How CRISPR Gene Editing Could Spark a New Agricultural Revolution
For centuries, crop breeders have chased incremental improvements to popular produce like blackberries: they might cross varieties to eliminate pesky seeds that get stuck between teeth, breed out sharp thorns that make harvesting dangerous, or develop strains that grow more fruit with less water and fewer synthetic inputs. Pulling off even one of these changes can take decades of trial and error, plus a heavy dose of luck. But Pairwise, a startup based in North Carolina, is using the CRISPR gene-editing technology to hit all three targets at once, crafting seedless, thornless, higher-yield blackberry plants in just a few years rather than a generation.
This is the core promise of modern agricultural genomics: bringing speed, precision, and the ability to solve multiple problems simultaneously to an industry that has long relied on glacial, hit-or-miss, one-tweak-at-a-time breeding. Even with this turbocharged process, Pairwise’s multi-trait blackberries will not reach U.S. grocery store shelves before 2030. But the company’s work could kick off a new high-tech era of designer crops optimized to benefit consumers, farmers, and the planet alike. Beyond blackberries, Pairwise is developing pit-free peaches, disease-resistant row crops, and fruit and nut trees that produce their first harvest in one to two years, rather than the three to eight years standard varieties require, alongside dozens of other new products, often in partnership with the world’s largest agribusiness firms.
Right now, the market for gene-edited food remains almost entirely emerging. Pairwise launched the first commercial CRISPR food product in the U.S. in 2023: a less bitter mustard green. But the company discontinued the product in early 2024 to focus on developing other gene-edited crops. To date, the firm has earned more than 50 regulatory approvals for five edited crops across nine countries, but only one of its creations is currently on sale: a high-yield blackberry variety available in limited quantities in Colombia.
Unlike traditional genetically modified organisms (GMOs)—crops modified with DNA from unrelated species—CRISPR-edited seeds have so far avoided major regulatory roadblocks and widespread public hostility. That does not mean backlash is impossible, however. CRISPR itself was only invented in 2012, and it still risks getting caught up in the same political and cultural backlash against so-called "Frankenfoods" that has limited GMO adoption for decades. The growing Make America Healthy Again movement is just one example of rising consumer discomfort with technology-altered food. Even though decades of scientific research confirm GMOs are safe for human health and the environment, they remain unpopular with many consumers. That is why even industry analysts who view CRISPR as safer and more useful than older GMO technology hesitate to predict its rapid success.
“Historically, there’s been so much pushback against genetic engineering in agriculture,” says Julius Beau Lucks, co-director of Northwestern University’s Center for Synthetic Biology. “I don’t know if we’ll see it again with editing, but if we do, it will be really hard to solve the world’s food problems.”
The stakes could not be higher. Over the next three decades, global farmers will need to produce far more food to feed a growing population, while cutting agricultural land use and reducing environmental damage to avoid cascading climate and ecological crises. By 2050, the world is on track to clear an area of forest equal to 12 Californias for new agricultural production. Other promising tech fixes, from vertical farms to AI-powered farm equipment to plant-based and cultivated meat alternatives, have so far struggled to gain widespread commercial traction. But Pairwise’s founders believe CRISPR can break through because it lets farmers grow more, healthier food in a warming climate, while cutting deforestation, agricultural chemicals, and greenhouse gas emissions.
The company already holds an enormous pipeline of new crops customized for traits ranging from higher yields and longer shelf life to better resistance to heat, drought, storms, pests and disease, and the ability to grow in marginal soils, new regions, or off-seasons. It has raised more than $160 million in funding, and after its short-lived experiment with low-bitter mustard greens, it shifted focus to licensing its technology rather than building its own consumer brands. Today it partners with agricultural giants Bayer and Corteva, food companies Mars and Sun World, and a wide range of universities and research institutions.
Just as electric vehicles can reimagine what a car looks like thanks to their compact motors, CRISPR can transform how we grow food in unexpected ways. During a visit to Pairwise’s Durham headquarters in May, I saw one of the world’s first commercial cherry bushes—a plant that would likely confuse George Washington, famous for the fable of chopping down a cherry tree. Pairwise’s vision for this technology is to let growers produce more cherries on less land than conventional cherry trees, while also making spraying and harvesting easier to complete with machinery.
