Climate Resilient Biofortified Maize

Semilla Nueva reduces malnutrition by producing and selling high-yielding, biofortified maize seeds to smallholder farmers. In Central America and East Africa, maize is the most widely produced crop and is the primary dietary staple. Globally, 900 million people depend on maize. Maize is low in iron, zinc, and quality protein, critical deficiencies, which cause high malnutrition rates. Our biofortified seed yields 5-11% higher than similarly priced hybrid seeds and doubles yields compared to traditional seeds. The seed also contains increased zinc, iron, and protein quality, improving nutrition without requiring a switch to carbon heavy practices like animal agriculture. Our seed’s climate resilient traits - like drought and storm tolerance - help farmers adapt to climate change. Farmers who purchase our seed produce more food and better nutrition on the same amount of land.  Scaling the use of biofortified maize seed could improve nutrition for nearly a billion maize consumers globally.

By 2050, 2 billion people will depend on maize for their primary nutrition.  While global malnutrition rates are falling, the number of malnourished people is rising across sub-Saharan Africa and in countries like Guatemala, regions where maize dominates diets.  Maize is high yielding and a cultural staple, but its naturally low nutrient levels trap countries in the cycle of malnutrition and poverty. This situation will be significantly exacerbated by three climate change consequences: 1. Rising atmospheric carbon will decrease the nutritional content of crops 2. Rising temperatures will increase soil aridity and decrease yields and 3. Extreme weather events will lead to crop losses.

To keep up with population growth the world must produce more food in the next fifty years than in the entire history of humanity. This must be done in a climate sensitive way, which means decreasing the growing reliance on animal protein. Meat production is nearly five times higher than it was 60 years ago due to population growth and rising global incomes. The complexity of this problem requires technology that improves the climate resilience, yields, and nutrition of staple crops that poor populations rely on. Biofortifying maize improves yields and nutrition without increasing carbon output.

Semilla Nueva partners with scientists at the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) who specialize in biofortification. Through this process, seeds from all over the world are screened for nutritional qualities and crossed with seeds that are highly competitive in local areas. Semilla Nueva spent four years screening and testing seeds in Guatemala before launching the world’s first commercial, biofortified (non-GMO) maize seed with 19% more iron, 39% more zinc, and 2.1 times the quality protein of traditional maize. 

As part of this breeding and screening process, Semilla Nueva also screened seeds for climate resilience traits. Semilla Nueva’s first seed, commercially known as F3, is far more resilient to storms, with 65% less plants knocked over during heavy winds and 30% less plants lost to rot than similarly priced seeds. F3 has an extensive root system, allowing it to weather droughts better. Farmers observe that F3 maintains green and healthy plants during dry periods compared to conventional seeds. The seed supports farmers in producing more and more nutritious food on the same amount of land. We sell the seed commercially, using Central American seed company best practices and existing sales channels, to reach smallholder farmers across rural Guatemala.

In Guatemala, over 90% of farmers live in poverty. In years with favorable conditions, annual income is around $2,100 for a family of 6.2 people, only $.92/day per person. We’ve worked with Guatemalan farmers for over a decade. We designed our model in response to farmers unanimously requesting high-performing, low-cost seeds to improve their incomes. We combined this desire with increased nutrition through high-yielding, biofortified seed.

Our model improves nutrition and incomes for farmer families who grow our seed and nutrition for the poorest consumers who purchase grain in the market. We improved the nutrition of over 150,000 people in 2019. Our seed can reduce stunting by up to 20% and closes dietary zinc and iron gaps for women and children in Guatemala. Zinc sufficiency is linked to decreased mortality from pneumonia and diarrhea for vulnerable populations. Children with better nutrition experience lifelong improvements - girls with adequate protein complete 1.2 more school years and boys with adequate protein earn 46% more in their lifetime compared to malnourished peers. Further, of the over 5,000 farmer families who grew our seed in 2019, most increased their incomes by 5% to 120% based on farmers’ practices.

Farmers across the world are experiencing climate effects and suffering significant crop losses. Our seed’s drought and storm tolerance helps farmers adapt to climate change and increase yields. Through commercial sales, we rapidly reach rural farmers with climate resilient biofortified maize seed, helping them produce more food (and nutrition) on their existing land. Further, recent studies show climate change will lower levels of zinc and iron by 10-20% in staple crops, making hundreds of millions of additional people nutritionally deficient. Our solution compensates for these losses and opens a path to developing and scaling seeds with even higher nutrient levels. 

