15 Minutes With… Pam Marrone, Co-Founder of Invasive Species Corp.

By Michelle Pelletier Marshall, Women in Agribusiness Media (April 15, 2025)

WIA Today had the privilege of interviewing Dr. Pam Marrone, who is co-founder and executive chair of Invasive Species Corporation, which was founded to develop and market bio-based solutions to control invasive species. A long-time legend in the biologicals industry, Dr. Marrone is also a serial entrepreneur and one of only 32 women who founded and led companies to be listed on public stock exchanges. Additionally, she holds more than 500 patents.

Frequently recognized for her groundbreaking work, Dr. Marrone was selected as a 2025 inductee into the National Inventors Hall of Fame, and in 2023 received the Rosalind Franklin Award for leadership in industrial biotechnology and agriculture. 

She also is a fierce advocate and mentor for women entrepreneurs and supporter of Women in Agribusiness, and with that, quickly agreed when asked to moderate the Ag Innovations Panel at this year’s WIA Summit.

In this live video interview with Dr. Marrone, you’ll hear more from her on:

Stepping up to be on advisory boards:

“Young companies are desperate for experienced talent to advise them or serve on their boards… an opportunity to help guide and learn really good skills – leadership skills… how do you write and track financial statements? How do you audit financial statements? How do you do compensation? How do you help develop the fabric of the culture of the company?...”

The use of biologicals:

“In surveys, about half of all farmers say they haven’t tried them for three reasons: they don’t know enough about them, them don’t know how to use them, or they are afraid to use them – that is the big gap we need to work on.”

Hopes for the future of biologicals:

“Predictions are that if you grow 10-20 percent every year while chemicals are growing at single digits that by 2040, they’ll crossover and the biological market will be as big as the [$70 billion] chemicals market. That’s what I’d like to see.”

“I will not retire until I find really good herbicides that have an impact for both organic and conventional agriculture, and my mother is almost 99 years old so I think I’ll probably be around to see that.”

Watch the video interview here, and see the transcript below.

TRANSCRIPT:

WIA Today: Hello and welcome to this Women in Ag Today interview. My name is Michelle Pelletier Marshall and I'm the editor of this blog.

Thank you for joining us. Also joining us today is Dr. Pam Marrone, who is co-founder and executive chair of Invasive Species Corporation, which was founded to develop and market bio-based solutions to control invasive species. Dr. Marrone is also a serial entrepreneur and thought leader in the ag biologicals industry. She is one of only 32 women to have founded and led companies to be listed on public stock exchanges. Additionally, she holds more than 500 patents.

Dr. Marrone has received many accolades for her groundbreaking work, including being selected as a 2025 inductee into the National Inventors Hall of Fame. And in 2023, she received the Rosalind Franklin Award for leadership in industrial biotechnology and agriculture.

She also is a fierce advocate and mentor for women entrepreneurs, which explains why when women in agribusiness asked her to moderate this year's Ag innovations panel, she said yes without hesitation. So for that and for being here today with us, Pam, we thank you very much and welcome.

Let's dive in and learn a little more about you, as well as maybe get a little sneak into the Ag Innovations Panel.

1). WIA Today: First, could you tell us a little more about your career in biologicals and what your most memorable achievement was?

Dr. Marrone: Well, believe it or not, I was interested in biologicals since I was little because I learned about biocontrol from my parents. My father was trying to control some gypsy moths, and he actually used BT, which was the first-ever commercialized bio-insecticide on the planet. He used it to control gypsy moths on a prized dogwood tree right outside the kitchen window, which is still there, but much bigger. So I said wow, this is this is amazing and I pursued it passionately all throughout, starting my career after graduate school in entomology. At Monsanto Company, I started up a new unit there looking for new ways to control pests using microbial natural products. So way ahead of my time.

And then I left Monsanto and was recruited by Novo Nordisk, which was a really small company at the time, a Danish company that no one had ever heard of that had hired me to set up a company in Davis, which we called EntoTech, looking for microbes to control pests. After they had some issues in their core businesses, they sold us to our largest competitor and I started with AgriQuest and developed Serenade, which is the biggest biofungicide sold today and now under Bayer, because the company was sold to Bayer CropScience. Then I started Marrone Bio Innovations and took it public and developed a large line of bio insecticides, fungicides, nematicides and other products that are still growing globally. The company was sold in 2022 to BioCeres Crop Solutions and when my non-compete was up, I jumped in again seeing that there's still big problems to solve, and started the Invasive Species Corporation.

