The pattern is consolidation, financialisation, molecular control, regulatory lag, and the erosion of soil biology while technological layers increase.
Whenever I Want to Quit, I Remember Why I Started.
There are days I want to shut the laptop and walk away. I can see through the white noise, but then I didn't start Earthfood because I love gardening aesthetics. I started because I watched what was happening to soil.
I watched farmers being squeezed from both ends inputs rising, buyers consolidating, contracts tightening. I watched technology creep further into food production while the biological foundation underneath was dying.
RNA technologies are moving into agriculture. Gene expression tools, molecular precision inputs, carbon accounting frameworks that measure soil as a commodity and most people haven’t heard about it.
There is no national conversation nor a nightly news panel debate. Just quiet regulatory approvals, manufacturing investments and patent filings. And the pattern is familiar.
Every layer of complexity moves control further from the paddock and closer to the institution. Every time soil loses resilience, a new input product is introduced to compensate. Every time dependency increases, it’s described as innovation. This article isn’t about fear. It’s about awareness.
This Is About Power
For thirty years, agriculture has been told it is becoming more efficient. But look at who holds the leverage.
A handful of multinational corporations dominate commercial seed genetics and crop protection chemistry. After the Bayer–Monsanto merger, ChemChina’s acquisition of Syngenta, and the Dow–DuPont merger forming Corteva, market concentration tightened dramatically. That isn’t conspiracy language but it is documented competition data.
At the retail end, Australia’s grocery sector is heavily concentrated. The ACCC has examined the power of Coles and Woolworths repeatedly. Farmers sit between concentrated suppliers and concentrated buyers. That squeeze is real, and tight.
Now the system is moving smaller: RNA-based technologies and gene editing tools shift agriculture toward molecular-level control. In Australia, gene editing regulations were amended in 2019 to exempt certain techniques if no foreign DNA remains. In the United States, the USDA has allowed certain gene-edited crops to bypass traditional GMO oversight. It’s regulatory fact.
When agriculture becomes more technical, it becomes more patent-driven. Patents define ownership. Ownership defines power. Now add caron markets......
Australia’s Emissions Reduction Fund pays for measurable soil carbon increases under approved methodologies. That creates incentives — but also binds participation to compliance structures. Carbon becomes financial infrastructure.
So here’s the pattern:
1. Seed ownership concentrated.
2. Retail purchasing concentrated.
3. Biotech patents expanding.
4. Carbon markets financialising land.
At the same time, decades of high-input farming have simplified soil biology in many systems. Peer-reviewed soil science shows long-term synthetic nitrogen use can alter microbial communities and soil structure.
When soil loses resilience, dependency increases. Dependency is profitable. It’s economics. The question isn’t whether technology is evil. The question is whether we are restoring ecological self-regulation or building a system that requires continuous external control.
From soil to sequence: how food got quietly captured.
Australia is a country that still tells itself a comforting story about farming: sun, sweat, independence, a bloke on a tractor, honest produce at the gate. The modern reality is less romantic and far more corporate.
Farming now sits inside a vice: upstream consolidation of seeds and inputs, downstream consolidation of retail buyers, and an expanding middle layer of compliance, data and finance. It is not one villain. It is a system design. The system produces dependency as a feature, not a bug.
Consolidation: fewer hands on the steering wheel. You don’t have to use the word “cartel” to describe what has happened. You can just name the mergers.
Monsanto is gone, absorbed into Bayer. Syngenta sits under ChemChina. Dow and DuPont fused and spun into Corteva. You can call it efficiency if you like, but it is also concentration: fewer companies holding more of the genetics, chemistry and intellectual property that farmers rely on.
At the other end of the chain, Australia’s grocery sector is dominated by Coles and Woolworths. That dominance isn’t a vibe; it is an ACCC-documented market structure, with the Commission explicitly describing the sector as highly concentrated and set to remain that way.
When a small number of buyers control shelf access, they control standards, timing, pricing pressure, and rejection rules. Farmers can be productive and still be disposable.
The ACCC has also pointed to significant bargaining power imbalances between the major supermarkets and suppliers, and recommends reforms aimed at transparency and supplier outcomes.
Financialisation: land becomes a spreadsheet, then a tradable instrument. Once you’ve concentrated the chain, the next step is to turn the foundation into a financial product.
Carbon markets are doing that to soil.
In Australia, the supermarket conversation is loud because people feel it at the checkout. The carbon conversation is quiet because it arrives wearing the language of “methodology,” “verification,” and “measurement frameworks.” But the logic is simple: if carbon in soil can be measured, it can be priced; if it can be priced, it can be traded; and once it is traded, it attracts institutions that treat land less like ecology and more like an asset class.
