Pivot Bio launches Canadian business operations

Date:08-01-2022

Pivot Bio, agriculture’s leading nitrogen innovator, announces its expansion into Canada, including launching the company’s business operations, appointing its leadership team, and its future plans to offer sustainable nitrogen to Canadian farmers, pending regulatory approvals. Product trials are currently underway in eastern and western Canada on corn, wheat, and canola.   

For more than a decade, Pivot Bio has worked to replace synthetic nitrogen fertilizer with a sustainable, safer tool for farmers. Years of research have culminated in a scalable, proprietary platform that enables microbes to convert atmospheric nitrogen into a form that crops like corn and wheat can use as nutrition. Commercially available in the United States since 2019, Pivot Bio’s microbes provide U.S. farmers with a dependable and consistent nitrogen source that adheres to the root of the plants and does not wash away or volatilize into the air.

″Pivot Bio was founded on the belief that farmers need a better way to fertilize their crops. Synthetic nitrogen is unsustainable, and our technology has solved one of the biggest challenges facing modern agriculture – replacing synthetic nitrogen with something better,″ says Pivot Bio CEO and Co-Founder Karsten Temme, Ph.D. ″We are excited to expand our operations and ultimately introducing our technology to farmers everywhere, starting in Canada.″

Pivot Bio’s breakthrough technology works with the world’s most nitrogen-hungry crops. In Canada, canola, corn, and spring wheat account for about 45% of seeded acres and Canadian farmers use about five billion pounds (2.2 billion kilograms) of synthetic nitrogen every year to grow those crops.

A portion of unused synthetic nitrogen is emitted as nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas (GHG) estimated to be 300 times more potent than carbon dioxide, making synthetic nitrogen the leading cause of crop-related greenhouse gas emissions. Unused synthetic nitrogen also makes its way into water in the form of nitrates, which impacts water quality and globally, contributes to more than 500 oceanic dead zones.

Pivot Bio’s manufacturing footprint is also sustainable. The company’s microbes are produced using fermentation with virtually no carbon emissions. This replaces the chemical-based and energy-intensive Haber-Bosch Process traditionally used to create synthetic nitrogen and eliminates greenhouse gas emissions generated from the production of chemical nitrogen by up to 98%.  

Pivot Bio’s Canada operations launch under the leadership of Chuck Broughton, General Manager. Broughton brings more than 30 years of industry experience to Pivot Bio’s Canadian team, including business development, sales and marketing in the North American and global seed treatment, inoculants, and crop protection markets. Saskatchewan-based Wade Clarke is Pivot Bio’s Regional Sales Leader for Canada, and professional agrologist Katie Donohue, also from Saskatchewan, has joined Pivot Bio as Commercial Agronomist.

″Canadian farmers are facing unprecedented pressure to grow crops more sustainably and reduce their fertilizer use without impacting crop yields, and Pivot Bio provides a solution to those challenges,″ says Chuck Broughton, Pivot Bio General Manager, Canada. ″We are looking forward to offering Canadian farmers an economical and sustainable nitrogen, building on proven successes we’ve experienced with U.S. farmers.″  

The world’s population is growing and demanding more food, fueling the need for more synthetic nitrogen. This leads to greater negative impact on the climate and global food system. Farmers everywhere are in urgent need of a cleaner nitrogen source that supports sustainable agriculture without jeopardizing food production capacity – and Pivot Bio’s breakthrough crop nutrient innovation will play a critical role in the future of food, farming, and the health of our planet.