Top ten seed companies, 2007 to today: how a ranking became a big four

In the spring of 2007 the research group ETC Group published one of its periodic rankings of the world's ten largest seed companies, based on seed revenue for 2006. The list itself is history now. Several of the names on it no longer exist as independent companies, and the one at the top, Monsanto, no longer exists even as a name. The exercise is still worth revisiting, partly for what it showed and partly for how hard it was to do.

Why anyone ranks seed companies

Seed is the first purchase of the farming season and the one that shapes the rest. The variety determines which herbicides can be sprayed, which pests matter, what the harvest will be worth and, for patented traits, what the farmer may do with the grain afterwards. A company that controls germplasm and traits has a say in all of that.

Rankings are a crude tool for tracking that control, but a useful one. They show who is buying whom, how fast the top tier is pulling away, and how much of the commercial market a handful of boardrooms decide. Repeat them every few years and you get a trend line that no merger review produces, because competition authorities examine one deal at a time.

They also miss a lot. A seed company's reach extends well beyond its own sales. Through the 2000s, Monsanto licensed its herbicide-tolerance and insect-resistance traits to a long list of other seed companies, so a large share of its "competitors'" seed carried Monsanto genetics and paid Monsanto royalties. Revenue share understated influence. In 2007 Monsanto sat at the top of the list, well ahead of DuPont's Pioneer, despite having barely figured in seed rankings a decade earlier. It had bought its way in.

Why the list is hard to compile

The 2007 compilers had to phone companies for figures that weren't published anywhere, and some never answered. Little has changed in principle:

• Segment reporting is patchy. Some companies report seed revenue cleanly. Others fold it into a "crop science" division alongside pesticides, or don't separate it at all.
• Royalties muddy the figure. A trait owner may book licensing income alongside its own seed sales. That flatters the licensor and counts value that also appears in the licensee's revenue.
• Private and cooperative firms. Some large vegetable-seed houses, such as Japan's Takii or the Netherlands' Rijk Zwaan and Enza Zaden, are privately held and publish little. Cooperative-controlled groups such as France's Limagrain and Denmark's DLF disclose more, but on their own reporting calendars.
• Fiscal years and currencies don't line up. Monsanto's year ended in August; most European firms use the calendar year. A swing in exchange rates can reorder a ranking without anything changing in a field.
• The denominator is an estimate. The size of the "global commercial seed market" comes from industry consultants, not from any official statistic.

Then there is the biggest caveat. A large part of the seed planted in the world, especially in Africa and Asia, is saved, swapped or sold locally by farmers and never appears in any company's accounts. "Share of the commercial seed market" is not "share of the world's seed". The gap between the two is precisely what seed laws and plant-variety protection fight over.

Timeline: from ten to four

2007. Monsanto completes its purchase of Delta and Pine Land, the leading US cottonseed company, after the Justice Department requires it to sell some cotton assets. Delta and Pine Land had co-owned, with the US Department of Agriculture, an early patent on "Terminator" seed-sterility technology, which Monsanto had pledged years before not to commercialize.

2008–2014. A long run of smaller deals. The big firms buy regional seed companies and vegetable specialists, while patents on first-generation traits start to run out. Monsanto's original Roundup Ready soybean patent expired in the United States in the mid-2010s, opening the way for generic versions of the trait.

2015. Monsanto makes an unsolicited offer for Syngenta, the Swiss seed and pesticide group. Syngenta says no, and Monsanto walks away in August. The approach signals that the largest players are now hunting one another rather than smaller prey.

December 2015. Dow Chemical and DuPont announce a merger of equals, with a plan to split the combined company into three, one of them agricultural.

February 2016. China National Chemical Corporation (ChemChina) agrees to buy Syngenta in a deal valued at about $43 billion, at the time the largest foreign acquisition by a Chinese company.

September 2016. Bayer agrees to buy Monsanto for more than $60 billion.

2017. Dow and DuPont close their merger in August, after the European Commission requires DuPont to sell a large part of its pesticide business, research included; FMC buys it. ChemChina completes the Syngenta purchase in mid-2017, after regulators in the US and Europe require sales of overlapping pesticide products.

2018. Bayer closes the Monsanto deal in June. To win approval from the European Commission and the US Justice Department, Bayer sells BASF a substantial package worth more than €7 billion in total: its soybean, canola and cotton seed businesses, its vegetable-seed arm, the glufosinate herbicide franchise and the traits that go with it, among other assets. BASF, which had little seed business before, becomes a significant seed company almost overnight. Bayer retires the Monsanto name.

2019. DowDuPont splits. The agricultural business becomes Corteva Agriscience, listed in New York from June 2019, joining Dow AgroSciences with DuPont's Pioneer seed business.

2020–2021. Syngenta is folded into a larger Chinese state-owned structure. Syngenta Group brings together Syngenta, the Israeli-founded pesticide maker ADAMA and Sinochem's agricultural assets, and in 2021 ChemChina and Sinochem themselves merge under a new holding company.

Six large seed-and-pesticide companies at the start of 2015 (Monsanto, DuPont, Dow, Syngenta, Bayer and BASF) became four: Bayer, Corteva, Syngenta Group and BASF.

What "big four" means, and what it doesn't

The phrase covers seeds and agrochemicals together. Look at seed alone and the picture tilts. Bayer and Corteva sit well ahead of everyone else, with Syngenta behind them, followed by a second tier that includes Limagrain, BASF and Germany's KWS. The order within that second tier shifts with the year and the method.

The overall shape is not in serious doubt. Studies of the commercial seed market since the merger wave commonly find that a handful of firms control well over half of it, and in particular crops and countries, such as maize and soybeans in the Americas, two companies dominate the pipeline of traits and elite germplasm. The mergers did not change the direction the 2007 list pointed in. They accelerated it.

None of that settles whether farmers are worse off. Supporters of the deals argued that only very large firms can fund the research behind new traits and the regulatory dossiers needed to approve them. Critics reply that the price of seed for major US row crops has climbed faster than many other farm costs since GM traits arrived in the mid-1990s, that research follows a few commodity crops, and that much of the industry's control now runs through patents and licenses rather than through sales. As the primer on concentration ratios on this blog explains, a high share is a reason to look closely, not a verdict.

US policy reflected the unease. A 2021 executive order on competition directed the Agriculture Department to examine seed and other farm inputs, and in March 2023 USDA published a report on competition in seeds and inputs that flagged patent and licensing practices, along with what farmers are told about what they buy, as areas needing attention.

Buying market share also means buying risk. Bayer acquired Monsanto's Roundup litigation along with its seed business. In 2020 it agreed to a settlement worth up to about $10.9 billion to resolve a large share of US claims that the weedkiller caused cancer, while maintaining that glyphosate is safe, and new cases kept arriving afterwards. No 2016 merger model fully priced that in.

Patents are the next ranking

If the list were redrawn today, revenue might be the less interesting column. The frontier has moved to gene editing, and the question is who holds the foundational patents and on what terms they license them. DuPont's Pioneer, now part of Corteva, agreed in 2017 with the Broad Institute to offer joint licenses for CRISPR-Cas9 in agriculture. In Europe, whether plants made with new genomic techniques can be patented became one of the sticking points in the EU's rewrite of its GMO rules.

That is where to look next. A company's seed sales tell you what farmers bought last season. Its patent portfolio and licensing terms tell you what every other breeder may sell in the next decade.

The 2007 ranking stopped at ten because ten is a round number. A ranking drawn up in 2024 tells you most of what you need to know in the first four lines. The rest of the corporate power shelf follows the story from there.