The US company – which enjoyed a €22.5 funding round last year – offers technology which allows pollen to be collected, preserved, and applied on-demand on wind-pollinated crops for “significantly” better pollination and higher yields.
Pollen from wind-pollinated crops such as wheat, rice, corn, rye, barley and oats, usually survives only a few minutes to hours at most. Climate change – drought, excessively high temperatures, pollinator decline, and extreme weather events – has made the pollination of these plants even more complex.
PowerPollen collects, preserves and applies pollen to these crops, eliminating the previously required dependency on natural pollen shedding to pollinate female plants. It claims this process enables the ability to more reliably and cost-effectively produce high-quality seed farmers plant for crops.
The company has now received a US patent for its process of using solid particulates blended with fresh pollen grains to protect pollen’s viability during storage.
PowerPollen’s said IP strategy has been a key part of protecting its innovation while rapidly scaling to support global seed companies and farmers since the company was founded in 2015.
“Our initial key discoveries more than a decade ago – and our ongoing innovation since – has enabled PowerPollen to scale our unique pollination tech stack of collection, storage and application to commercial levels in agriculture – helping farmers and seed production partners increase yields without increasing other inputs,” said PowerPollen’s Jason Cope, chief intellectual property officer.
“Our discoveries changed the previously held notion that row crop pollen was not capable of being stored for any duration. The ripple effect can clearly be seen by the consistent yield improvements in fields that PowerPollen has treated with stored pollen.”
The hardest part of pollen storage
In 2015, PowerPollen began looking for ways to improve in-field crop pollination by collecting pollen and storing it for targeted application. In its discovery process, the greatest problem it encountered was that pollen tends to form large clumps when stored, which results in a rapid decline in pollen health.
“We theorized that when a pollen grain dies, its walls lose integrity and the contents of the dead cell leak out, contacting other pollen grains in the batch being stored,” Cope said. “This causes adjacent pollen grains to die, resulting in the large clumps of dead pollen cells.”
PowerPollen created what it calls a unique, cost-effective production process that blends fresh pollen with different materials that separate the live pollen grains from each other. This now patented process prevents the live pollen grains from contacting any material leaked from dead pollen grains, thus extending and prolonging the pollen’s viability.
“Seed crop producers today use incredibly innovative breeding techniques yet risk it all with pollination methods that haven’t changed for generations,” Cope said. “With this patent claim, we continue to execute our IP strategy focused on the foundational building blocks of pollination-enabling technologies – and advancing this innovation across crops and geographies at the pace, scale and reliability critical to advancing higher-yield and climate-resilient food production.”
