Harry Stine built an obscure $3 billion empire by breeding a better soya bean seed. Now the richest man in Iowa thinks he has revolutionised corn, the Earth's most popular crop
On one of the windiest days in recent memory Harry Stine, the richest man in Iowa, cranes his neck to examine the elevator shaft inside the 110-foot steel observation tower next to his garage. “The cables look awfully frayed. Who knows if it will last one more time?” he chuckles. Nonetheless, we hop into the elevator cab, he flips the switch to get it moving, and up we go as the wind rips into us at 40mph.
Stine, the 72-year-old founder and owner of Stine Seed, the largest private seed company in the world, built this tower back in 1987 so he could get a good view of his empire, some 15,000 acres of frozen Iowa farmland. Aside from a small, glass-walled house, it’s his only visible indulgence. Once home to his father’s hardscrabble cattle-and-crop farm, Stine has, without attracting any widespread notice, developed some of the most valuable agricultural products on Earth here. With more than 900 patents, Stine sells his coveted soya bean and corn seed genetics to agri-giants like Monsanto and Syngenta, nabbing estimated annual sales of more than $1 billion with margins in excess of 10 percent. Along with his four children, Stine owns almost 100 percent.
It is a good reminder to those tempted to confine “innovation” solely to the world of Silicon Valley that some of the most impressive and fundamentally important advances on Earth are occurring today in agriculture, and the global epicentre is America’s heartland. The seed market—a $44 billion worldwide industry that supplies crop growers with the essential element they use to plant, harvest and sustain the world’s food supply—is expected to double in the next five years as crops fortified with more resilient genetics improve yield and efficiency. That’s good news since the world’s population continues to grow by about 85 million every year, while arable land remains scarce.
With a combined market value of $320 billion, five publicly traded conglomerates own most of the action: Monsanto, DuPont, Syngenta, Dow and Bayer. Then there’s Stine. Based in Adel, Iowa, the dozen or so companies under Stine’s umbrella form an unlikely titan at the heart of the market, directly or indirectly generating revenues from almost 50 million acres of crops in the US each year.
Stine Seed does business with all of the heavyweights and has for more than three decades, primarily because it has something everybody else needs: The best-performing soya bean seeds in the business. Through plant breeding, a roughly 10,000-year-old technique that’s not unlike creating Thoroughbred horses or show dogs, Stine has been perfecting the genetic makeup of soya bean seeds—primarily used in animal feed and to produce vegetable oils—since the 1960s. The basic technology may be ancient, but an innovative, data-savvy strategy, married with shrewd leadership and a classic midwestern work ethic, has made Stine’s operation best in class. He isn’t bashful about what his small-town company has accomplished. “Our germplasm—our genetic base here—is the best in the world,” says Stine. “We dominate genetics in the industry.”
Today 60 percent of all US soya bean acreage is planted using genetics developed by Stine’s companies, which also have a strong presence in South America and other international markets. Forbes estimates that Stine’s company—which, among other things, also breeds corn genetics, creates plant traits in its biotech lab and has a small but growing commercial seed sales operation—is worth nearly $3 billion.
While rivals scoff, he now thinks he can double the world’s output of corn, the most popular crop on Earth. By breeding corn seeds genetically predisposed to thrive when planted in high densities, he thinks he can supercharge the engine generating animal feed, biofuels and food for the whole planet. “We’re going to be able to double corn yields very easily,” says Stine. “And apparently a lot of people working in the same industry can’t see that. … They think, ‘How can this be? And furthermore, how can this little farm kid out here be doing this?’ ”
After seven years of genetic tinkering, he’s won plenty of converts. “It’s an insight that will revolutionise the corn industry,” says Dermot Hayes, a professor of agribusiness at Iowa State University. If it works out, it won’t be the first time this farm kid, unknown outside his industry, has changed the world.
A tall man partial to Levi’s and blue button-downs with pens in the pocket, Stine stands on the burnt-orange carpet in his office—a little-changed artefact of the Reagan era littered with the nuts, berries and, especially, mushrooms he likes to forage for (he has a handwritten log detailing when and where he’s found each of the 32,000 morel mushrooms he’s nabbed in recent years). He’s waving several reams of paper, filled with three years of yield results that drive Stine’s corn euphoria. At almost every location they plant them, he says, his seeds outperform any other variety.
We’re willing to give Stine the benefit of the doubt for a simple reason. He’s already revolutionised agriculture. Twice. In 1994, the US government granted its first patents on the full genetic makeup of a soya bean. Previously, only asexual plants like rosebushes or apple trees could be patented, not self-pollinating crops like corn and soya beans. Stine Seed was first in line to get its top-performing varieties patented. It wasn’t a coincidence: As early as the 1970s, Stine, who had taken one business law class at McPherson College, a small liberal arts school in Kansas, was stipulating in contracts the royalties companies had to pay for using his seed and prohibiting them from using the seeds their harvest produced to plant for next season. Crucially, it also forbade them from using his seeds to breed their own.
(This story appears in the 16 May, 2014 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)