en.Wedoany.com Reported - Switch Bioworks, an agricultural biotechnology company headquartered in the United States, announced that its engineered microbial fertilizer has received regulatory approval for field trials from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). The company will be the first to conduct field trials on corn crops at multiple agricultural sites across the U.S. Midwest to validate performance under real-world agricultural conditions.
The technical principle behind microbial fertilizers involves using living microorganisms to extract nitrogen directly from the air and convert it into ammonia for delivery to crops, a process that replaces the reliance on fossil fuels in the production of traditional chemical fertilizers. Switch Bioworks' core technology is a set of genetically encoded switches designed to address the fundamental energy challenge that has long constrained microbial fertilizer performance—microorganisms require energy both to colonize plant roots and to produce fertilizer, yet the same energy cannot serve both purposes simultaneously. The company's approach is designed to allow microorganisms to first establish reliable colonization on plant roots, then switch to fertilizer production mode.
Corn is one of the world's largest commodity crops, and this field trial will focus on evaluating the colonization stability and nitrogen production initiation capability of Switch's microorganisms under different combinations of genetic switch designs and microbial production hosts, providing optimization data for the company's microbial discovery and engineering platform originating from Stanford University.
Nitrogen fertilizer is critical to modern agriculture, but traditional production relies heavily on fossil fuels and centralized supply chains, leaving farmers exposed to significant risk during price fluctuations. In recent years, multiple federal policies have been introduced in the U.S. to mitigate this situation, including executive orders issued by the Trump administration targeting fertilizer and herbicide supply chains, as well as the bipartisan-supported Homegrown Fertilizer Act. These measures reflect that domestic fertilizer supply has been recognized as a critical economic vulnerability, while also driving industry attention toward alternatives to conventional fertilizer solutions, with a focus on supply chain resilience and agricultural input costs.
Tim Schnabel, founder and CEO of Switch Bioworks, stated that receiving regulatory approval for field trials marks an important milestone for the company. He noted that the fundamental biological challenge long facing microbial fertilizers lies in the energy conflict between reproduction and fertilizer production, and that the company's approach aims to achieve a mode switch from colonization to fertilizer production through genetic switches.
Gareth Asten, General Partner at Acre Venture Partners, commented that modern agriculture and the global food supply depend on century-old fertilizer technologies that are having negative environmental impacts, and reinventing fertilizer is one of the most important problems of our time. He believes Switch Bioworks is one of the few companies with a realistic opportunity to drive this transformation, and that field trials are a critical step in this process.
The field trial approval was obtained through the EPA's and USDA's existing biotechnology regulatory pathways, which allow for the testing of advanced technologies under safety safeguards. Data generated from the trials will be used for ongoing product development, laying the foundation for the commercialization of the next generation of engineered microbial fertilizers.
