Seeds and Sprays
The harvest the world depends on rests on a tripod of fertilizer, genetics, and herbicides, sold by a handful of companies that also decide whether the farmer is allowed to keep next year’s seed.
A field of corn today yields roughly six times what it did in 1940. Three things did that, and they work together: fertilizer feeds the plant, improved genetics (hybrids, then biotech traits) raise its ceiling, and herbicides and pesticides stop weeds and bugs from stealing the gain. Take any leg away and the yield falls over. The Productivity Race theme tracks the result; this one is about the inputs that produced it, and the unusual industry that sells them.
The herbicide that rewrote farming
The quiet revolution was glyphosate, the weedkiller sold as Roundup. On its own it was just an effective, broad herbicide. The leap came in the 1990s when herbicide-tolerant crops were engineered to survive being sprayed with it, so a farmer could blanket a field and kill everything except the crop. That made weed control almost trivial and, crucially, enabled no-till farming: instead of ploughing to bury weeds, which erodes and dries the soil, farmers could spray and drill the seed straight in. Soil conservation improved, labour and fuel fell, and yields rose. The same logic spread to insect resistance through Bt crops, named for Bacillus thuringiensis, a soil bacterium whose insecticidal protein (long sprayed even by organic farmers) is built into the plant so it makes its own insecticide, lethal to specific caterpillars and beetles but harmless to mammals. By the 2010s the great majority of US corn, soybeans, and cotton carried one or both traits.
Four companies
The striking thing about this industry is how few hands hold it. A wave of mergers collapsed the old "big six" of seeds and agrochemicals into roughly four: Bayer (which bought Monsanto in 2018 and with it Roundup and the flagship traits), Corteva (the agriculture spinoff of the DowDuPont merger), Syngenta (owned by ChemChina/Sinochem, so a Chinese state-owned giant sits at the centre of Western seed and chemistry), and BASF. They sell the seed and the spray as a bundled system, and glyphosate itself is now off-patent and mass-produced in China, so the margin has moved from the chemical to the trait and the seed.
Who owns the seed?
For most of history a farmer saved part of the harvest to plant next year. With modern seed, that mostly ended. Patented biotech seed comes with a technology-use agreement that forbids saving and replanting, and the company enforces it: in Bowman v. Monsanto (2013) the US Supreme Court unanimously backed the patent against a farmer who replanted saved soybeans. Even without patents, most high-yield seed is hybrid, and hybrids do not breed true, the second generation yields poorly, so farmers rebuy fresh seed every season regardless. The result is that the input industry doesn’t just sell a product once; it sells the right to grow the crop again each year, which is a large part of why a few companies capture so much of the value the seed creates.
Aren’t all crops already GMO?
In a real sense, yes. Every crop is genetically altered, the product of thousands of years of selective breeding and hybridisation, and some everyday "non-GMO" crops were created by mutation breeding, blasting seeds with radiation or chemicals to scramble their genes, which is unregulated and sold without a label. What the law means by GMO is narrower: transgenic, genes inserted by biotechnology, often from another species. Gene editing with CRISPRblurs the line further, since it can tweak a plant’s own genes with no foreign DNA, which the United States treats as non-GMO and the EU long treated as GMO before moving to loosen the rules. So Europe’s sharp GMO line, an effective ban on cultivation and mandatory labels, sits on a distinction that is partly biological and partly cultural, even as the continent feeds its own livestock on imported transgenic soy.
Who actually farms this way
The system is most total in the Americas: the United States, Brazil, Argentina, Canada, and Paraguay grow the bulk of the world’s biotech crops, and Roundup Ready soy in particular remade South American agriculture. Elsewhere it is patchier. India plants Bt cotton on the vast majority of its cotton acres yet bans GM food crops outright. China grows Bt cotton, imports enormous volumes of GM soy for feed, and only in 2023-2024 began approving its own GM corn and soybeans for planting. Europe is the refusenik: it effectively bans GM cultivation (one Bt maize, grown mostly in Spain) even as it imports shiploads of GM soy to feed its livestock, and it re-approved glyphosate through 2033 only after a bruising fight, so herbicides yes, GM crops no. Africa has been the most restrictive, partly to protect exports to a GMO-shy Europe, with South Africathe long-standing exception (GM maize, soy, and cotton at scale); the door is opening slowly, Nigeria approved Bt cowpea and Kenya lifted its ban, but Burkina Faso adopted and then abandoned Bt cotton over fibre quality, a reminder the technology does not always travel. Two things are nearly universal, though: herbicides themselves are used in commercial farming everywhere (China is the largest glyphosate producer), and the four-company oligopoly sells into all of these markets, even where smallholders in Africa and Asia still save their own open-pollinated seed and fight to keep the legal right to.
The resistance treadmill
The catch is evolution. Spray one herbicide across hundreds of millions of acres and the weeds that happen to survive it inherit the field: glyphosate-resistant superweeds such as Palmer amaranth spread across US farmland, and the industry answered by stacking crops with tolerance to older, harsher herbicideslike dicamba and 2,4-D, which drift and damage neighbours’ fields and have drawn lawsuits and bans. The same arms race runs in insects against Bt and in fungi against fungicides. So the input system that drove yields up also locked agriculture into a chemical treadmill: each fix buys a few years before resistance forces the next one, which keeps the four companies selling new traits and new chemistry in perpetuity. That, in the end, is the business, not a product but a subscription to staying one step ahead of nature.
Is it safe, for people and for nature?
On human health the picture splits. Eating these crops is, by the weight of scientific opinion, safe: the Bt protein is specific to insect guts and harmless to mammals, and bodies from the WHO to the US National Academies judge approved GM foods as safe to eat as conventional ones. The live controversy is the herbicide, not the gene. Glyphosate was rated probably carcinogenicby the WHO’s cancer agency in 2015, while regulators including the US EPA and the EU concluded it is unlikely to cause cancer at normal exposures; the science is genuinely contested, and Bayer has paid out billions of dollars settling US lawsuits regardless. Harsher chemicals raise clearer flags: paraquat(banned in the EU) is acutely toxic and linked to Parkinson’s, and atrazine is an endocrine disruptor and water contaminant.
The heavier charge is ecological, and here the harm is real but mostly indirect. Bt and glyphosate are not the prime poisons; the insect-killers most tied to pollinator decline are the neonicotinoidseed treatments, whose outdoor use the EU banned in 2018. Glyphosate’s damage is collateral: by killing every weed in and around a field it wiped out the milkweed that monarch butterfliesdepend on, a major factor in their collapse. Stack that on monoculture and hedgerow loss and you get the documented declines, a roughly 75 percent fall in flying-insect biomass in one long German study, farmland birds down by about half across Europe since 1980 as the insects and weed seeds their chicks eat disappeared, and aquatic life hit by pesticide runoff and, even more, by fertilizer nutrients that create fish-killing dead zoneslike the one in the Gulf of Mexico. The fairest summary: the food is safe to eat, one herbicide’s cancer risk is disputed, but the system’s real toll falls on insects, wild plants, birds, and water, through habitat loss and the wider chemical load more than through the engineered seed itself.