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Pivot Bio is using microbial nitrogen to make agriculture more sustainable


Pivot Bio, co-founded by MIT Professor Chris Voigt, is making farming more sustainable with nitrogen-producing microbes that can replace synthetic fertilizer.

The Haber-Bosch process, which converts atmospheric nitrogen to make ammonia fertilizer, revolutionized agriculture and helped feed the world’s growing population, but it also created huge environmental problems. Pivot’s products are already being used to grow corn, wheat, barley, oats, and other grains across millions of acres of American farmland, eliminating hundreds of thousands of tons of CO2 equivalent in the process. As a freshly minted assistant professor at the University of California at San Francisco, Voigt was struggling to stand up his lab, attract funding, and get experiments started.

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