Inside the World of New Leaf Symbiotics: Customizing Microbes for Optimal Crop Growth

Listen to KC Sheperd discussing PPFMs with New Leaf Symbiotics CEO/President Brent Smith.

Farm Director KC Sheperd caught up with New Leaf Symbiotics CEO/President Brent Smith to discuss the company’s unique class of microbes, also known as Pink-Pigmented Facultative Methylotrophs (PPFMs).

The truly pink, naturally occurring microbes with a variety of jobs including bio-stimulation, bio-control, Plant Growth Regulators (PGRs), and nitrogen use efficiency.

New Leaf Symbiotics’s library of microbes includes 12,000 different strains, 6,500 of which are sequenced, and work continues on about 100 varieties. Smith commented, “There are multiple modes of action that we are finding in this whole phylogeny of microbes.”

Technicians at New Leaf Symbiotics use the microbes’ natural abilities and improves them. “We launch individual strains for individual outcomes,” Smith said. “For example, we have one strain that is for corn, and another for soy, but also in biocontrol, we use individual strains for individual pests, crops, and those things.”

This makes New Leaf Symbiotics unique as does their microbes’ ability to multiply and colonize after application instead of degrading. The microbes can also survive in all soil types for the duration of the plant’s lifecycle. These things are among the reasons that New Leaf’s covered acreage has increased from 3.2 million acres in 2023 to 7.5 million in 2024.

“We also have other biocontrol products, bio-fungicides, so it is really custom-tailored to what is needed,” Smith said. “What you find a lot in biologicals is consortia, which is let’s just go throw a bunch of Bacillus together – or mycorrhiza, Trichoderma, Bradyrhizobium – and let’s call it good. We don’t know what those things do.

“We have spent more than a decade working on our technologies. We have only been commercial for three years, which means that we spent eight years developing the science behind our products. We wanted to make sure that we understood exactly what each strain was delivering for the farmer.”

New Leaf Products support four different crops – corn, soybeans, peanuts, and cotton, along with one specialty technology for tomatoes, but twenty-three more products are in the pipeline to launch in the next three or four years.

More information can be found at NewLeafSym.com/.

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