Our good friend and ag entrepreneur, Matt Crisp, recently shared his thoughts about the state of crop protection and everything tied to it, meaning innovation, regulation, resistance, and the growing pressure on farmers. His thoughts are not about any one company or decision, but rather the structural issues and how agriculture might learn a lesson from pharma. Below is a summary and a few of the highlights. I encourage you to read Matt’s entire report in full HERE
Eroom’s Law Comes to Crop Protection
In 2012, a team led by Jack Scannell, a researcher who had long studied pharmaceutical productivity, published a paper that named a troubling trend: Eroom’s Law — Moore’s Law spelled backwards. The number of new drugs approved per billion dollars of inflation-adjusted R&D spending had been falling, roughly by half, every nine years since 1950. This was counterintuitive. Tools like genomics, high-throughput screening, combinatorial chemistry, and computational modeling have improved dramatically, yet more money has produced fewer drugs.
Big Pharma responded by hollowing out internal R&D, pivoting to acquisitions of biotech innovators, and becoming a commercialization platform. Today, roughly 80% of best-selling drugs originate outside the big companies.
The same forces, rising costs, tougher regulations, consolidation, and the paradox of better tools yielding worse outcomes, are now hitting crop protection. The average cost of discovering, developing, and registering a new active ingredient climbed from $152 million in 1995 to $301 million in the 2014–2019 period, a near-doubling in real terms. Development time stretched from 8.3 years to 12.3 years. The chance of finding a viable compound from a screening library is now about 1 in 160,000.
New active ingredients have slowed sharply. In the 1980s and 1990s, 80 to 120 received ISO Common Names every five years. That dropped to 40–50 by 2001–2020.
Herbicides, which make up half the market, show the crisis most clearly. From the 1950s to the mid-1980s, a new mode of action arrived roughly every two years. Since 1984, only one genuinely new mode of action has reached broadacre crops: cyclopyrimorate in 2021. The gap now stretches more than four decades.
Fungicides are losing ground fast. Azoles and strobilurins were once game-changers, but resistance is eroding their punch against septoria in wheat. SDHI fungicides already show sensitivity shifts and cross-resistance. The 2020 withdrawal of chlorothalonil removed a key resistance-management tool with nothing ready to replace it. Growers across Europe are watching their fungicide toolbox shrink in real time.
Insecticides follow the same pattern. Neonicotinoids once held a quarter of the market but faced heavy restrictions. Diamides stepped in as the main replacement, yet resistance is already appearing in pests like diamondback moth, repeating the old vulnerability.
Rising discovery costs, declining output, industry consolidation, and biological resistance are all at work. Registration costs more than doubled between 1995 and 2014. The EU’s review system favors small tweaks to old chemistry over risky new mechanisms. Successful incumbents like glyphosate killed investment in alternatives until resistance or bans forced the issue. U.S. herbicide patents plunged from over 430 in 1997 to just 65 by 2009. Mega-mergers turned the Big Six into the Big Four, controlling 70% of the market and reducing independent discovery programs. Unlike pharma, major companies have let true discovery spending drift toward defending old products.
Crop protection is harder than pharma. Farmers run on thin margins, so new products can’t be priced like breakthrough cancer drugs. Regulators weigh a wider range of risks, such as pollinators, groundwater, and aquatic life, making the cost curve steeper. When innovation stalls here, the price is measured in food, not just profits. A Kansas farmer still battles glyphosate-resistant Palmer amaranth after forty years without a new broadacre herbicide mode of action. A UK wheat grower sees azoles and SDHIs weaken against septoria. A southern European vegetable producer loses insecticide rotations as diamondback moth builds resistance to diamides. The pipeline is vanishingly thin.
The industry now sits where Big Pharma was in 2000–2010: aware of the problem but not yet restructured. Early signs of change include AI screening, biologicals, and protein engineering, but the venture ecosystem is far smaller, and returns are lower. Public funding could help de-risk early work, as NIH once did for biotech.
Solving this will require new modalities, not just new molecules. The chemical paradigm is hitting its limits. Biological and macromolecular approaches may open new paths, but they require different infrastructure and must perform near the level of old chemistries, as farmers only adopt what works. Major companies must decide either to reinvest aggressively in discovery or actively support outside innovators. They do not have twenty years. Resistance does not wait.
Eroom’s Law is not inevitable. It describes what happens when institutions optimize for the short term. Pharma survived because drug prices absorbed the inefficiency. Crop protection has no such luxury; the end users are farmers, and the end product is food. Development costs have doubled while the number of companies running real discovery programs has fallen 75%. Resistant weeds have increased sixfold. Toolboxes are shrinking across herbicides, fungicides, and insecticides.
Somewhere in Kansas, a farmer has waited forty years for a new herbicide mode of action. The weeds have not been waiting. In the UK, wheat growers watch options narrow with every resistance survey. In southern Europe, vegetable producers run out of rotations. The work to fix this is happening in small companies and university labs. Some will need the scale and reach of the big players. None of it will wait.
Pharma learned the hard way that the most expensive innovation is the kind you acquire after someone else has already proved it. Crop protection still has the chance to learn that lesson faster. Whether it will is an open question. The resistance is not. Read and share Matt’s full article HERE.