This isn’t automatically evil. It is simply what finance does. It finds the measurable. It packages it. It takes a cut.
And once land stewardship is tied to formal frameworks, those frameworks become another form of control: who gets paid, who gets excluded, what practices count, who verifies, and what data must be handed over to participate.
Molecular control: the shift from seed to sequence. Now we reach the part most people still haven’t clocked. Agriculture is moving from paddocks to gene expression.
Not just “GMO” in the old public imagination. We’re talking about tools that don’t necessarily insert foreign DNA, but instead switch genes off, turn traits down, and silence pests with RNA interference.
The US Environmental Protection Agency registered a novel RNAi pesticide (ledprona) as a sprayable double-stranded RNA product targeting Colorado potato beetle in potatoes. That is not a conspiracy theory. It’s a government registration announcement.
This matters because regulation follows categories, and categories lag technology.
If something is treated as a pesticide rather than a genetically modified organism, the public debate changes, the labelling debate changes, and the testing expectations can differ.
Australia’s own gene technology regime has also evolved. The OGTR lists the Gene Technology Amendment (2019 Measures No. 1) Regulations 2019 and related instruments, which shaped how certain gene editing techniques are treated.
So the trajectory is clear: as tools become more molecular, the levers of control become more legal and intellectual-property based. You don’t just own the seed. You own the method. You own the sequence. You own the delivery system.
That is where modern power sits in patents and permissions.
Regulatory lag: the grey zone is the business model. Regulators are not stupid. They are slow by design.
But the grey zone between “GMO,” “biological,” and “pesticide” is commercially useful. It is where products can be introduced before the public has the vocabulary to even ask the right questions.
A mature democracy should be able to talk about this without panic or denial. Instead, most people are left with two options: the corporate brochure version (“safe, precise, sustainable”), or the internet rant version (“poison, conspiracy, doom”).
Neither is good enough.
Erosion of soil biology: the missing foundation no one wants to fund. Here’s the detail that ties the whole pattern together.
If soil biology is functioning, agriculture is less dependent. Nutrients cycle more efficiently. Structure holds. Water behaves differently. Plants recruit biology through roots in ways that are still being mapped in scientific literature.
When soil biology is degraded, the system becomes hungry. It must be fed. It must be propped up. It becomes an engineering problem. And engineering problems are lucrative.
The best business model in the world is not selling people what they want. It’s selling people what they can’t live without. So if soil function declines while technological layers increase, you get a neat loop:
- biological decline increases dependency
- dependency increases intervention
- intervention increases patents and compliance
- patents and compliance increase consolidation
- consolidation increases bargaining power
- and bargaining power keeps the loop profitable.
That is the pattern.
South Australia: why the “RNA hub” matters, even if it’s sold as health.
South Australia has been building RNA and mRNA capability, including state-backed narratives about becoming home to an mRNA development and production facility, with BioCina establishing an mRNA Centre of Excellence in Adelaide supported by public funding.
Australia’s federal government has also published “Australia’s RNA Blueprint,” explicitly aimed at building an RNA sector with coordination across governments, academia and industry.
Today, that is framed as sovereign capability for therapeutics and vaccines. Fine.
But once a country builds delivery expertise, advanced manufacturing, nanoparticle know-how, and RNA production pipelines, the capability exists. The question becomes where else it gets deployed. Agriculture is already using RNAi in the US.
If we can’t even have an adult conversation about that possibility, we are not being protected. We are being infantilised.
And yes, that is a public debate problem. What this means for ordinary people, in plain language is if you’re a gardener, a parent, a farmer, or just someone trying to eat real food without being lied to, the conclusion is not “panic.”
The conclusion is to stop outsourcing responsibility for the foundation.
You do not control multinational mergers, nor supermarket leverage and definitely do not control whether RNA tools expand. But you control your square metre. You control whether your soil is dead and dependent or alive and self-regulating.
And that’s why Earthfood exists. Because the quiet revolution is not shouting at the system. It’s rebuilding the biological base the system has been strip-mining.
When soil biology works, you need less of everything else. When it doesn’t, you become a customer forever. That’s the economics of dependency. If this topic makes you uncomfortable, good. It should.
Discomfort is often the first sign you’ve stopped being managed and started paying attention.
FACTS:
Bayer–Monsanto: the merger that rewired the input side.
When Bayer closed its acquisition of Monsanto in 2018, it didn’t just buy a company; it absorbed the dominant genetic trait engine of modern commodity farming and married it to one of the world’s biggest crop-chemistry portfolios.
