Syngenta at 25: From Merger Roots to Global Ag Innovation Leader
Editor’s Note: As we mark the first 25 years of the 21st century, CropLife reflects on the innovations, challenges, and transformations that have shaped ag retail — honoring our past while looking ahead to agriculture’s promising future. In this article, we spotlight Syngenta as a company born from merger and transformation, now leading the way in crop protection, seed innovation, and sustainable ag solutions.
The start of the 21st century also represented the beginning for one of the crop protection and seed industries’ biggest companies – Syngenta. In late 2000, two long-standing agribusiness companies – Novartis Agribusiness and Zeneca Agrochemicals – announced plans to merge their operations into a single entity. To satisfy regulatory concerns, Novartis was required to sell its Flint herbicide business to Bayer and Zeneca needed to divest its acetochlor corn herbicide business to Dow AgroScience (now Corteva).
Once these conditions were met, Syngenta began formal operations in January 2001. The company’s mission statement read as follows: “Syngenta’s vision is to be the leading global provider of innovative solutions and brands to growers and the food and feed chain.”
However, this vision didn’t happen overnight. Two years after the creation of Syngenta, the company was still struggling to get its message across to the marketplace. “We were wrestling with the question of ‘who is the customer?’” Mike Mack, then President of Syngenta Crop Protection told CropLife in March 2003. “Perhaps the single most important thing we can work on over the coming years is to conceive of additional innovations in products and services to restore more value to the industry.”
Some Acquiring Along the Way
Besides strengthening its crop protection innovations, Syngenta also worked on shoring up its seed portfolio. In 2004, the company acquired Garst seed business and glyphosate-tolerant corn technology from Bayer. These moves gave Syngenta the chance to “offer North American corn and soybean growers a complete range of solutions, including high quality seed, input traits, and world leading crop protection products,” then CEO Michael Pragnell told CropLife in June 2004.
In 2011, Syngenta announced plans to bring the operations of its separate crop protection products and seed businesses together. According to Vern Hawkins, President, this was done to maximize the ability of the company to fulfill customer needs.
“All the functions of the business in R&D, which creates the technologies, will be in one group now,” Hawkins told CropLife in March 2011. “It won’t be able putting together a seed and crop protection team to figure out what we know and can share. It will be a combined and integrated team from the start.”
Speaking of integration, Syngenta’s business underwent this in earnest a few years later. In February 2016, Chinese-owned ChemChina offered to purchase Syngenta for $43 billion. Global governmental agencies ultimately approved this deal and in 2020, the Syngenta Group was formed. This brought together Syngenta Crop Protection, Syngenta Seeds, Adama, and the agricultural business of Sinochem into a single entity.
Later in 2020, Syngenta announced it had entered into an agreement to acquire Valagro, a manufacturer of biological crop protection products headquartered in Italy.
And the product innovations spoken of 20 years ago are continuing from the company. Earlier this year, Syngenta announced its latest weed control solution, metproxybicyclone, has been recognized under a new chemical subclass of herbicides. A new generation of ACCase-inhibitors, metproxybicyclone could be approved for use by 2026 in Argentina.
“Herbicide resistance has been officially reported in 75 countries and affects farmers of more than 100 crops; of the 273 weed species afflicted, 40% are grass weeds,” said Camilla Corsi, Global Head of Research and Development. “Years ago, our scientists foresaw that certain grass weeds in Argentina and Brazil would likely evolve resistance to existing herbicides, and since then we’ve raced to bring a solution to market – in time to support soybean and cotton farmers who now confront this challenge.”
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