Data Wars: How Private Equity is Buying Up the Agricultural Gene Pool

4 Jun

There was a time when seeds were just seeds. You kept a handful from last season’s harvest, maybe swapped some with a neighbour, planted them the following year, and hoped for the best. You knew which varieties could survive a dry spell and which ones preferred cooler ground. You knew that resilience came not from clever branding or carbon credits but from stubborn old knowledge passed down in envelopes and mason jars and pockets. It wasn’t glamorous. It worked.

These days, things feel a little different.

In 2023, a quiet acquisition barely made headlines. Legacy Seeds, a US-based seed company known for working closely with local growers and agronomists, was purchased by Tillridge Global Agribusiness Partners, a private equity firm. It wasn’t the first, and it certainly won’t be the last. Over the past decade, more than two hundred agricultural input firms specialising in seeds, plant genetics, microbial treatments, and AI-driven breeding platforms have been acquired by investment groups or folded into multinational portfolios. The consolidation is subtle. The impact is not.

What we’re seeing now isn’t just a merger here or a new venture round there. It’s a shift in how seed itself is understood, not as something biological, not as something cultural, but as intellectual property, as data, as software. Once it’s viewed through that lens, everything else begins to change.

Seed used to be owned. Now, increasingly, it’s licensed. You can still buy it, but the fine print may tell you not to save it, not to reuse it, not to cross it with something else. In some cases, you’re not just buying the seed, you’re buying into a system. One that comes bundled with the company’s fertiliser, their agronomic model, their software, and sometimes their analytics platform that tells you how to grow it, when to grow it, and whether you’re doing it right. It all sounds helpful until you realise how little freedom is left.

Corteva, for example, one of the biggest players in the global seed market, limits a farmer’s right to save Pioneer-brand seeds through legally binding contracts. Bayer’s digital platform, Climate FieldView, tracks how seeds perform on each field and uses that data to recommend future purchases. It’s efficient. It’s slick. It’s a closed loop.

Private equity has been especially drawn to this model, not because they’re particularly interested in agronomy, but because they understand platform economics. If you can own the input and the algorithm that interprets the results, you can influence the farmer’s future decisions too. The goal isn’t just yield. It’s dependency. As the returns on farmland flatten, the returns on intellectual property, particularly biological intellectual property, look increasingly attractive.

This matters for reasons that have little to do with business. Seeds are not just inputs. They are the foundation of food sovereignty, biodiversity, climate resilience, and culture. When a company owns a seed, it controls not just what can be grown, but where and how. It shapes what food reaches markets, which varieties are adapted to climate stress, which traits are invested in, and which ones are quietly left behind.

Across the Global South, the effects are particularly stark. Public seed banks in countries like Kenya, Peru, and the Philippines have seen stagnant funding while corporate breeders expand their reach. Reports from the Access to Seeds Index show that many smallholder farmers face fewer varietal choices, rising seed costs, and increasing dependency on proprietary hybrids. In some cases, access to certain seed varieties is now linked to mobile apps or bundled service models, with subscription-style contracts that are difficult to navigate and harder still to exit.

At the same time, new breeding technologies are entering the picture. Gene editing tools like CRISPR allow for rapid trait development, while AI-driven breeding platforms use large datasets to predict which genetic combinations will produce the best results. Companies like Benson Hill, Inari, and Tropic Biosciences are leading this space, claiming to offer climate-smart crops that require less water or fertiliser. On paper, this sounds like progress, but the models are trained on global data, often using indigenous and heritage crops, and there are real questions about whether the communities that contributed that data will see any of the benefits.

The legal frameworks are not keeping up. Seed intellectual property sits at the uncomfortable intersection of patent law, trade secrecy, and plant variety protection. In the European Union, plant varieties are registered through a formal process that includes traceability and transparency. In the United States, seeds can be patented as utility inventions, with little public scrutiny. Some companies protect their innovations through contract law instead, relying on non-disclosure agreements and restrictive terms of use. These are not theoretical concerns. They are already shaping what farmers can plant and what researchers can study.

International agreements like the Nagoya Protocol were supposed to ensure that benefits from genetic resources are shared fairly. But enforcement is patchy, and many digital breeding techniques now sidestep traditional definitions of bioprospecting entirely. If a company uses AI to identify a desirable gene from a wild variety, builds a synthetic version, and patents the result, is that still subject to benefit-sharing laws? Most countries don’t know. Few have legislated.

The open-source movement has tried to resist. Initiatives like the Open Source Seed Initiative work to preserve farmer rights by releasing seeds under licences that guarantee free use, replanting, and sharing. Community seed banks and traditional knowledge networks continue to store and distribute climate-adapted varieties without fees or restrictions. In places like India and Uganda, grassroots movements are pushing back against seed monopolies, advocating for legal reforms and public funding for breeding programmes. These efforts matter, but they remain the exception rather than the rule.

What we’re witnessing is a slow drift away from stewardship and towards speculation. The gene pool is being treated like a portfolio. Traits are being ranked by profit potential. The farmer, once the central decision-maker in the field, is being nudged into compliance with a system that does not always have their best interests at heart.

This isn’t a rejection of innovation. There is real value in breeding crops that can handle salinity, that need less nitrogen, that yield well under erratic rainfall. But the question is who gets to control those traits, and on what terms. If private capital owns the gene, the algorithm, and the market access, what happens to everyone else?

We’ve spent decades warning about monocultures in the field. Now we face something more insidious, a monoculture of ownership, a concentration not of plants, but of power.

Maybe it’s time to ask not just what we’re growing, but who decides.

Data Wars: How Private Equity is Buying Up the Agricultural Gene Pool

Further Reading and Resources

Cropping Up in Court: The Coming Legal Battles Over Ag AI Ownership