Ag Ventures Alliance is a company that offers agriculture business support services.

Ag Ventures Alliance

Iowa Corn Opportunities, LLC (ICO) is an equity fund established by the Iowa Corn Growers Association (ICGA) to: Make profitable, strategic, value-added investments that will benefit Iowa’s corn grower members. Facilitate new business development opportunities for Iowa’s corn growers. Leverage investments to facilitate and coordinate further investment by individual corn growers.  Iowa Corn Opportunities is a limited liability company solely owned by the ICGA, and directed by an eight-member board of managers.

Iowa Corn Opportunities

The Liechtenstein Group is owned by the Princely Family of Liechtenstein, and manages a portfolio of companies that operate worldwide in the agriculture and food, forestry, renewable energies and real estate sectors. The Group invests in sustainable and innovative business models, where they can leverage their in-depth knowledge and long-term capital.

Liechtenstein Group

Powerpollen

Powerpollen is an AgTech company that collects, preserves, and applies pollen to boost seed production. It enables higher productivity in seed and grain production. The technology is designed to improve crop yield and genetic purity, cut down on resources, and reduce seed production costs by 20%. The company has developed a patent-pending process that will increase corn parent seed yields and, more importantly, will improve the genetic purity of the parent increase phase, just prior to hybrid seed production in corn. Powerpollen was founded in 2015 and is headquartered in Ankeny, Iowa.

<div><p>PowerPollen engineers new technologies that improve seed production and increase agricultural productivity by enabling more effective cross-pollination. It extends the lifespan of pollen in corn, rice, and wheat. The AgTech company’s technology preserves, stores, and applies pollen at optimal times to increase yields and minimize risks. It helps corn seed producers to increase yields by 20%. PowerPollen serves 22 customer fields at eight different seed production centers. The privately held company has received many awards, and is a 2020 lowa Biotech Leader Award and 2021 Small Business Innovation Research Award recipient.</p></div>

Enhancing seed and crop traits via biotechnology

Crop Biotech

Startup Spotlight: PowerPollen’s ‘on-demand’ pollination tech could make bees’ lives easier

Corteva Agriscience

A commercial agreement expanding the use of pollination-on-demand technology, enabling increased flexibility and productivity for Corteva’s commercial corn seed production. As part of the agreement, Corteva will license the on-demand pollination technology and gain access to PowerPollen’s prescriptive pollination expertise and algorithms that inform producers of the optimal pollination timing to increase seed yield, purity and quality.

Sustainably solving the food shortages of the future

Smart Farming

Start-ups offering software and related hardware solutions for crop operation, crop modelling, weather forecasting, soil analysis, and overall irrigation management using sensors, big data, AI and machine learning.

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    PowerPollen engineers new technologies that improve seed production and increase agricultural productivity by enabling more effective cross-pollination. It extends the lifespan of pollen in corn, rice, and wheat. The AgTech company’s technology preserves, stores, and applies pollen at optimal times to increase yields and minimize risks. It helps corn seed producers to increase yields by 20%. PowerPollen serves 22 customer fields at eight different seed production centers. The privately held company has received many awards, and is a 2020 lowa Biotech Leader Award and 2021 Small Business Innovation Research Award recipient.
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<p><span>Lone Star Industrial Materials is a cultivation company that manufactures raw hemp materials. Its product portfolio consists of bast fiber, refined cellulose, and hemp hurd, seeds, hearts, fines and oil. Additionally, it offers retail products such as HempSorb, animal bedding, and hemp control socks. Hemp requires less land, improves nutritional health, is environmentally friendly, helps soil regeneration, grows in various climates, absorbs a great deal of CO2, is a rotational crop and reduces waste. Hemp is used in construction, insulation, bioplastics, and as hemp wood. The privately held company has developed an end-to-end supply chain from seed genetics to delivery.</span></p>

Lone Star Industrial Materials

<p><span>PLANTeDIT operates in the plant genome editing field to produce improved crop species through transformation technology and a CRISPR/Cas9 delivery system. It produces regulatory-free, consumer-oriented, DNA-free and sustainable genome edited crops and biopharmaceuticals. The company’s offering includes non-transgenic high oleic soya, which is produced by mutating the FAD2 gene, which eventually increases the oleic oil content in the soya bean. This product was developed through a collaboration between PLANTeDIT and ToolGen. The organization has also collaborated with RebelBio, University College Cork and IAPB. Headquartered in Cork, Ireland, PLANTeDIT is privately held.</span></p>

PLANTEDIT

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    Amforo is a biotech company that focuses on developing foods that are high in protein by enhancing the nutritional density of food and feed crops through the platform of technologies it has built. The company offers a family of feed and food crops, including primary ingredients for suppliers of plant-based meat and dairy alternatives. In addition, it is focused on developing a low-cost, plant-based source of protein for farmed seafood. Moreover, Amforo is pursuing approaches to enhance the nutritional profile of crops as well as their protein content, which entails optimizing amino acid profiles, modifying carbohydrates, and enhancing micronutrients.
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Amfora

<p><span>BioHeuris provides weed management solutions by combining synthetic biology and gene editing to develop herbicide resistant crops. Its offering includes Heurik, a technology platform that integrates rational design and directed evolution to identify mutations that confer herbicide tolerance, while Swap is the platform that introduces these mutations in crops using gene editing. The company cultivates soybeans, sorghum, rice, cotton, and alfalfa. It has partnered with Santa Rosa Semillas, Adecoagro, Gensus, GDM, Aceleradora Litoral, Tobin, Rotam, Asociación de Cooperativas Argentinas, Benson Hill, and Plant Science Center. Headquartered in Rosario, Argentina, BioHeuris is privately held with an office in the US.</span></p>

BioHeuris

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    Tropic Biosciences is a privately held developer of high-performing commercial varieties of tropical crops that promote cultivation efficiencies, improve sustainable environmental practices and enhance consumer health through its use of cutting-edge genetic editing technologies. Its GEiGS Technology combines gene editing and RNAi in a single platform that enables critical disease resistance and quality improvement traits. The technology caters to the banana production, row crops, livestock, and poultry industries. The company’s partners include Temasek, Agronomics, Polaris Founders Capital, and Excellence Through Stewardship. Headquartered in the UK, Tropical Biosciences has been featured in The Telegraph, Nature, Fast Company, and the Financial Times. 
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Tropic Biosciences

Companies that develop or use biological, physical and chemical agents and techniques to provide protection and improve the quality of a seed. This includes the sale of seed coating, or seed enhancement products as methods to treat seeds.

Companies that redesign large clusters of genes and gene parts rather than modifying or engineering a single gene for improving the traits of a plant.

Companies that utilize genetic engineering tools and technologies to use existing and naturally present gene variants in a plant and the natural process of breeding such as inbreeding, and linebreeding to develop better traits for plants.

Companies that use transgenesis processes like tissue culturing to develop transgenic plants or seeds by inserting new genes into them from other plants or in certain instances other organisms like bacteria or even animals.

Companies that offer techniques such as epigenetics, RNA interference (RNAi) to temporarily block a specific gene that would trigger unwanted effect such as a disease on a plant.

Companies that develop a platform to insert, edit, or delete the DNA of a plant itself using approaches such as CRISPR-Cas 9, TALENs, and Zinc Fingers. These approaches help develop plant genes or seeds with traits such as disease-resistant, enhanced-performance, or improve yield.

Biotech solutions to produce crops that are sustainable and offer better traits

Offers customization of genes and traits as required by farmers

Uses AI/machine learning to facilitate their platform/biotech processes like gene editing

Powerpollen

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