Biologicals R&D Up 43% at Big Five Crop Protection Firms

Biological crop protection R&D spending at the five largest crop protection companies rose 43.4% between 2019 and 2023, reaching $37 million per company, while spending on conventional chemical R&D fell 9.3% to $336 million. The figures come from an AgbioInvestor survey, carried out during 2025 on behalf of CropLife International and published in May 2026, covering BASF Agricultural Solutions, Bayer Crop Science, Corteva, FMC and Syngenta.

Biologicals (living or nature-derived products, including microbials, fermentation-derived natural products, semiochemicals such as pheromones and biostimulants) now absorb 10% of the five companies' combined chemical and biological R&D budgets, up from 7% in both 2014 and 2019. The study excluded biofertilisers and macrobials such as beneficial insects, and left stewardship costs out of the chemical-biological split.

Is the shift real money or a statistical effect?

The survey data show genuine reallocation, not arithmetic. Average biological R&D per company was $16 million in 2014, rose to $26 million in 2019 and reached $37 million in 2023 — more than doubling in a decade. Chemical R&D grew from $201 million in 2014 to $370 million in 2019, then turned down. The combined budget also shrank, falling 5.9% from $396 million in 2019 to $373 million in 2023. Biologicals grew even as the overall budget contracted, which means companies committed new money to the category rather than gaining share by default.

Where is the biological money going?

The report's breakdown by function suggests the extra cash is pushing biological candidates deeper into the pipeline, not just funding early discovery:

• Research into new biological actives rose to almost $15 million per company in 2023, from roughly $11 million in 2019.
• Development of new biological actives roughly doubled to around $13 million, the fastest-growing line in the dataset.
• Product launch and development held broadly steady at about $9 million.
• A monitoring and stewardship line of around $1 million appears for the first time — a sign more biological products now sit on the market and need ongoing regulatory support.

Chemical spending moved the other way. Across the full R&D budget, which averaged $444 million per company in 2023, spending on developing new active ingredients fell 16.8% to $130.3 million. Product launch and development fell 17.9%, and stewardship fell 24.4%. The one growth area in conventional R&D was research into new active ingredients, up 9.8% to about $139 million — evidence that companies still hunt for new chemistry but carry fewer candidates into costly development.

Why is chemistry getting harder to justify?

The report does not attribute the biological shift to a single cause, but its wider findings describe the squeeze on conventional chemistry. Taking one new chemical active ingredient to the US and European markets now costs an average of $307 million and takes about 11.4 years from first synthesis to first sale. Growing regulatory data demands have raised both the time and the cost of registration, so companies concentrate resources on fewer candidates and fewer new substances clear approval. The same firms have also increased spending on off-patent products — a defensive move to protect earnings as patents on existing molecules expire.

What are the limits of the data?

Conventional chemistry still takes 90% of the combined budget. The report cautions that respondents were mainly the leading originators, some of which have bought positions in the biocontrol sector, and that many other biocontrol companies were not surveyed. Total industry investment in biologicals is therefore likely to be considerably higher than these figures capture.

For growers and agri-input firms in developing markets, the direction matters more than the current scale. As multinationals push more development money behind microbials, natural products and biostimulants, a steadier flow of biological products should reach growers. Companies with fermentation, microbial strain or formulation capabilities — the report cites India specifically — may find licensing, contract manufacturing and co-development openings with originators building biological pipelines. Generic chemical makers, meanwhile, face multinationals investing on two fronts at once. Latin America stands out as the only region where regionally targeted R&D grew, rising to $56 million across all R&D categories.

With biologicals at a tenth of R&D budgets and growing faster than any other category surveyed, the next edition will show whether this is a lasting reallocation or a cyclical bump.