Startup Gains Momentum in Preserving Pollen

For at least a century, scientists and entrepreneurs have been trying to figure out how to preserve plant pollen, many types of which die within an hour of being shed. If the problem could be solved, pollen could be distributed whenever and wherever needed.

A University of Nebraska small grains expert says some modest progress was made in the past by keeping pollen cold and controlling humidity. But storage life was limited. Those discoveries weren’t enough to prevent major yield losses when weather-related challenges hampered the success of natural pollination.

Katherine Frels, assistant professor, University of Nebraska-Lincoln: “We’re talking about expanding it from maybe an hour to a few hours or maybe a day. And that’s not really long enough if we’re trying to make a lot of pollinations, or say we have a stress window that’s occurring.”

The challenge remained: how could these dust-sized particles be collected, preserved and redistributed on plants in a way that the extensive time and money invested didn’t cancel out any financial benefit.

Katherine Frels, University of Nebraska-Lincoln: “I would definitely say that pollen preservation, while we understand mechanisms that contribute to it, we haven’t been able to reach our goals at a commercial scale.”

PowerPollen, an Ankeny, Iowa-based company, says it has not only made progress on preserving pollen longer and maintaining its viability, but they are also able to collect and redistribute within cornfields on a large scale. 

Jason Cope, PowerPollen: We got together and really started brainstorming and came up with the fact that pollen is an uncontrolled aspect of agriculture, where it’s just left to the weather, the elements, timing. And we felt that if we could build a solid technology around the ability to preserve pollen, that it would be a major step in agriculture that’s been a long-held need.”

Co-founders Jason Cope and Todd Krone, who worked at what was then DuPont Pioneer, now under the name Corteva, decided to start out by focusing their efforts on seed corn production. Not only is corn pollen easier to collect than pollen of many other plants, but it is also considered a high-value crop. PowerPollen’s leaders also believed they could save seed corn companies space in their fields by eliminating the need for rows of male plants.

Jason Cope, PowerPollen: “Seed production is… costly. There’s a lot of labor associated with it. There’s a lot of land utilization. The male is only out there to produce pollen and then those rows are actually mowed out. So as you start to remove the males from the field because you have preserved pollen, now you’re increasing the overall productivity per unit of land.”

The company, started in 2015, now has 30 full-time employees, a half dozen approved patents, and more than 60 others pending. PowerPollen has also landed contracts with two major seed companies. Corteva, which is also a major funder of Market to Market, signed a licensing agreement with PowerPollen in 2020 and Bayer followed in 2021.

Jeremy Johnson, Corteva: “We’ve had very successful in-field testing to date so based on those results, we are really excited and look forward to our continued collaboration with PowerPollen to explore this technology and better understand how we can integrate the processes and how it can help us produce a reliable high-quality seed crop for our customers.”

Working with Iowa-based equipment manufacturer ALMACO, PowerPollen developed equipment for collecting and redistributing pollen in seed corn fields. They also pinpointed an additive that kept the pollen from hardening into a brick, a problem that would otherwise make application nearly impossible.

Jason Cope, PowerPollen: “We store it at 4 degrees Celsius, which basically slows it down and makes it just real comfortable and we keep a relatively high humidity so it keeps its moisture content….We’ve actually stored pollen now for, it’s getting close to two years. Normally it dies within 30 to 45 minutes… The long-term preservation really, we consider that to still be in the R&D scaling phase, but that is really the ultimate end use for the technology. Once we get that process scaled as well, then you can harvest pollen in South America and bring it to North America and utilize it a year later.”

Cope says their biggest remaining challenge is to reduce the cost of the PowerPollen process to $50 an acre or less.

Jason Cope, PowerPollen: “I think it does seem realistic that there’s gonna be a point in time where people go: ‘Remember when we used to plant our males and females out there and then cross our fingers that they were gonna time together well?’ And I hope they say, ‘It’s hard to believe we used to do things that way’ just because this takes so much risk out of the equation.”

The company is also focused on wheat pollen, which hides deep inside the plant’s head and is more difficult to gather. But experts say the ability to store and reapply wheat pollen could speed up the development of a commercially-relevant wheat hybrid in the U.S., a goal pursued for decades.

Katherine Frels, University of Nebraska-Lincoln: “We’ve got a lot of research going but we haven’t quite reached the point where there are hybrid weather varieties on the market for U.S. farmers. Hybrid wheat would be a huge game changer… With pollen preservation, we would be able to collect pollen from a field of male plants, maybe somewhere across the state where that plant is already flowering…and then we could take that pollen and pollinate our female plants and get that hybrid seed.”

Frels says if climate change creates more barriers for natural plant pollination, being able to preserve pollen may become even more critical for many crops.

Katherine Frels, University of Nebraska-Lincoln: “Challenges of climate change have the potential to really affect our seed production…We may need more technologies like this. I really hope we don’t…but it’s really good that we have these, you know, backups. Something to come back to if we are seeing production concerns.”

By Colleen Bradford Krantz, colleen.krantz@iowapbs.org