Betting the Farm

How a Maverick Entrepreneur and a Band of Scientists Changed Agriculture Forever

This is the tale of a wild corporate ride at the beginning of the agricultural biotechnology revolution. In their eyewitness account, two scientists who participated at the start of the genetically modified crops revolution tell how David Padwa, a charismatic entrepreneur who saw the promise of the new technology as a way to feed people and protect the environment, set out to make it happen.

David, along with his “wingman” and fellow entrepreneur, Gene Keluche, the first Native American with a Harvard MBA, and his money man, Gilbert de Botton, head of the Rothschilds bank in Switzerland, started the seed company Agrigenetics. They then raised today’s equivalent of hundreds of millions of dollars through a limited partnership and contracted the world’s best academic scientists to discover new useful genes and get them into seeds.

The times were alive with competing startups; big oil, chemical, and pharma companies were also getting into the game, and hustlers were ever present. Takeover offers, unintended consequences of government legislation, soaring interest rates, stock market volatility, and huge egos had to be managed. Though well before the advent of the internet, the lessons from this extraordinary venture are as relevant today as they were forty years ago.