Scientist/entrepreneur searches for biopesticides

By JIM DOWNING
Sacramento Bee
Tuesday, July 03, 2007

Next time you see an organic tomato at half-again the price of a conventional one, blame weeds.

More than diseases or hungry insects, weeds account for the high cost of organic crops, farmers and industry experts say. Weeds crowd plants, steal nutrients and cut yields.

Conventional farmers can fight weeds with a menu of proven herbicides. But organic growers rely on hand labor, delicate plowing between rows, even spraying vinegar -- whatever they can come up with.

It all adds to the cost of that tomato in the store.

If the price comes down a few years from now, there's a good chance Pam Marrone will have had something to do with it.

For 17 years, the Davis, Calif.-based scientist and entrepreneur has scoured the world for the biopesticides made by microorganisms that live on plants and in the soil. Marrone concentrates these natural chemicals into products that fight weeds, insects and diseases and, ideally, cut the cost of growing organic crops.

She has won a reputation as a leading innovator in the $600 million biopesticide industry.

Thomas Holtzer, a Colorado State University entomologist who co-directs the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Western regional pest management program, said Marrone has been a pioneer in turning the promise of biopesticides into money-making commercial operations.

"I just see what she's doing as so important -- getting that technology out there for people to use," he said. "I can't think of anybody that's done that at the level she has."

Marrone ties her passion for natural chemicals to a gypsy moth infestation at her home in rural Connecticut when she was 7.

"You could go into the woods some years, and you could actually hear the insects chewing," she said.

"I remember walking out into the forest with no leaves and thinking, 'Well, this is what I want to do -- I want to find ways to control these things.'"

Mixed with that memory of insect devastation is a picture of dead ladybugs and bees after her father, out of desperation, sprayed a powerful chemical to kill the moths on the dogwood in front of the kitchen window. Her mother, a committed organic gardener, put her foot down.

"She said, 'That's the first and last time you will ever use a chemical,'" Marrone said.

Marrone's father went back to what's known as Bt, an early and still-popular biopesticide. And Marrone, a first-grader, wrote a letter to the U.S. Department of Agriculture for information on careers in pest management.

She would go on to earn a Ph.D. in entomology at North Carolina State, chasing dreams of developing natural pest-killers.

In 2006 she founded Marrone Organic Innovations, and by April of this year announced she had raised $3.75 million from investors.

So far, Marrone Organic Innovations has just one product, GreenMatch O, on the market. The all-purpose herbicide is approved for use by organic farmers in every market except California, where it's under regulatory review. The company is working on dozens of others, including many it has licensed from scientists eager to get their invention into Marrone's product pipeline.

The timing for Marrone's latest venture, it seems, could hardly be better: Sales of organic foods in the United States hit $16.9 billion in 2006 and are projected to keep growing for years to come. The biopesticide industry is growing in tandem, with conventional chemical companies and small independent firms like Marrone's vying for market share.

The very traits that make biopesticides appealing for environmental reasons also complicate efforts to make an effective, marketable agricultural product, said Marrone, 50.

To start with, biopesticides -- which include herbicides, insecticides, fungicides and others -- tend to break down quickly when dried out or exposed to the sun. That means they probably won't end up on food in the grocery store, but at the same time, their effectiveness in the farm field can be short-lived.

Another problem: While a great deal of research has been done on how weeds and diseases develop in conventional farm fields, and how to fight them, the opposite is true in organic agriculture, said Carolee Bull, a plant pathologist at the USDA's Organic Research Center in Salinas. Organic farm fields tend to be more complex systems, ecologically speaking, than conventional farm fields, so it's harder to predict how well any given chemical will work, Bull said.

Marrone's search for a new biopesticide often starts with a bag of dirt. Boxes in her lab hold dozens of Ziploc bags full of soil from places where she or a colleague noticed that something ought to have been growing but wasn't: A bare spot in a creek bed in Inverness, a patch near her mother's house where the crabgrass wouldn't grow.

"You wonder what's in the soil that's making that happen," Marrone said. "You're looking for what produces a lot of microbes warring against each other."

Those conditions tend to favor unusual microorganisms that produce complex cocktails of chemicals that could be turned into a product.

And Marrone has a hunch that, somewhere out in the wild, there's a blockbuster biopesticide waiting to be discovered.

"It's not sitting in somebody's lab," she said. "If we're going to develop an organic Roundup, we're going to have to find it."