Pairwise CEO Tom Adams, who previously led Monsanto’s biotechnology division before its acquisition by Bayer, explained that the growth trait edited into cherries works across many types of fruit. “It’s exciting how one change can fundamentally transform how a food is grown,” Adams said. “Then we can make more changes that make the food even better. Then we can make similar changes with other foods.”
Humans have selectively bred crops for as long as we have farmed, starting with saving seeds from the highest-performing plants, then crossing different varieties to combine desirable traits. This slow process turned barely edible wild grasses into corn, turned a single wild mustard species into broccoli, cauliflower, and kale, and expanded tomatoes from tiny wild berries to the large, juicy varieties we eat today. But even after GMOs were introduced in the late 20th century, crop breeding remains an incredibly slow, random process, relying on unpredictable natural mutations and almost always forcing undesirable trade-offs. Corn has more than 40,000 individual genes, so cross-breeding creates nearly infinite variables. If you breed fruit that lasts longer on shelves, it might lose flavor or cut total yield; if you breed rice that needs less water, it might require more fertilizer. Developing and testing a single new variety can take an entire generation of breeders.
CRISPR bypasses these problems entirely. Once Pairwise’s scientists identify a genetic trait that controls a desirable characteristic, they can use their editing platform to modify only that trait—turning it on or off, or fine-tuning how it works, without altering any other part of the plant’s genome. For example, after isolating the gene that controls how many rows of kernels grow on a single ear of corn, the firm partnered with Bayer to optimize the number of rows to maximize grain output. Now they plan to stack that edit with other changes to “minor-effect” corn traits: shorter stalks to resist wind damage, heat and drought tolerance to adapt to climate change, and more efficient fertilizer use, to create new varieties with major gains in yield and resilience.
“That’s the big unlock, this truly unprecedented ability to imagine the kind of corn we want and create it with speed and scale,” said Michael Graham, head of research and development for Bayer’s crop science division. Experts estimate CRISPR is already at least 95% faster than conventional plant breeding, and AI models that help pinpoint where and how to edit genes are speeding up the process even more.
But the biggest advantage of CRISPR is the ability to stack multiple desirable improvements into a single plant without random cross-breeding. Instead of crossing seedless blackberries with the best-tasting blackberries and hoping the resulting seedless offspring will also taste good, scientists simply edit the best-tasting variety to remove seeds. I got to sample a seedless blackberry during my visit, and it tasted identical to the conventional berry I compared it to, just with a much smoother, softer texture.
That direct consumer benefit—no more seeds stuck in your teeth—was a core priority when Adams launched Pairwise. During his time at Monsanto, he saw that most benefits of older GMO technology, like Roundup Ready row crops engineered to tolerate the widely used herbicide, went almost entirely to farmers growing animal feed and industrial ingredients. GMOs’ reputation was not helped when Monsanto ended up paying massive settlements to farm workers and gardeners who claimed Roundup exposure caused their cancer.
“We talked about how cool the science was, not what’s in it for you [the consumer],” Adams recalls. So he made sure Pairwise’s early work focused on fruits and vegetables bought directly by consumers, with edits that make them more pleasant to eat, not just more profitable for farmers to grow.
Traditional GMOs are extremely expensive to develop, which is why they are almost entirely controlled by large agribusinesses focused on commodity crops. This model has drawn widespread criticism from farmers and consumers alike for reducing crop diversity and limiting grower and eater choice. But gene editing is much cheaper and faster to develop, which Adams says makes it a far more accessible, democratic technology.
Pairwise works with nonprofits including the Gates Foundation and the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA) to develop more resilient staple crops like cowpea and cassava that can better withstand pests, disease, and drought. Leena Tripathi, a molecular biologist leading genetic innovation at IITA, is optimistic about semi-dwarf CRISPR-edited yams that will cut down on the intense labor required by the African women who mostly grow the crop.