Semilla Nueva’s model is innovative at three levels. We: 1. produce and sell more nutritious, climate resilient, and high-yielding seeds, 2. use commercial sales to reach people with better nutrition without changing behavior and 3. employ policy and strategic partnership to expand the use of biofortified seeds. The combination of proven technology (biofortified seeds), an effective delivery mechanism (sales), and a plan for scale (policy and partnerships) will allow Semilla Nueva to meaningfully improve nutrition and climate resilience for farmers in contrast to failed efforts of the past. 

Traditional nutrition programs often fail because they ignore the cultural and economic importance of maize for poor families. Diet diversification efforts like home gardens are work intensive and don’t produce enough food to change nutrition outcomes. Nutrition education can be ineffective because nutritious foods are more costly, and families must focus on immediate needs and ensure they have enough to eat.

Previous efforts by the Guatemalan government to give farmers free low-yielding biofortified seeds and promote them based on better nutrition failed because farmers will not trade nutrition for low yields. Semilla Nueva’s approach is fundamentally different because we produce high-yielding seeds and sell them at an affordable cost. Farmers care deeply about their income and our seed can improve incomes by up to $200 annually. We highlight our model’s success to demonstrate the benefits of high-yielding biofortified seeds to the Guatemalan government to support a national policy. We use our impact evidence to advance partnerships with African agricultural organizations.

The genetics of Semilla Nueva’s first seed were developed at CIMMYT with funding from Harvest Plus. CIMMYT’s general strategy for developing seeds involves screening seeds globally to find regionally adapted and high nutrient varieties, crossing them to create new seeds with improved characteristics, and then testing these potential commercial seeds with partners such as Semilla Nueva which then launch the seed. 

This breeding method was useful for launching F3, which can compete against most locally produced seeds in Guatemala. But it has two major drawbacks. First, these seeds are not competitive against the best new seeds that are available from international seed companies, and this breeding method will not be able to catch up to private sector efforts. Second, developing seeds for new geographics like sub-Saharan Africa could take close to a decade and end up with similar yield gaps. Recognizing the need to develop higher yielding biofortified seeds and seeds for new geographies, Semilla Nueva began developing a new strategy to breed nutritional traits into desirable seeds without changing the overall genetics of those seeds. This approach, called backcrossing, would allow Semilla Nueva to help partners, seed companies, and governments to biofortify their best seeds while maintaining their yield, climate resilience, and other traits. Developing this technology will make it possible for seed companies to cost-effectively convert their best seeds, making a policy based incentive program far cheaper and opening the door for other social enterprises to rapidly scale biofortified maize.

Biofortified crops are a climate resilient and cost-effective way to reach rural populations with better nutrition. Every dollar of investment generates $27 in economic return from averted disease, improved earnings, and increased productivity. A meta-analysis of over 20 global studies demonstrates that consuming maize with higher protein quality can reduce childhood stunting by up to 20%. Recent data from Central America’s leading research institute, Instituto de Nutrición de Centroamérica y Panamá (INCAP), confirms that our maize closes dietary zinc and iron gaps for children and pregnant and lactating women in rural Guatemala. A recently completed ex-ante model of potential impact shows that if only 12.5% of the seed market (or approximately 18,000 farmers)  is shifted to biofortified seed in Guatemala, 7.7 million people will improve their zinc intake and 200,000 people will become fully zinc sufficient. 

Field surveys with farmers who purchased our seed have shown yields up to 11% higher than similarly priced hybrid seeds and up to nearly double yields compared to traditional, open pollinated varieties. The seed’s higher climate resilience further protects farmers' yields.  Farmers report F3 maintains healthy plants during dry periods compared to conventional seeds and cite it as a top reason to buy F3. We launched commercial sales in 2018 and sold 1,234 bags. In 2019, we nearly doubled sales selling 2,183 bags, proving the commercial viability of our model.

In maize dependent regions around the world, farmers are beginning to switch to improved seeds sold by seed companies in order to produce enough maize to feed national populations. If we can get more rural farmers to adopt biofortified seed we can improve the nutrition of hundreds of millions and help farmers adapt to climate change. 

Studies across the world have shown that farmers select seeds based on yields and price and don’t consider nutrition. To get millions of farmers to buy biofortified seeds, we need seed companies to offer high-yielding biofortified seeds at low costs.

