BASF commissions new BioHub fermentation plant for crop protection products in Ludwigshafen
BASF Agricultural Solutions has commissioned a new BioHub fermentation plant in Ludwigshafen. The company says in-house production of biological active ingredients should strengthen supply resilience and expand its crop protection portfolio.
BASF Agricultural Solutions said on May 11 that it had commissioned a new BioHub fermentation plant at its Ludwigshafen site in Germany. The project is focused on biological and biotechnology-based crop protection products and, according to the company, represents an investment in the high double-digit million-euro range. For the farm input market, that matters because major suppliers are still putting fresh industrial capacity behind biological crop protection.
The new facility will manufacture biological fungicides and biological seed treatment products. BASF said this should give farmers broader access to solutions that fit into sustainable and integrated crop protection programmes. This is not a pilot-scale announcement: the company described the site as a fully commissioned production unit already moved into commercial operation.
Fermentation is the core process at the plant, with microorganisms converting renewable raw materials such as glucose into the desired active substances. BASF said commercial production of key biological ingredients started this year. Those include Bacillus amyloliquefaciens, the basis of the biological fungicide Serifel, and the main building block of Inscalis, a novel insecticide based on the fungal strain Penicillium coprobium.
BASF explicitly linked the move to in-house fermentation with stronger execution and more resilient supply chains. By bringing production inside its own manufacturing network, the company says it can improve flexibility, scale up biotechnology innovations faster and reduce dependence on outside processors. That is particularly relevant for agriculture at a time when crop protection supply chains remain exposed to logistics disruptions and capacity bottlenecks.
Management described the BioHub start-up as a step forward for industrial biotechnology in agriculture. BASF also argued that the global market for biological crop protection continues to grow steadily and that the new fermentation platform will help the company expand its BioSolutions portfolio while ensuring more dependable deliveries to customers. In practical terms, BASF is positioning itself more aggressively in the biological segment, not only in conventional chemical crop protection.
The wider scale of BASF’s agricultural business helps explain why the investment is notable. The company said it invested 990 million euros in research and development in 2025, while Agricultural Solutions generated sales of 9.6 billion euros that year. Seen in that context, the BioHub launch looks less like a stand-alone factory announcement and more like part of a longer-term strategy built around biological products, industrial control and supply security for farmers.