St. Louis’ agricultural ecosystem continues to strengthen its status as an international hub for the sector, with new programs connecting resources here with companies beyond the region.
One of those announced last week by the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center involves the first awardees of the Core Facilities Access Fund. The initiative from Cultivar STL gives Argentina-based APOLO Biotech and Costa Rica-based Innovaciones Circulares access to the vast resources and experts the Danforth Center has at its disposal, explains Katie Murphy, director of phenotyping and principal investigator at the Danforth Center.
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She says it allows groups who’ve not traditionally had a local presence the opportunity to tap into what’s here. “Each of these companies has access now—and not just the access, but the funds to use these core facility resources,” Murphy explains.
That includes not just her team’s work measuring the physical or biochemical characteristics of an organism, but also access to the Danforth Center’s top-tier greenhouses and growth chambers, its horticulturalists, its bioanalytical chemistry facility, and the experts who can image plants and analyze that data.
Those core facilities are typically open to people outside the Danforth Center. But, she says, “What’s unique about this particular access fund is it comes with the financial support to use the facility.”
That last part is critical for startups, as many aren’t flush with cash and need help validating their technology. The financial support for the Core Facilities Access Fund comes from the Bill Gates-backed Breakthrough Energy Discovery, which reached out to the Danforth Center last year with interest in supporting what Cultivar STL was working on, says Stephanie Regagnon, executive director of The Yield Lab Institute.
“We decided that giving them access to the core facilities was a great offering,” Regagnon says. “[These] facilities are so often a first stop for companies anywhere, but specifically internationally, long before they have a footprint in St. Louis, long before they establish other partnerships. It really does start with some kind of research partnership.”
The partnership in this case will help APOLO Biotech further develop and validate its RNA-based technology to protect crops, making use of the Danforth Center’s phenotyping, data science, and plant growth expertise to test how new applications of the company’s product affect plant health and water use.
That work is right in the Danforth Center’s wheelhouse. Says Murphy, “RNA based technologies are a specialty of the Danforth Center.”
Innovaciones Circulares’ innovation, however, is less in line with the Danforth Center’s traditional expertise, which does not involve animal agriculture: The company has developed a small-scale modular reactor to recover phosphorus from pig farms. Innovaciones Circulars can make use of the expertise in St. Louis in evaluating how its recovered phosphorus fertilizer compares to what’s more widely available.
And Regagnon says that deploying that expertise in a way could be a boost to the region’s ambitions.
“What I get excited about is the different kinds of stories that we can tell by supporting a company that is still in agriculture, still in agtech, but a little bit different than companies we typically think about attracting to this ecosystem,” she says.
Isabel Acevedo, BioSTL’s manager of tech-based economic development, says she’s thrilled to see two new companies join the local ecosystem, especially one from Costa Rica, where St. Louis doesn’t have strong ties.
“The more companies that we have and we’re able to engage, the more we elevate the St. Louis brand as a global hub for innovation,” she says.
Regagnon adds these two companies should be the first of many to receive such funding. The two were selected from 15 applications from across Central and South America.
To Regagnon, it’s a clear indication that the effort she and others have put into building new connections through the Cultivar STL initiative since 2023 are worthwhile. The project seeks to raise and promote St. Louis’ international profile as an agtech leader by building trust with foreign organizations, companies and governments working in similar spaces.
“Until you have outcomes from those efforts, there’s a whole lot of people who think that those kinds of activities can be fluff,” she says. “But the truth is, if you don’t dedicate the time and resources it takes to build those kinds of relationships, you rarely have these kinds of programs.”
Regagnon says this point is underscored by Gates’ Breakthrough Energy Discovery proactively reaching out wanting to support Cultivar STL after having read about the initiative.
“This is a win for St. Louis for sure, and it’s a win for innovation,” she says.
Acevedo, who’s also been involved in developing Cultivar STL, says it’s gratifying to see the results of its efforts.
“We’re starting to see some of those real, impactful economic development outcomes that we want to see,” she says. “And also for me, being from Puerto Rico, having that cultural connection, it’s also very fulfilling.”
Beyond just new research partnerships, the goal is to have foreign companies pick St. Louis to set up shop when they’re looking to expand, Acevedo explains—as happened with the Argentinian company Deepagro, whose U.S. base is now in the BioSTL building.
In this same vein, BioSTL unveiled a partnership last week with India’s AgVaya LLP to launch Global AgXelerate, which also works to entice global agtech startups to establish a base in St. Louis when looking to enter the U.S. market.
“St. Louis is uniquely positioned to be the U.S. home for the world’s most promising agriculture innovators,” says Donn Rubin, president and CEO of BioSTL. “We’re making it easier for startups to land here, scale faster, and bring their technologies to market, [strengthening] St. Louis’ leadership in sustainable food and agriculture and raising our visibility globally.”
And not just for companies in India either. BioSTL indicates in a press release that the Global AgXelerate platform will look to foster connections with similar innovation hubs in the UK, the Netherlands, Israel, Australia, and Latin America, along the lines of where The Yield Lab Institute’s H.A.R.V.E.S.T. AgTech is also looking.
