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[Michaelangelica]

There's gold in that there dirt!

Scientist/entrepreneur searches for biopesticides
science and technology

By JIM DOWNING
Sacramento Bee
Tuesday, July 03, 2007

Next time you see an organic tomato at half-again the price of a conventional one, blame weeds.

More than diseases or hungry insects, weeds account for the high cost of organic crops, farmers and industry experts say. Weeds crowd plants, steal nutrients and cut yields.

Conventional farmers can fight weeds with a menu of proven herbicides. But organic growers rely on hand labor, delicate plowing between rows, even spraying vinegar -- whatever they can come up with.

It all adds to the cost of that tomato in the store.

If the price comes down a few years from now, there's a good chance Pam Marrone will have had something to do with it.

For 17 years, the Davis, Calif.-based scientist and entrepreneur has scoured the world for the biopesticides made by microorganisms that live on plants and in the soil. Marrone concentrates these natural chemicals into products that fight weeds, insects and diseases and, ideally, cut the cost of growing organic crops.
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Mixed with that memory of insect devastation is a picture of dead ladybugs and bees after her father, out of desperation, sprayed a powerful chemical to kill the moths on the dogwood in front of the kitchen window. Her mother, a committed organic gardener, put her foot down.

"She said, 'That's the first and last time you will ever use a chemical,'" Marrone said.

Marrone's father went back to what's known as Bt, an early and still-popular biopesticide. And Marrone, a first-grader, wrote a letter to the U.S. Department of Agriculture for information on careers in pest management.

She would go on to earn a Ph.D. in entomology at North Carolina State, chasing dreams of developing natural pest-killers.

In 2006 she founded Marrone Organic Innovations, and by April of this year announced she had raised $3.75 million from investors.

So far, Marrone Organic Innovations has just one product, GreenMatch O, on the market. The all-purpose herbicide is approved for use by organic farmers in every market except California, where it's under regulatory review. The company is working on dozens of others, including many it has licensed from scientists eager to get their invention into Marrone's product pipeline.

Nice story worth reading in full
Scientist/entrepreneur searches for biopesticides | ScrippsNews