Bayer’s own announcement frames it as “bringing together” chemical/biological crop protection with seeds and traits, and it names the scale of the deal (US$63B including debt). That’s a consolidation event with consequences for pricing power, trait licensing, and what farmers can realistically choose to plant.
Syngenta under ChemChina: a Swiss seed-and-chemical powerhouse inside a Chinese state-owned group.
Syngenta was taken over by China National Chemical Corporation (ChemChina) via tender offers completed in 2017. Syngenta’s own release describes ChemChina acquiring 94.7% of shares through the settlement process.
However the market reality is straightforward: one more major seed-and-chem player moved into a different sovereign orbit, and the “Big Six” era narrowed further. That changes negotiation dynamics and the geometry of global ag input power.
Corteva: the DowDuPont agriculture spin-out that kept the consolidation wave rolling ... Corteva didn’t appear out of nowhere; it was born from the Dow–DuPont merger and the subsequent break-up that created a standalone agriculture giant in 2019. Chemistry business reporting at the time described the end of “DowDuPont” and confirmed Corteva’s separation.
This is part of the same pattern: fewer entities controlling more of the high-tech seed and crop protection stack, with IP and licensing as the gatekeeper rather than open agronomy.
Australia’s supermarket concentration: the numbers, not the vibes
If you want a clean, quotable anchor, use the ACCC’s own estimates: Woolworths at 38% of supermarket grocery sales nationally, Coles at 29%, ALDI at 9% (with Metcash/IGA and others making up the remainder).
That’s a downstream concentration of control, and it matters because bargaining power does not sit with dispersed growers when the buying side is this concentrated.
Fresh produce tendering and “buyer power”: how the squeeze actually happens
The ACCC describes a “significant bargaining power imbalance” and points to practices like lack of transparency in weekly tendering processes, volume forecasts, and trading terms that can be used to reduce wholesale prices. That’s the competition regulator describing mechanics.
Rejection and cosmetic standards: the waste, the money lost, the quiet brutality.
When produce is rejected for minor visual defects, it’s not a moral story; it’s a power story. Australia’s public reporting has documented the issue as a NSW parliamentary report flagged restrictions to stop produce going to waste due to cosmetic standards, and farmer surveys reported appearance as a major reason for rejection with real financial losses.
RNAi isn’t theory anymore: the spray has landed.
If anyone tells you “RNA in agriculture is just a concept,” you point to the EPA. In December 2023, the US EPA announced it registered ledprona, a novel RNA interference (RNAi) biopesticide active ingredient, with a three-year registration window consistent with how it handles novel biopesticides.
Chemistry reporting identified the company (GreenLight Biosciences) and described the mechanism: turning off a gene the Colorado potato beetle needs.
Australia’s gene-editing regulatory snapshot: the line in the sand moved
Australia has already adjusted its gene technology settings in ways that matter for public scrutiny.
The OGTR’s legislative instrument set includes the 2019 amendments that updated how certain gene editing techniques are treated in regulation (notably where no foreign DNA remains).
Bonus info for South Australia: RNA capability is being built in plain sight within
Australia’s RNA Blueprint and SA announcements.
The federal Blueprint names BioCina’s mRNA Centre of Excellence and manufacturing ecosystem elements, and the University of Adelaide has described BioCina capacity spanning from plasmid DNA fermentation to formulated mRNA–lipid nanoparticle complexes.
That’s not “agriculture” on the label, but it is capability: production, formulation, delivery know-how. The public has not connected that dot to the EPA’s RNAi spray reality in the US, but that is exactly the kind of connection I make.
Sources readers can check:
EPA announcement on RNAi pesticide ledprona (dsRNA spray)
OGTR legislative documents including Gene Technology Amendment (2019 Measures No. 1) Regulations
ACCC Supermarkets Inquiry (2024–25) + final report noting high concentration
ACCC media release on bargaining power imbalance and recommended reforms
South Australia BioCina mRNA Centre of Excellence (public announcement)
BioCina Adelaide facility capabilities (mRNA / LNP / microbial / pDNA manufacturing)
Australia’s RNA Blueprint (Industry.gov.au)
Bronwyn Holm, Founder, Earthfood®
Farmers’ Friend • Gardeners’ Guide • Soil Advocate • Growers’ Voice
Bronwyn Holm works alongside farmers, gardeners and land stewards to restore living soil through biology, not chemistry. Earthfood® was built to return microbial intelligence to the ground quietly, effectively, and without dependence on industrial inputs.
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