“Behind every story is people,” says Claudio Screpanti as he welcomes a group of visitors into his lab at the Syngenta Group’s Soil Health Research Center. “These are the people.”

He smiles at three scientists nearby who are methodically sorting through soil trays and portioning small amounts into carefully labeled testing tubes.

The center is part of Syngenta Group’s vast Research & Development (R&D) campus in Stein, Switzerland. The campus is a place of calm, methodical excellence. Nearly one-third of the 380 employees hold PhDs. Their work here includes formulating and assessing some 2,000 chemical compounds every month.

It’s all part of Syngenta Group’s work to ensure that Earth’s most precious resource, the soil on which all life depends, can meet the needs of the world’s farmers — even as the global population continues to expand and as climate change makes agriculture ever more challenging. Many of the coming soil innovations for farmers will begin right here in the Stein R&D center. 

The campus, a half-hour drive from Syngenta Group headquarters in Basel, Switzerland, is sleek and modern but somehow not at odds with the quiet, fairytale-like Swiss town it sits in. The neighborhood includes a factory of the pharmaceutical giant Novartis, the pharma supplier Lonza’s Stein site and the power plant of an energy service provider, GETEC.

But only a 15-minute walk away, along open fields, is the longest wooden-roofed bridge in Europe. It was built more than 300 years ago and stretches some 200 meters or so across the Rhine River, connecting Germany to Switzerland. The setting is in keeping with the history of Syngenta itself, which traces its roots to a company founded in Basel in the mid-18^th century.

Turning knowledge into tools

Although Screpanti says the past 20 years have seen a “blooming of new approaches and technologies” in soil science, there remain many unknowns yet to be discovered in the complex living ecosystem beneath our feet.

“We need to be humble in the sense that we embrace this challenge,’’ he says, “but we need to acknowledge that there is still a lot to understand and learn.”

While academia drove the initial interest in soil health research, Screpanti says, it’s at labs like this one where that knowledge is sharpened into practical tools for farmers. “For us, it is not just about doing science for science’s sake, but to try to use this learning to address a practical problem.”

If soil is the foundation of food, then nitrogen offers an example of problem solving in action. “Without nitrogen,” he says, “we know that more than 40 percent of the world’s population could not be fed.”

Indeed, the growth of the global population over the past century can be largely attributed to the early 20^th-century work of two German chemists, Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch. They developed a way to transform nitrogen in the air into fertilizer, using what became known as the Haber-Bosch process.

It’s hard to overestimate the impact nitrogen has had on our ability to feed the world. But it’s also difficult to overstate the environmental damage that its heavy use has caused.

Nitrogen is critical to crop growth and reproduction. When farmers harvest their crops, much of the nitrogen that would fuel the next rotation is pulled from the soil. Extensive plowing ahead of the next crop also degrades the soil and its microbiome.

And so, farmers tend to apply chemical nitrogen fertilizer to their crops to secure higher and more stable yields.

Once nitrogen fertilizer is added to the soil, a wide range of microbial processes can change the nitrogen form, making it more or less available to the crops. But because of the tendency in conventional agriculture to blanket a field with fertilizer, much of the nitrogen that is applied to soils leaches into waterways or the air, degrading the environment and contributing in various ways to climate change.

(Industrial production of nitrogen fertilizer is energy intensive in its own right, releasing high carbon emissions when fossil fuels provide that energy.)

In recent decades, soil scientists and agronomists have learned much more about the nitrogen process in soil and plants. Rapid, efficient and reliable new molecular-based research methods have emerged alongside the new, emerging discipline of microbial ecology. Armed with that knowledge, Screpanti’s team then try to find solutions for farmers, devising more intelligent, efficient ways to manage nitrogen and nitrogen use.

“In the past, the agrochemical industry neglected the potential role of small molecules as critical chemical signals to modulate the nitrogen cycle in soil,” he says. “In recent years, Syngenta has put more emphasis on this area.”

And under Screpanti’s leadership, the Soil Health Center has become a key part of Syngenta’s renewed investment in soil health, says Matthew Wallenstein, the company’s Chief Soil Scientist.

