Bayer’s new “Intacta 5+” technology promises farmers more tools against weeds and insects — and locks Brazil even more tightly into a chemically intensive model of soybean production.
On a hot November morning in Mato Grosso, Brazil’s soy heartland, the problem in many fields is not that the crop looks weak. The plants are tall and vigorous. The issue is that the weeds look vigorous too.
After two decades of reliance on glyphosate-tolerant soybeans, Brazil’s farmers are running up against the limits of a single chemistry. Horseweed, sourgrass and amaranths shrug off sprays that once wiped them out. Many growers now mix several herbicides in the same tank, then repeat applications through the season, simply to keep rows passable.
Into this landscape, on 26 November 2025, Bayer announced a new genetically modified soybean trait for Brazil: Intacta 5+. It promises tolerance to five herbicides — mesotrione, dicamba, glyphosate, glufosinate and 2,4-D — plus built-in protection against caterpillars that chew on soy leaves. If regulators approve it on schedule, commercial varieties could reach Brazilian fields in the 2027/28 crop season.
For its supporters, Intacta 5+ is the logical next step in a country that has embraced biotechnology more comprehensively than almost anywhere else. For critics, it is a symbol of how far industrial agriculture is willing to go to stay ahead of the weeds — and of how deeply Brazil’s soy boom is now entangled with questions of ecology, public health and corporate power.
Brazil, the world’s soybean laboratory
Brazil’s rise as a soybean superpower is one of the most dramatic shifts in global agriculture in the past 20 years. In 2015/16, the country harvested just under 96 million tons of soybeans from 33.3 million hectares. By 2024/25, that had risen to roughly 171–169 million tons on more than 47 million hectares, according to U.S. Department of Agriculture data.
Official and private forecasters now expect Brazilian output to reach around 175–178 million tons in 2025/26, depending on weather — a figure that would cement its lead over the United States for both production and exports.
The expansion has been powered not only by land and logistics, but by an almost complete shift to biotech seeds:
- In the 2024/25 season, Brazil was forecast to sow 68.5 million hectares with genetically engineered traits across soy, corn and cotton.
- Adoption rates have reached about 99% for soybeans and cotton, and 95% for corn, making Brazil the second-largest user of biotech crops after the U.S.
Bayer has been one of the main beneficiaries. The company says that its Intacta technology — an earlier generation of GM soybeans combining glyphosate tolerance with insect resistance — has added 21.2 million tons to Brazil’s soybean output over the last decade.
Intacta 5+ is designed to extend that winning streak. It builds on Bayer’s existing Intacta2 Xtend platform, which already combines glyphosate and dicamba tolerance with caterpillar control and is expected to cover about 30% of Brazilian soy area in 2024/25, up from roughly 15% the year before.
At the same time, Bayer is preparing a parallel five-herbicide tolerant trait under the Vyconic™ brand for North America, also targeting a 2027 launch there. Vyconic includes tolerance to the same five molecules as Intacta 5+.
Taken together, these moves position Brazil as the key proving ground for a new phase of soybean biotechnology: ultra-stacked traits that combine multiple herbicide tolerances with insect resistance and, eventually, other agronomic features.
Why five herbicides?
To understand why a seed company would go to the trouble of building resistance to five different herbicides into a single plant, it helps to look at what has been happening in Brazilian fields over the past decade.
Herbicide consumption in Brazil more than doubled between 2010 and 2020, from about 157,500 tons to 329,700 tons of active ingredients, according to a study by researchers from Embrapa and the University of Rio Verde. That 128% increase far outpaced the growth in cultivated area. The main reason, the study concludes, was a surge in glyphosate-resistant weeds.
Weeds such as Conyza (fleabane), Digitaria insularis (sourgrass), Eleusine indica (goosegrass) and Amaranthus species now resist glyphosate in large parts of the soy belt.
One recent study estimates that glyphosate-resistant Conyza alone occupies more than 7.7 million hectares in Brazil — roughly 30% of the country’s soybean area.
Faced with this evolution, agronomists have urged farmers to rotate modes of action and mix herbicides to avoid relying on a single molecule. The message has been clear: if glyphosate is used alone, resistance is almost inevitable; if it is combined with other chemistries and cultural practices, resistance can be slowed.
Intacta 5+ pushes that logic to its technological extreme. Its five herbicides span several different modes of action:
- Glyphosate – the workhorse EPSPS inhibitor (HRAC Group 9).
- Glufosinate – a glutamine-synthetase inhibitor (Group 10).
- Dicamba and 2,4-D – “synthetic auxin” herbicides (Group 4).
- Mesotrione – an HPPD inhibitor (Group 27) used in residual and post-emergence broadleaf control.
