Basin peptide platforms. The acquisition signals consolidation and a strategic bet that the future of biocontrol extends beyond semiochemicals into targeted bioinsecticides. Suterra's existing CheckMate and Puffer lines deploy species-specific pheromones for pests including codling moth and navel orangeworm, with EPA labels and extension trials documenting season-long activity without direct bee toxicity.
Provivi, another pheromone innovator, announced a distribution deal with Syngenta in Brazil on December 3, 2025, for sprayable fall armyworm mating disruption. The company positions pheromones as non-toxic, residue-free alternatives at row-crop scale. Syngenta, for its part, paired its facility buildout in 2025 with a July 14, 2026, partnership with Groundwork BioAg to market mycorrhizae and soil-carbon solutions. The biologicals portfolios, in other words, are expanding beyond pest control into holistic plant-health platforms. Whether that's mission creep or strategic necessity depends on who you ask.
ProFarm Group's Rinotec insecticide and nematicide platform received U.S. EPA registration on March 11, 2025, with 2026 commercial availability pending state approvals. The platform emphasizes residue and resistance benefits aligned with integrated pest management and pollinator-safety goals. Bee Vectoring Technologies takes a different approach entirely, using managed bees to deliver biologicals during pollination—a concept the company says has been in development for two decades. Sometimes the long road is the only road.
The Inflection Point Ahead
The sector is approaching an inflection point, though perhaps not the one founders would prefer. The technology works well enough to attract serious capital and corporate consolidation. BASF's BioHub and Suterra's Vestaron acquisition are confidence votes in commercial viability. But the integration challenge remains formidable.
Biologicals remain predominantly supplements rather than standalone solutions, and performance consistency at scale continues to generate skepticism among retailers and growers, according to the 2026 CropLife surveys. It's one thing to prove efficacy in a university trial plot. It's another to deliver results when a farmer's livelihood depends on it, across variable weather, soil types, and pest pressure that doesn't respect protocol.
Regulatory trends cut both ways. The EPA's April 2026 Insecticide Strategy and updated pollinator risk-assessment guidance create tailwinds for products with narrow target spectra and low off-target effects. The EU Council's May 27, 2026, support for drone applications as potentially lower-risk delivery methods opens pathways for precision biologicals deployment. Yet the litigation and controversy swirling around conventional "bee-safe" insecticides underscore the scrutiny any pollinator claim will face going forward. The bar is rising faster than some companies anticipated.
The scientific frontier is resistance management and ecological integration. RNA interference and peptide bioinsecticides offer genuinely novel modes of action, but resistance evolution is a biological inevitability, not a chemistry problem. Molagri's stated emphasis on resistance modeling reflects this reality. The question is whether the sector can maintain a pipeline cadence fast enough to stay ahead of pest adaptation—a challenge that has defeated conventional chemistry repeatedly. History doesn't suggest optimism, but the stakes may finally be high enough to force a different outcome.
For investors, the opportunity set spans early-stage molecular-design platforms like Molagri to late-stage commercialization plays and consolidators like Suterra. The market projections—$40 billion by 2034, according to Fortune Business Insights—assume sustained regulatory pressure, ecological urgency, and technology maturation all align in the same direction at roughly the same time.
The 39.9% colony-loss figure from June 2026 suggests the urgency, at least, isn't hypothetical. Whether the capital and innovation can move fast enough remains the defining question of the next decade in agriculture. The growers making those calls to GreenLight are still waiting for an answer.
