Sights on organic pesticides

By LIAM DANN

A new biotech company with plans to revolutionise the organic pesticide business was launched in Auckland yesterday.

Unlike many peers in the sector EnCoate - a 50/50 joint venture between Ballance Agri-Nutrients and Celentis (the commercial arm of AgResearch) - has a fully developed and patented product ready to take to market.

EnCoate will market a biopolymer coating that makes the micro-organisms in biological pesticides more stable and more practical to use. It says it is the first product of its type in the world.

Biopesticides are made from fungi and bacteria that are designed to attack and kill specific pests. The big problem was that many were too unstable to be commercially useful, said EnCoate chief executive Elizabeth Hopkins.

They often needed to be refrigerated or were difficult to package in a way that could be easily applied to crops and pastures, she said.

EnCoate's biopolymer allows them to be converted into sprays, seed coatings or granules.

Hopkins was previously chief development officer at NeuronZ and is a member of the Government's biotech taskforce.

The bio-pesticide business had enormous growth potential as consumers, particularly in Europe, increasingly focused on environmental and food safety issues, she said.

The new biopolymers were developed by AgResearch over the past 10 years.

EnCoate plans to license the technology around the world and is already talking to companies in the US and the UK.

Ballance, a largely farmer owned cooperative, will produce the first EnCoate enhanced bio-pesticides for the domestic market.

Its first product, launched in February, will target grass grub - a pest that infests more than one million hectares of land in New Zealand and costs farmers millions of dollars a year.

Ballance will not reveal how much money it has invested in EnCoate. The other partner, Celentis, was established in 2000 to identify AgResearch science with commercial potential.