2). WIA Today: That's quite a career. In terms of being at the forefront of this ag innovation throughout your career, how have you seen the role of women evolve in driving ag tech solutions?

Dr. Marrone: Wow, what a change! I was literally the only woman in the room back then when I was starting in my career. And I was the highest ranking woman in R&D at Monsanto, which wasn't saying much because I wasn't that high. I would go out and raise money from venture capitalists and I literally was the only woman. It's gotten so much better, and I'm seeing that women are attracted to an entrepreneurial career and starting up companies because they can form the culture that they want. And there's many studies on this. There was one last year that was from Russell Reynolds [Associates] that was very revealing. They interviewed many men and women and noted that women tended to leave their corporate jobs and go into entrepreneurship to have greater impact and create a community and culture that they wanted, and that was driving entrepreneurship.

Agriculture is a perfect place to do that – ag and food – because there's so many big problems to solve, and it has such a big impact on the planet.

3). WIA Today: With this entrepreneurial spirit, what advice would you give to women who are looking to build or lead their own ventures in agribusiness or ag tech? Is there a certain starting point?

Dr. Marrone: Right now because so much investor capital – billions of dollars have come into ag tech and ag biotech and food tech, it’s getting pretty crowded. There's literally thousands of companies in biologicals.

The Mixing Bowl, a media company, and Western Growers and I worked on a map of all the companies, and in 2023 we gave up in exhaustion at 1,400 companies. So it's very crowded.

That doesn't mean that there's not opportunities for startups, as there are, and I do see a lot of women forming companies now. What always amazes me, and this is what entrepreneurs do, they find something that differentiates and that's the key, look at what's out there already, look at the problems to solve and when you talk to farmers, there's still a lot of problems to solve. Then find those solutions that can solve those problems and have the impact. I'm seeing a lot of entrepreneurs and female entrepreneurs doing that today.

4). WIA Today: That's amazing. And a good thing too. Along those lines, and I don't want to give away the next big thing because you might be working on it, but what is the most exciting current trend in ag innovation that you think could transform how we farm in the next 5 to 10 years?

Dr. Marrone: Well, there are quite a number of things. I don’t want to be trite by saying it's AI, but actually AI and machine learning has a lot of opportunity in agriculture to assess large data sets, like flying over the field with drones or satellite data and assessing all that data much more quickly to make recommendations for crops and soils.

Every week I see another entrepreneur who's coming up with ways to better assess soil health on the fly and what's amazing is what we can do with genomics data – so gene sequences of microbes and being able to assess what microbes are doing in the soil. There was a company in Europe that just started up and they told me that they're going out to farms and asking the farmers show them where the good parts of the field are and the not-so-good parts of the field where they might have some diseases or poor growth, and then doing next-gen sequencing on the soils in those areas and finding the better microbes.

Being able to apply all those things to datasets to help farmers better understand what's going on in their fields and then make recommendations for them to get better crops, that's what really excites me. There's lots of things that can feed into that such better biologicals, real time detection of pests and pathogens, assessing your soils, assessing your crop growth and so on.

WIA Today: There's a lot of opportunity out there for sure, just need to put the great minds to work at it though.

Dr. Marrone: On the biologicals front, there's still a lot of biodiversity out there that we haven't even tapped. There's a real opportunity for a bio herbicide, where there's only like $200 million worth of bio herbicides sold today compared to $35 billion worth of chemical herbicides. It's a huge opportunity, but very technically challenging problem, which is why my current company is focusing on that because if we find some bio herbicides that is really going to help a lot. And that's one more thing that I'm very excited about.

Then there's also the opportunity for peptides and RNA interference and there's a number of companies working on those. And again, machine learning can really help in discovery and synthesis of new peptides. There's a lot of opportunity for better pest control.

5). WIA Today: Excellent. Now switching gears a little bit… how do you think events like Women in Agribusiness help accelerate not only innovation but also more opportunities for women to lead in ag?

Dr. Marrone: Well, you know what I see when I talk to anybody who wants to become an entrepreneur or work in a startup or startup company is having role models so it's really good to have panels like that to help others see “Oh, I can do this”, and that's why it's really important to have panels like Women in Agribusiness is having.