In theory, this gives growers a large menu of combinations and sequences to hit resistant weeds from different biological angles. In practice, it does something more subtle for the industry: it locks in a high-tech, chemistry-heavy model of weed management and raises the stakes on stewardship.
Used carefully — with pre-emergence products, crop rotation, cover crops, mechanical control and strict adherence to labels — a five-herbicide stack could slow the spread of resistance and reduce the need for rescue sprays. Used as a blunt instrument to push back ever-tougher weeds, it risks accelerating a chemical arms race.
The business case: traits, piracy and pricing power
From Bayer’s perspective, the economics are compelling. Stacked traits support premium pricing and deepen the company’s relationship with large commercial growers. In a market where nearly all soy area is already biotech, future growth depends less on converting conventional hectares and more on upselling new generations of traits.
But there is a tension between this high-value technology and Brazil’s messy seed market.
According to a study commissioned by industry group CropLife Brasil and consultancy Celeres, seed piracy — the use of unlicensed or illegally saved GM soy seed — causes annual losses of roughly 10 billion reais (about $1.76bn). The report estimates that 11% of Brazil’s soybean area, or some 5 million hectares in the 2023/24 season, is planted with pirated seed.
The study warns that piracy erodes both corporate revenues and public tax receipts, and suggests that curbing it could unlock an additional 900 million reais in investment in improved seed varieties over the next decade.
Ultra-complex stacks like Intacta 5+ cut both ways in this context:
- On one hand, they raise the technical barrier to counterfeiting. Reproducing a five-herbicide tolerant, insect-resistant trait legally requires licences, and illegally requires sophisticated breeding and stealth.
- On the other, they increase the value of each bag of seed, potentially making piracy even more tempting in parts of the market where margins are thin and enforcement weak.
Bayer is not alone in this race. BASF, Corteva and M.S. Technologies, for example, are working on a new trait stack for Brazil that combines BASF’s nematode-resistant soybean trait with Enlist E3® and Conkesta E3® soybeans, which already offer tolerance to 2,4-D, glyphosate and glufosinate, plus insect resistance.
Corteva’s Enlist platform, Syngenta’s pipelines and Bayer’s own Vyconic™ project suggest that by the late 2020s, multi-herbicide stacks will be the norm in high-intensity soy systems across the Americas.
In that sense, Intacta 5+ is less a one-off product and more a signal that the next competitive frontier in seeds is not just yield, but the depth of the chemical “toolbox” each trait unlocks.
Drift, health and the global dicamba lesson
One uncomfortable truth sits at the heart of this strategy: several of the herbicides in these stacks are controversial far beyond Brazil’s borders.
In the United States, the roll-out of dicamba-tolerant crops in the late 2010s led to thousands of drift complaints and an estimated millions of acres of non-dicamba-tolerant soybeans and specialty crops damaged each year. Regulatory documents from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency cite more than 2,700 official crop-damage cases in 2017 alone, covering roughly 3.6–4.1 million acres of soybeans.
Federal courts twice vacated dicamba registrations, describing “enormous and unprecedented damage”, before the EPA moved again in mid-2025 to re-approve certain dicamba products for in-crop use on soy and cotton, subject to new restrictions.
Synthetic auxin herbicides such as dicamba and 2,4-D are highly active at very low doses, which makes them powerful tools against broadleaf weeds — and also means that small amounts of vapor or spray drift can damage neighbouring vineyards, orchards or vegetable fields. Extension services in North America still warn growers about their history as some of the herbicides most frequently implicated in drift incidents.
There are health questions as well. Recent scientific reviews report evidence that 2,4-D and dicamba can cause DNA damage in certain cell models, and campaign groups argue that both herbicides, along with glyphosate, are linked to cancer and other illnesses, though regulatory agencies differ in their assessment of the risks at field-relevant exposures.
Brazil’s own pesticide use has soared: one analysis by WWF notes that agrochemical use in Brazil roughly doubled between 2010 and 2021, with glyphosate remaining the best-selling product and residue limits in water far higher than in the European Union.
Bayer and other companies stress that modern formulations and label restrictions are designed to minimise off-target effects, and that herbicides can be used safely if directions are followed. Nonetheless, the U.S. experience suggests that large-scale deployment of dicamba- and 2,4-D-tolerant crops is not just a technical question, but a social one. When herbicides drift, they do not only hit wild plants; they affect neighbours, and sometimes community relations.
As Brazil considers how to regulate a five-herbicide stack, these lessons from the north will be hard to ignore.
Climate, deforestation and the Cerrado constraint
Even as technology pushes yields higher on existing fields, Brazil is discovering the ecological constraints of its soy boom.