“Their work,” he says, “is critical to translating advances in soil and microbiome science into solutions to farmer challenges.”

A long-term perspective

Researchers often measure their ambitions in decades, laying the groundwork today for something that might come to fruition only many years out.  

“Our job is to prepare for the future,” Screpanti says. “And then to drive innovation through great and responsible science.”

Farmers, too, play the long game with soil health. Around the world, more and more of them are adopting soil-enhancing regenerative agriculture techniques that include crop diversity and the use of cover crops, as well as no-till or low-till cultivation to restore the soil and improve crop health and yield. In parallel, Screpanti’s team is on a continuous research journey to better understand the processes that can restore or protect soil and then to share this knowledge with farmers.

“We embrace a holistic approach by looking at the science of plant growth, the interactions with the soil microbiome in combination with new diagnostic tools,” he says. “This is the foundation of developing products and service offerings that impact soil health.”

The approach is indicative of Syngenta Group’s renewed focus on the life cycle of its products and their effects on the environment.

Screpanti cites the company’s TYMIRIUM® technology, the nematicide and fungicide, as an example of the center’s work. His team was among the first to research the product’s benefits for soil health. The technology deters soil-borne diseases and nematodes – parasitic microscopic worms – without damaging beneficial ones.

The Soil Health Research Center uses ecological approaches, or the interaction between organisms in the soil and their physical and chemical environments. 

As an example, their work focuses on symbiotic microorganisms in the soil, such as the fungus mycorrhizae. These are very important organisms which establish positive interactions with plants, help them to thrive and support soil biodiversity.

“We successfully demonstrated that our nematicide doesn’t harm this important fungus in a wide range of experimental lab and outdoor conditions,” Screpanti says.

This kind of work requires investment in the scientists, their work and their facilities, says Syngenta’s Head of Crop Protection Research, Camilla Corsi.

Corsi, who strongly backed the founding of the Stein Soil Health Research Center, says the significant resources Syngenta is pouring into soil health reflects its long-term commitment to this precious resource.

"Understanding soil health, how the complex microbiome interacts with different crops and crop protection products, and helping growers find ways to restore degraded land, are all vital activities to making agriculture more sustainable," she says.

"The practical soil health solutions and expert advice that we can offer to support growers is possible thanks to the hard work of our dedicated scientists and agronomists and their collaboration with colleagues and partners around the world, including here in Stein.”

Screpanti notes the continuing challenges, and excitement, around his team’s work.

“When you talk about soil and soil health, it’s quite easy to capture the general concept behind it,” he says. “But when you really want to drill down into the topic, it is very difficult, because it’s so complex. At the first step, you need to have more holistic view, so that people will start to look at the problem in a more open way.”

He acknowledges that the approach may run counter to many other scientific disciplines, which tend to involve increasing specialization. But he says the big picture is key to how his team views its work. “We start this with the work culture, where people are more comfortable to talk about this topic in a very interdisciplinary way.”

Screpanti has a PhD in agronomy from the University of Bologna, Italy, and has done additional study of molecular biology and genetic engineering at the University of Louvain-la-Neuve in Belgium. He’s been with the company for almost 20 years and is now a Syngenta Senior Fellow – a company title awarded to less than 0.1% of scientists within the R&D organization – in recognition of his outstanding scientific achievements.

He regularly contributes to academic research on soil health and chemical innovations for sustainable agriculture.

And this passion for agronomy and science comes from what Screpanti calls the 3 I’s: being Inspired, Inquisitive and Impactful.  

“Nurturing an inquisitive mind is the fire feeding my passion to continue to learn and discover the world around us,” he says. “Being impactful means I have the privilege to work for the one of the leading companies in agriculture, and I strongly believe in responsible science.”

The inspiration part? 

“I have the chance to interact with other people who share a similar vision. And this is a little bit contagious, we can catalyze new ideas,” he says. “There is a new generation of scientists joining our company, and what do we try to do at the Soil Health Center is to train them to unleash their potential and to be innovative.”