6). WIA Today: You've served on numerous boards in, in the capacity to guide and assist. If women are looking to get more involved like this, what qualities have you found are most important to serve in the role of executive board on a company?

Dr. Marrone: Young companies are desperate for experienced talent to advise them or serve on their boards. The problem with startups is they don't pay much, but it's a great opportunity for somebody to get stock or stock options, which may be worth something later down the road. But it's a wonderful opportunity to help guide a young company.

I think it's really an opportunity to help guide, do something important and learn good skills. One of the things I did was to serve on outside boards and nonprofit boards in addition to my own to develop skills such as:

·      How do you write and track financial statements?

·      How do you audit financial statements?

·      How do you define and plan for compensation?

·      How do you do a dashboard to make sure the company's on track?

·      Help the CEO develop a culture of the company and have everybody aligned?

·      How do you how do you address talent in succession?

There are so many things that you can learn by being on boards and advising companies.

7). WIA Today: Yes, and there's quite a lot to learn, especially if you're starting a company from scratch. So it could be very helpful.

 As far as that with all the companies you've started and worked on, I have read something where you said your legacy would be that “you've changed the perception of biological products and how they're used, which in turn has created a whole industry that is now mainstream and growing very fast”. What's next on your list of to-dos?

Dr. Marrone: I have said publicly that I will not retire until I find really good bio herbicides that can have an impact for both organic and conventional agriculture.

For organic agriculture, I know a lot of organic farmers and they struggle with weed control. It's their number one issue. They must do a lot of tilling or use special tillers and so it’s not as sustainable or green as they'd like because they're doing too much, too many passes throughout the field. That's a big area.

On the conventional side, there's so many weeds that have developed resistance to conventional herbicides and so there's an opportunity to find some new modes of action.

Those are the big things I want to work on. Let’s see… the biologicals industry is estimated to be between $9 and $10 billion, which is amazing because when I started, it was just $100 million or something. Conventional farmers weren’t using it; now 70 percent of all growers use biologicals.

So that’s $9 to $10 billion on a $70 billion chemical market. The predictions are if you grow between 10 and 20 percent every year, while chemicals are growing at single digits, that by 2040 they'll crossover and the biological market will be as big as the chemical market. That's what I'd like to see. And my mother is almost 99, so I think I'll probably be around to see that.

So working on that continued growth and doing everything we can to support the growth of the business, and what that means is helping farmers understand how to use the products and how to use them successfully because you need to get over the perception that they don't work as well as chemicals. They do when they're when you know how to use them.

About half of all farmers in every survey say: I haven't tried them because I don't know enough about them, or don't know how to use them, or I'm afraid to use them. So that's the big gap that we need to work on from here on out.

WIA Today: Right. Communications is a really key. Just teaching people and helping them not be afraid to try something that’s different.

Dr. Marrone: Absolutely. And once they try them, the surveys show that 8 out of 10 farmers love them.

WIA Today: Just stick with it. I have to say, I love your energy. I wanted to share something I had read regarding your being inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame. In the introduction to you, there was a video that noted you being like a hummingbird – having hummingbird energy and competitiveness, and I think that's just great.

Dr. Marrone: Yes, that's true.

WIA Today: That having the drive and just keep going and being such a mentor for so many others in the sector as well as for women in general. It’s a hard path you've paved, but it's a very good thing for certain.

Dr. Marrone: Thank you. Yes, my husband coined that term hummingbird energy.

8). WIA Today: You will be moderating the Ag innovations panel. We're still working to confirm the final panelists, but we will soon do that. Do you have any messages that you hope attendees will take away from the ag innovations panel and from your journey as a leader in the space?

Dr. Marrone: Yes. I'm hoping that the audience will take away hearing other entrepreneurial stories and what it takes to start up and how women have persevered through thick and thin to get where they are, and also to showcase some of the very exciting things that are coming in agriculture that can help farmers.

WIA Today: Excellent. Yes, it should be a very good event and we are so glad to have you as a speaker and moderator and to join us with a great team of women innovators.

Dr. Marrone: Looking forward to it. It's going to be great.

WIA Today: And to everyone else, if you want to hear more from Dr. Marrone, you can join us at the Women in Agribusiness Summit this year, our 14th annual, which will be September 22nd to the 24th. We will be in Orlando, Florida, this year.

Thank you so much for your time, Pam.

We will see you in Orlando!