Syngenta’s decision to invest USD $130 million (£100 million) in a new Biological Sciences Technology and Research (BioSTaR) centre at its Jealott’s Hill campus in the UK is more than a facilities upgrade. It is a statement about where the world’s largest crop protection company believes agricultural innovation is heading.
Scheduled to be operational by 2028, the BioSTaR centre will bring together around 300 scientists in a purpose‑built environment designed to accelerate discovery and product development. The facility will integrate bioscience, molecular and analytical research, digital technologies and artificial intelligence, reinforcing the UK’s role as a global hub for agri‑innovation.
“Everything we do at Jealott’s Hill has a global focus to it,” said Dave Hughes, head of new technology identification and evaluation for Syngenta Crop Protection.
The investment also strengthens Syngenta’s long‑standing UK presence, supporting high‑value scientific jobs while complementing its global R&D network across Europe, the US and China.
From chemistries to complexity
Hughes occupies a role at the very front end of Syngenta’s innovation pipeline. His job is to scout, assess and shape technologies years – sometimes decades – before they reach farmers’ fields.
From that vantage point, the most striking trend he has witnessed is the quiet diversification of agricultural technology.
“When I first joined the company around 15 years ago, we produced synthetic chemical pesticides and high‑quality seeds, and that was it,” Hughes said. “But these days, it’s much more diverse than that.”
That diversity now spans digital agronomy, biological agents, biofertilisers, biostimulants, and entirely new ways of influencing plant performance.
The rise of digital agronomy has been especially transformative, Hughes notes – from image analytics and satellite data to sensors in the field, all integrated into decision‑support tools for growers.
“That was never around when I first started,” he said.
At the same time, the nature of crop protection agents themselves is changing. Alongside traditional chemistries sits a growing spectrum of biological approaches, from living bacteria and fungi to nucleic acids, proteins, extracts and natural products.
“It’s much more diverse in terms of the sort of things we’re trying to invent,” Hughes said. “And that makes it much more interesting and exciting.”
A new herbicide, four decades in the making
Despite the shift toward biology, Syngenta continues to invest heavily in chemistry – particularly where resistance is eroding existing tools.
Jealott’s Hill remains the company’s global centre of excellence for herbicide discovery, a role underlined by the recent launch of VIRESTINA™, a new technology designed to control resistant grass weeds in crops such as soybean and cotton.
Developed over around 10 years at Jealott’s Hill, VIRESTINA™ is based on metproxybicyclone, the first new selective herbicide for resistant grass weeds in these crops in nearly 40 years.
Grass weeds now account for around 40% of the 273 weed species reported as resistant across more than 100 crops worldwide, posing a growing threat to yields and farm profitability.
Approved first in Argentina, with planned rollouts in Brazil, Australia, the US and Canada, VIRESTINA™ offers a new mode of action within the ACCase inhibitor family, engineered to overcome resistance to older chemistries. The technology also breaks down quickly in soil, supporting flexible crop rotations and reducing environmental impact.
Modelling rivals experimentation
One of the trends Hughes is most enthusiastic about is the rapid evolution of modelling – and its growing parity with physical experimentation.
The growing ability to model systems that are far more complex than could be handled in the past is hugely exciting, he said. “Both experiments and models are approximations of reality. But the advent of digital science means our ability to model complex systems is now starting to rival experimental measurements.”
Traditionally, experiments ruled supreme despite their limitations: they are slow, expensive and conducted under controlled conditions. Advanced computational modelling, by contrast, is fast and scalable – provided the outputs can be trusted.
“We’re now getting to the point where the two are kind of equivalent,” Hughes said.
That shift is already changing how new crop protection molecules are invented. Today, Syngenta can model how a hypothetical chemical structure might perform as a herbicide – from how it binds to its target site to how it moves through a plant and breaks down in the environment.
“You can essentially screen the molecule in a computer without ever having had to go to the bother of making it,” Hughes said. “That’s a tremendously long step.”
AI lifts the lid on biology
AI‑driven analytics are also transforming the “wet science” of biology.
“We can do experiments now that produce oceans of data,” he said. “In the past, a human brain just isn’t capable of spotting little relevant signals in oceans of noise. AI systems aren’t intimidated by that at all.”
These tools are enabling researchers to understand how plants respond to stress, chemicals or environmental change at a systems level – opening the door to interventions that improve resilience to heat, drought and other climate‑driven pressures.
Beyond crop protection: fertilisers, soils and microbes
Looking further ahead, Hughes sees a major opportunity in biofertilisers and biostimulants, which could reduce reliance on energy‑intensive synthetic fertilisers by enabling plants to access nitrogen and phosphorus more efficiently through microbial processes.
“There’s so much focus on fertiliser at the moment, not least the geopolitical issues,” he said. “So anything we can do in that respect is pretty good.”
Soil health represents another frontier. While measurement tools are improving, Hughes argues that the bigger challenge is intervention – finding scalable, product‑based ways to improve degraded soils.
The soil microbiome, in particular, remains a “black box”.
We still don’t really understand which species matter, why they matter, and how to intervene in a way that actually sticks, he said.
Unlocking that complexity, he believes, will rely on the same convergence of biology, chemistry, data and modelling that now defines modern agtech R&D.
‘A hell of a time to be alive’
Despite regulatory hurdles and the sheer complexity of the challenges ahead, Hughes is optimistic.
“From my perspective, there has never been a better time to be involved in agricultural innovation,” he said. “The opportunities out there are incredible. The challenges are profound. It’s just a hell of a time to be alive.”
For Syngenta, the BioSTaR investment suggests the company agrees – and is preparing for a future where biology, data and digital science are as central to farming as chemistry once was.
“Basically,” Hughes continued. “I love what I do.”