Our initial work with seed companies has shown that small financial incentives can lead seed companies to sell biofortified seeds at highly competitive prices. In Guatemala, the entire seed sector could be incentivized to switch to biofortified seeds for about $4 million a year - equivalent to 4% of the national agricultural development budget or 1% of the health budget. Significant nutritional impacts could be obtained with less than a quarter of this adoption rate. Faster biofortified seed breeding would decrease the subsidy cost even further. 

Policy to incentivize seed companies to sell biofortified seeds at low costs could be highly attractive to governments because it 1) improves nutrition for previously hard to reach demographics at a low cost, 2) leaves implementation to the private sector and only pays for results, and 3) could increase political capital if the decreases in seed prices are noticeable to farmers. 

To expand access to biofortified seeds globally, Semilla Nueva must continue to: 

1. show the feasibility of selling biofortified seeds and generate initial evidence, 

2. improve the development of biofortified seeds, and 

3. build alliances with other seed companies, development organizations and the Guatemalan government to push for a policy pilot and later long-term institutionalization. 

If we can succeed in Guatemala and if we can generate new seeds for sub-Saharan Africa, we will create the groundwork for a highly promising model that could reach over a hundred million people with improved nutrition in the next ten years with potential to impact 2 billion by 2050.

In our first three years we’ve nearly doubled our seed sales annually. In our second year, 2019, over 5,400 farmer families purchased seed, improving their income and nutrition. The grain they consumed and sold improved the nutrition of over 150,000 of Guatemala’s poorest consumers. Sales are on track to reach nearly 8,000 families in 2020 and nearly 11,000 families in 2021, improving the nutrition of over 250,000 people and nearly 400,000 people respectively. 

Within five years, Semilla Nueva hopes to have a policy in place to incentivize other seed companies to sell biofortified seeds at reduced prices and also launch the next generation of biofortified seeds. Combined, this would lead to 45,000 families purchasing seed, improving their incomes and nutrition. These farmers would sell enough grain into the market, saturating it with higher nutrient grain, to make a population level impact on nutrition. According to our ex-ante nutritional impact model, this would improve the nutrition of more than 8 million people. At the same time, Semilla Nueva would launch new seeds in Africa, beginning to repeat the process with partners who already sell seed to the largest concentrated population of malnourished, maize consuming people.

To reach our goal of improving the nutrition of 8 million people within five years, and laying the groundwork to reach 100 million within ten, Semilla Nueva has to meet several key milestones in seed development, marketing, and coalition building for public policy. 

In terms of seed development, within the next year we need to develop improved laboratory techniques to measure the nutrition of seeds without destroying them and use these techniques to prove that nutritional traits can be bred into the parental seeds of highly competitive, non-biofortified hybrids. If successful, this will allow us to launch new biofortified seeds with up to 30% higher yields (making them competitive with the best seeds of transnational companies) within three years. It will also enable us to begin developing seeds for our partners in Africa, with a goal of launching within four years. 

Using our seeds already in development, and these new seeds, we will expand sales, but most importantly, we will begin building general support from farmers, NGOs, international development organizations, and other seed companies to encourage the Guatemalan government to adopt a policy to incentivize all of Guatemala’s seed companies to copy our model. Given timelines for similar policies in other countries, we expect this phase to take approximately two years, with an additional two years to pilot the implementation of the policy, generate results and work towards its institutionalization.

Semilla Nueva is facing three immediate challenges to be able to significantly scale our model. We need to develop advanced in-country nutritional testing capabilities and create the evidence and public demand to support public policy. 

1. Current testing for seed nutrition requires grinding seeds and evaluating the powder for zinc and iron levels. Because seeds are destroyed in the process, additional breeding generations are required; this can triple the time and cost to develop new seeds.  New advances in both X-Ray Fluorescence (XRF) and Near Infrared Spectrometry (NIRS) should facilitate a testing method that can assess a seed’s nutritional content without destroying the seed. This technology should allow us to develop higher-yielding, more climate resilient seeds much faster and enable us to begin developing seeds for Africa. 
2. Semilla Nueva has convincing data on the impacts of our seed on improving nutritional intake, incomes, and food security. We haven’t yet developed a cost-effective means of measuring local health outcomes. While the case for improved health outcomes due to improved nutrition from biofortified seeds is relatively strong in the literature, we need to collect local evidence of health outcomes in Guatemala to improve our argument for policy. 
3. Currently, Semilla Nueva’s marketing appeals to farmers by highlighting the income increases our seed can generate. As we launch advocacy efforts to promote national policy, we need to develop a new strategy to generate widespread public demand for biofortified seed, with farmers and rural families becoming central advocates to the Guatemalan government. 