“Gene editing can be such a powerful tool to help smallholder farmers,” Tripathi said. “They live on the edge. When they lose a crop, they can’t send their kids to school.” Cuts to the U.S. Agency for International Development under the Trump administration have gutted budgets for groups like IITA, however, which could make it harder to get CRISPR seeds to low-income subsistence farmers. Even so, the potential gains are enormous: “This could finally help them get access to quality seeds,” Tripathi says.
Major agricultural firms are already betting big on CRISPR. Bayer releases roughly 450 new crop varieties every year, and Graham says he expects every new variety will include at least some edited genes within a decade. Corteva spends nearly $1.5 billion on research and development annually, and biotechnology vice president Wendy Srnic says using CRISPR to fight crop disease is the company’s top R&D priority. By 2030, Corteva hopes to release a corn variety with four different edited genes that resist four of the most damaging yield-robbing diseases in North America.
“This is the holy grail, the ability to make the precise changes you want rather than searching for a needle in the haystack,” said Srnic. “Our mission is to help farmers get more productive on their land so they don’t need more land, and this makes me hopeful we can do it.”
So far, most governments around the world have accepted the ag industry’s argument that gene editing is essentially just an extremely accelerated version of conventional plant breeding, and therefore does not require heavy, restrictive regulation. Even the European Union, which has banned most traditional GMOs, recently moved to classify most gene-edited crops the same as conventional varieties. Regulators have been far more cautious of CRISPR-edited livestock, however: the U.S. Food and Drug Administration regulates edited animals the same way it regulates drugs, and has required scientists to incinerate edited animals after research is complete.
The core argument for caution is that unforeseen side effects from genetic modification could harm human health or the environment. But to advocates like Alison Van Eenennaam, a UC Davis geneticist who has worked to cut beef’s environmental footprint by creating the first cattle embryos edited to produce only more efficient male calves, unfounded fears of “unnatural” technology are blocking progress on solving agriculture’s most urgent problems. Van Eenennaam is moving to the University of Queensland in Australia, where she can continue her editing work without U.S. regulatory restrictions.
“It’s so depressing,” Van Eenennaam says. “People would rather have famines than technology that scares them. And if there’s no path to market, nobody’s going to invest in the technology.”
British startup Tropic Biosciences is already preparing to launch a non-browning CRISPR banana, but most CRISPR crops are still at least a few years away from widespread commercial availability. Startups need hundreds of millions in additional funding to reach market, but investment in agritech and food tech has dropped 70% since peaking above $50 billion in 2021. The drop is partly because venture capital has flooded into AI instead, but it’s also because investors were burned by the struggles of former high-flying food tech startups like plant-based burger maker Beyond Meat and indoor farming pioneer AppHarvest.
Adam Bergman, managing director of EcoTech Capital, an investment firm focused on climate-friendly technology, says only about $3 billion has been invested in gene-edited seed startups over the past decade. But he believes CRISPR has more potential to disrupt agriculture than any other new technology. There is still nervousness, he says, that the GMO backlash could repeat itself if regulators crack down or consumers reject the technology. Agriculture is also a tough, low-margin business for venture capitalists that usually look for fast, high-return exits. It takes years for CRISPR crops to be developed, field-tested, and brought to market at a profitable price for all parties.
“That’s the thing about agriculture: Change is always slow, even with great tech,” Bergman said.
CRISPR can accelerate the pace of agricultural change, and the dream of tastier, healthier food grown on higher-yield, less polluting farms is no longer a distant fantasy. But CRISPR remains a young technology, still in its early stages of development. It will take years, even decades, for it to mature and for a full industry to grow around it. Still, Adams is confident CRISPR will deliver on its promise of seedless, thornless blackberries, high-yield disease-resistant corn, and compact, efficient bush cherry orchards.
“This is the crest of a wave that’s coming,” he said. “I wish it was already here.”
This article was produced in collaboration with the Food & Environment Reporting Network, an independent, nonprofit news organization.
