Alltech Crop Science announced it has acquired Ideagro, an agri-food research and development business based in Murcia, Spain. Ideagro employs a team of more than 20 scientists who specialize in agri-food research and development, intending to improve the productivity and profitability of agricultural systems.
Representatives said that this partnership will enable both platforms to accelerate soil and crop research and enhance biological and other microorganism-based offerings to Alltech Crop Science customers worldwide.
“We are excited to announce that Ideagro has joined the Alltech Crop Science global team, providing us with a partner who shares our vision and significantly scaling our research capabilities,” said Andy Thomas, CEO of Alltech Crop Science. “This is the strengthening of a longstanding partnership. We have worked closely with the Ideagro team since their founding 11 years ago.”
Left to right: Mike Castle, Chief Operating Officer, Alltech; Pedro Palazón, CEO, Ideagro; Dr. Mark Lyons, President and CEO, Alltech; Andy Thomas, CEO, Alltech Crop Science; Christopher Speight, Chief Financial Officer, Alltech.
Ideagro has state-of-the-art laboratories, experimental research stations, and fields for trials in Spain. To date, the company has researched more than 90 different crops and performed more than 10,000 physicochemical and biological analyses. This has led to the development of new agricultural strategies based on microorganisms.
“We are facing a great growth opportunity for Ideagro because we are going to have better means and more technological capacity to develop our research, which will now have a global projection,” said Pedro Palazón, CEO of Ideagro. “We will no longer only study the soils of the Iberian Peninsula, but we will work with soils from all over the world to achieve more sustainable and environmentally friendly agriculture.”
In June 2021, Ideagro was named a Reference Regional Laboratory by GLOSOLAN, the global soil laboratory division of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.
“The combination of the Ideagro expertise with the reach and scale of Alltech will allow us to extend world-leading understanding of the interface between soil, crop, animal and human health to the global market,” Thomas said. “The potential implications of these insights cannot be understated as we endeavor to improve the vitality of our global food system, from the ground up.”