Semilla Nueva is currently addressing these barriers by:

1. We are working with scientists and industry experts at companies which develop and sell XRF and NIRS technology to test if they can be used for single seed analysis. Testing is underway with seeds available in the US. Seeds from our breeding program, with known nutritional qualities, will soon be sent to several international companies. Successful testing results will lead to an XRF machine being installed in Guatemala. 

2. Semilla Nueva recently hired an additional M&E coordinator to strengthen data collection quality and analysis. This position is allowing us to move to representative and regional samples of economic impact, family demographics and consumption data, and improve analysis on nutritional impacts for farmers - data which will guide the creation of a larger health outcomes study. We have held initial conversations with organizations such as JPAL, ID Insight, and local researchers to build initial proposals for health evaluations based on this data. Additional work is necessary to solidify these proposals and seek funding for implementation. 

3. Semilla Nueva hired a marketing strategist to oversee new national marketing campaigns and digital marketing. We are also working with USAID’s Feed the Future program to launch a new market study focused on using the improved taste and texture of the tortillas produced from biofortified maize (in addition to the low cost and high quality of our seed) to create a deeper sense of customer loyalty, an important step before beginning a marketing campaign to build support for policy.

23 full time

2 part time

The executive team has 50 years of experience in Latin America’s agriculture sector. Director of Operations, Dr. Angela Bastidas, led Monstanto’s seed development pipeline in northern Latin America. Since joining Semilla Nueva’s team she has nearly doubled sales annually. 

CEO, Curt Bowen, founded Semilla Nueva, and has worked in Guatemala’s agricultural sector for over a decade. During Semilla Nueva’s first five years, he worked with the Guatemalan Ministry of Agriculture to reach thousands of farmers with new sustainable farming techniques. He led initial efforts to launch biofortified seeds in Guatemala and co-founded the BioFORT Platform, a stakeholder working group which has expanded the use of biofortified crops to over 10,000 families in Guatemala. He has been recognized for fellowships from Forbes 30 under 30, Mulago, Ashoka, and Expo2020.  Curt is cultivating and leveraging a wide network of policy stakeholders to advocate with the Guatemalan government on national policy.  

Juan Jose Catalan, seed development lead, has 30 years of experience in seed breeding. During his two decades at Central America’s largest seed company, Cristiani Burkard, he helped breed and produce hybrid seeds which reached over 200,000 farmers annually. Additionally he led Monsanto’s seed evaluation efforts in Guatemala for 8 years. 

The Board of Directors includes Dr. Keith Andrews, the former director of Zamorano, Central America’s most prestigious agricultural school, Jerry Brady, the co-founder of ACCION, the world’s largest microfinance organization, and Dr. Jack Fiedler the world’s lead scientist in ex-ante impact evaluation for biofortified crops.

Semilla Nueva formally partners with: 

• The International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT): We work with CIMMYT to develop better seeds. In partnership with CIMMYT and Harvest Plus we launched our current seed. Our model’s ability to operationalize the seed and reach thousands of farmers has facilitated further collaboration with CIMMYT. We have an MOU with CIMMYT to share genetic materials and testing. However, current COVID-19 restrictions have made collaboration more difficult, increasing the need to improve local testing abilities. 

• Harvest Plus: We share data with Harvest Plus in Guatemala to track the use of biofortified crops across the country. 

• Instituto de Nutrición de Centroamérica y Panamá (INCAP): INCAP is Central America’s leading nutrition institute; we partner to evaluate our impact. We expanded our partnership with INCAP to work towards co-launching Central America’s first seed nutrition lab with protein quality abilities.

In 2019, we began a policy working group with the World Food Programme, USDA, INCAP and additional stakeholders to promote a seed subsidy program that could bring improved nutrition to over eight million people within three years.

We are currently working with One Acre Fund to investigate a seed development partnership model and anticipate officially launching the partnership at the end of 2020. We will cultivate partnerships with additional agricultural organizations in Africa throughout 2021.

