RNA crop protection joins the fight against pesticide-resistant bugs

Last year, potato farmer Josh Qualey experienced a potato beetle infestation bad enough that he felt the pesticides he’d been using on his crops just weren’t cutting it. Qualey oversees 550 acres of potatoes and rotating grain crops on his farm in Sherman, Maine. After a meeting with GreenLight Biosciences, a biotech company that makes novel crop protection products with ribonucleic acid (RNA), Qualey decided to give its insecticide targeting the Colorado potato beetle a shot.

“It costs so much money to grow an acre of potatoes nowadays that you need to secure your investment,” Qualey told Tech Brew. “I just decided, ‘Hey, we’ll try it. Other than a little money, we have nothing to lose.’”

And the insecticide, which GreenLight dubbed Calantha, “worked great,” he said. After spraying it on his entire yield and waiting a few days, the beetles were annihilated.

Novel crop protection: RNA is an organic molecule that’s part of all living things, and it regulates and controls biological processes. Or, as GreenLight founder and CEO Andrey Zarur told Tech Brew, RNA is a “machine language” for living organisms. So when RNA is sprayed onto weeds or insects, it kills or stops the growth of only the target pest and not any surrounding insects or plants because each of GreenLight’s RNA formulas is created specifically to affect its target. That means that when RNA is used as crop protection, Zarur said, it’s safe for humans to consume those crops.

“You and I will eat 20 grams of RNA in our day—every time we eat a fruit or a veggie or whatever, we’re just eating raw RNA all the time,” Zarur said. “Our bodies know how to process it, so there’s literally zero side effects, zero adverse events associated with RNA.”

Zarur said GreenLight created its RNA crop protection products for two main reasons: to solve for pesticide and herbicide resistance problems, and protect agricultural biodiversity. Because GreenLight’s RNA products are formulated to only affect their targets, insects and other plants beneficial to crops remain unharmed. Take the case of the Colorado potato beetle, which is “extraordinarily destructive” to potato plants, and the ladybug, which also hangs out in potato fields.

“You want to preserve the ladybugs,” Zarur said. “Why? Because ladybugs are predators, primarily of aphids. Aphids are the very tiny insects that spread fungal and viral diseases in potatoes.”

RNA in action: Preserving farm biodiversity and eliminating pesticide-resistant Colorado potato beetles are a huge part of why Walther Farms decided to incorporate GreenLight’s Calantha product into its crop protection rotation. Walther Farms is headquartered in Three Rivers, Michigan, and grows potatoes in 10 states across the US. The business started using Calantha two years ago alongside six chemical pesticides.

“We’ve learned from our mistakes, and learned that if we can rotate [through] seven different chemicals…to fight the potato beetles, Calantha would be an important one of those seven,” Karl Ritchie, the farm’s agronomist, told Tech Brew.

And though Ritchie said that GreenLight’s prices are “on the high side” compared to traditional pesticides, Walther Farms felt it was important to support a new product that was helping them get off the ground. (Qualey said GreenLight’s prices were “comparable” to other crop protection.)

“Anybody who’s looking more than one year ahead is going to be willing to [pay higher prices],” Ritchie said. “It’s so critical to have this new mode of action that we have to help support it.”

Other farmers are excited to support GreenLight’s products, too. Agriculture trade organization Western Growers is working with the company to help register its upcoming RNA products with the Environmental Protection Agency and California’s Department of Pesticide Regulation to expand farmers’ options for crop protection.

Jeff Landis, a spokesperson for the EPA, said that novel crop protection products like RNA are categorized and regulated as biopesticides.

“They are generally considered safer than conventional pesticides due to their lower toxicity to non-target organisms, greater specificity to the target pest, and reduced environmental impact,” Landis told Tech Brew in an email, adding that the EPA “has received a substantial increase in the number of applications for registration of products containing new and novel types of active ingredients” like RNA in the past couple of years.

RNA products are also particularly attractive to farmers working with Western Growers, because they want to take advantage of environmentally safe crop protection methods due to pressure from consumers.

“There’s a target on the back of the old-school synthetics. We’ve seen that over time [from] environmental groups,” Jonathan Sarager, the senior federal government affairs director for a Western Growers, said. “Some of the retail groups are feeling pressure from consumers.”

And Western Growers’ work to help GreenLight register its products is part of the organization’s larger push to increase transparency and interaction between farmers and the EPA to speed up the industry’s learning curve when it comes to novel crop protection like RNA.

After Calantha successfully registered with the EPA last year and made its way out to farms across the US, Sarager feels optimistic about making future RNA crop protection available to farmers.

“The EPA is already aware of the technology,” Sarager said, “so it’s going to be that much quicker.”