Plant Impact and Bayer CropScience Update Soy Pact

Plant Impact of the UK and German-based Bayer CropScience have signed an additional agreement to develop yield enhancing technologies for soy cultivation. The latest agreement encompasses a multi-year partnership for Plant Impact to develop and Bayer CropScience to potentially commercialize new products in the soy markets of North and South America. In particular, the US, Brazil and Argentina, which account for more than 90% of the global export trade in soybeans, soy meal and soybean oil, are of interest.

Plant Impact develops products designed to complement and enhance the effects of modern crop protection programs, such as foliar crop sprays and industrial seed treatments. Bayer CropScience markets a full range of products to soy growers, from seed to crop protection end-products.

The new agreement supplements a collaboration dating from August 2014, under which Bayer markets Plant Impact-developed Veritas, a product intended to improve the soy plant's capacity to fix pods and fill grains at critical growth stages.

This also extends the initial period of the companies' Brazilian Veritas agreement to ten years. This means that Bayer CropScience will have exclusive first rights of commercialization over Plant Impact's current and future pipeline of products for soybeans throughout the Americas in return for payments of up to $9 million, including $3 million upfront and as much as $6 million upon achieving.

The terms for the ultimate commercialization of new products will be agreed at a later date.