Semilla Nueva launched a subsidiary seed company in 2018. This seed company uses the same business model as Central America’s other seed companies. Local farmers are trained and contracted to produce seed which is certified by the Guatemalan government for quality. Seed is sold to distributors who stock local retailers throughout the country who in turn sell the seed to farmers. Semilla Nueva promotes the seed through demonstration parcels with community leaders, field days where farmers can visit demonstration parcels to see the seed during maturity and harvest, and advertising through radio, billboards, SMS and digital promotion. 

Approximately half of Guatemala’s maize is produced by 150,000 farmers who buy hybrid seeds. These farmers are dependent on erratic rainfall and do not have crop insurance, making them highly risk averse.  Over 60% buy inexpensive and outdated seeds from local seed companies. While aware that more expensive seeds and inputs could increase incomes in good years, climate risks lead them to seek the best inputs they can purchase with minimum investment. Semilla Nueva’s seed costs the same as the cheapest seed in the market, but yields similarly to the seeds in the mid-price range, which are close to twice as expensive. The result has led to increasing brand loyalty, with Semilla Nueva’s net promoter score, a measure of how much farmers would recommend a seed to friends and family, ranking in the top two brands for surveyed farmers during the first two years of sales.

Malnutrition holds back nearly a billion people from reaching their full potential, undermining the health, educational, and economic development of entire nations. As the world’s population continues to grow, we need to find a way to address malnutrition without resorting to carbon heavy practices, which would be disastrous for the environment and particularly so for the poor farming families we aim to serve. We have a promising blueprint that combines effective technology (biofortified seeds) and delivery models (sales, policy, and partnership) to improve nutrition, agricultural productivity, and climate resilience for rural farmers.  We need Solve’s strategic support and expertise to solve our current barriers to scale - the need for improved nutritional testing methods, improved impact evaluation, and a successful national campaign to drive demand for favorable public policy.

Solve’s model, providing connections to researchers, industry leaders, and donors, will connect us to the right people with the specific expertise required to address our barriers to scale. We will work with professors and the D-lab to design a high throughput XRF machine that can evaluate single seeds without destroying them. This will require an iterative process to adapt and refine existing technology. We are also eager to partner with J-PAL-Latin America and J-WAFS to design new methods to evaluate health impacts. Finally, the diverse set of marketing, policy, and advocacy experts in MIT’s network will help us shape a successful public campaign to drive national demand for biofortified seeds.

Solution technology: While several companies have developed XRF and NIRS lab equipment, the technologies are not specifically calibrated to maize seeds and modifications are required to evaluate seeds in an automated fashion. No current companies have the right teams to solve this interdisciplinary problem. 

Monitoring and evaluation: We need assistance in designing an improved evaluation strategy that will allow us to measure the local health impact of our seed. To implement the improved strategy we will also need support identifying research partners and funders. 

Marketing: We need to combine policy and advocacy expertise with commercial marketing strategies. This is another interdisciplinary problem where very few existing organizations have the correct skill set. This requires collaboration across policy experts, academics, and private sector leaders.

MIT hosts both the programs and faculty that can help us overcome the barriers mentioned above. We’d like to prioritize partnership with the D-lab, JPAL- Latin America, J-WAFS, and leading engineering and policy professors as well as researchers and students.  We propose three main avenues for partnership:

1. If awarded the MIT Solve partnership, Semilla Nueva will work with leading MIT scientists and the D-lab to develop a high throughput XRF and NIRS testing machine. This machine will be able to evaluate grains one by one without destroying them, allowing an efficient and cost-effective way to evaluate seeds for nutrition. Finalizing this technology will allow us to conduct nutrition testing locally and rapidly, eliminating the principle barriers to developing higher-yielding and more climate resilient seeds for Meso-America and sub-Saharan Africa. 

1. Secondly, we will expand on previous conversations with JPAL-Latin America and J-WAFS to develop a cost-effective and rigorous way to evaluate health outcomes for farmers using our seeds. Working with JPAL, we will seek funding to implement additional studies in collaboration with the Guatemalan government to advance national policy and improve our plans for policy implementation. 

1. Finally, we will work with professors and students, likely from public policy and business programs, to create a methodology for researching, piloting, and implementing a new national marketing campaign designed to leverage positive farmer perspectives on our seed and increase public awareness of the malnutrition crisis to build support for new policies to make biofortified seeds more accessible to farmers nationally.