A study released in November 2025 by Zero Carbon Analytics examined deforestation in the Cerrado, the vast tropical savanna that covers about 23% of Brazil’s territory and has been heavily cleared for soy and cattle. The analysis of 840 municipalities between 2013 and 2023 concludes that deforestation has created drier local climates and reduced rainfall, cutting into soy yields.
The authors estimate that if deforestation had been prevented, Brazil could have produced nearly 34 million tons more soybeans over the decade, worth about $9.4 billion at prevailing prices.
It is a striking finding because it runs against the narrative that more land plus better seeds automatically equals more output. The study notes that average soy yields in Brazil have risen about 38% since 2008, helped by GMO seeds and better agronomy. Yet climate disruption from land-use change appears to have offset part of those gains.
In this light, Intacta 5+ looks like one more attempt to squeeze extra productivity out of a system that is already pushing ecological limits. Stack more traits, spray more herbicides, push yields a little higher — while the underlying climate in key producing regions becomes more volatile.
The question is not whether new seeds can add bushels. By Bayer’s own numbers, they can and do. The question is whether genetics and chemistry can keep outpacing the environmental costs of expansion, or whether Brazil will be forced to rethink the very model that made it a soy superpower.
Who really benefits?
There is also an equity dimension. The Brazilian soy sector is famously concentrated: large and mid-sized commercial farms dominate exports, while smallholders often operate on thinner margins and with less access to credit.
In theory, Intacta 5+ is available to any farmer who can buy the seeds and associated herbicides. In practice:
- Larger operations are better positioned to absorb the higher upfront costs of premium trait packages, invest in application technology, and work with agronomists to design multi-herbicide weed-management programmes.
- Smaller farms may face a choice between sticking with older traits, using generic herbicides in increasingly complex mixtures, or turning to informal seed markets, with all the legal and agronomic risks that entails.
Brazil’s experience with seed piracy underlines this divide. The 10-billion-real annual loss figure is an aggregate; behind it lie growers who feel squeezed between input prices set in global corporate boardrooms and commodity prices set in Chicago and Beijing.
At the same time, the country’s public research institutions such as Embrapa continue to develop non-proprietary varieties and integrated weed-management strategies that rely more on crop rotation, cover crops and mechanical practices. These approaches can be harder to roll out at scale and do not generate patent royalties, but they may prove critical in slowing resistance and reducing chemical intensity.
The risk is that as trait stacks become more complex, the entry ticket into the most competitive segment of global soy markets rises, deepening existing inequalities.
A fork in the road
What, then, does Intacta 5+ actually represent for Brazil and for global agriculture?
One charitable interpretation is that it is a bridge technology. Weeds have already evolved resistance to glyphosate; caterpillars already chew through conventional soybeans; climate volatility already disrupts yields. In this view, a five-herbicide, insect-resistant stack gives farmers a few more crucial years of stability while the sector invests in more sustainable solutions — precision spraying, robotics, biological controls, better rotations and carbon-smart practices.
A more sceptical take is that it is a cul-de-sac: a sophisticated way of doubling down on a system that treats land, chemistry and genetics as interchangeable inputs in the pursuit of volume, while leaving structural problems — from Cerrado deforestation to rural health concerns — largely intact.
Reality will probably lie somewhere in between. The technology will almost certainly be adopted; in a country where around 80% of soy exports now go to China, and where 2025 exports are on track to set a fresh record above 110 million tons, growers are under intense pressure to keep yields high and costs predictable.
Intacta 5+ is therefore less a futuristic outlier than a logical next chapter in Brazil’s agricultural story:
- A country that turned biotech seeds and agrochemicals into the backbone of its export engine.
- A market where trait stacking, seed piracy, glyphosate-resistant weeds and deforestation are now tightly interwoven.
- And a place where the boundaries between private innovation and public risk are being redrawn in real time.
For policymakers, the challenge will be to set guardrails — on herbicide use, on environmental monitoring, on support for alternative weed-management strategies — that allow farmers to use new technologies without repeating the dicamba saga on a Brazilian scale.
For farmers, the challenge will be to treat Intacta 5+ as a tool, not a crutch: something to be deployed within genuinely diversified production systems, not as a licence to spray more, earlier and more often.
For the rest of the world, watching from afar, the arrival of a five-herbicide “super-seed” in Brazil is a reminder that the future of food is being negotiated not only in trade talks and climate summits, but also in the fine print of seed catalogues and pesticide labels.
If Intacta 5+ helps buy time for a shift toward more resilient, lower-impact agriculture, it may yet justify its billing as a breakthrough. If it simply postpones a reckoning with the limits of chemical control, Brazil’s new super-seed could end up looking less like a marvel of modern science and more like a last, clever twist in an old story.
