Published on May 19, 2026
A Department of Justice filing in a legal battle that could determine whether competitors can break into the concentrated seeds industry underlined the patent system’s role in entrenching dominant players at the top of the market. The lawsuit, between startup biotech firm Inari Agriculture and the dominant Corteva Agriscience, centers on Corteva’s allegation that Inari […]
A Department of Justice filing in a legal battle that could determine whether competitors can break into the concentrated seeds industry underlined the patent system’s role in entrenching dominant players at the top of the market.
The lawsuit, between startup biotech firm Inari Agriculture and the dominant Corteva Agriscience, centers on Corteva’s allegation that Inari illegally acquired Corteva seed samples for its own research, violating a swath of patents and related intellectual property protections in the process. Inari, in counterclaims, contends that it accessed the seeds legally under the Patent Act’s public access requirement and that the lawsuit is an attempt to prevent new competitors from entering the market.
Four major firms—led by Corteva and Bayer AG—dominate nearly the entire soybean and corn seed industry, controlling about 79% of the former market and 84% of the latter between them, the USDA estimated. That dominance, and the tactics used to maintain it, as alleged by farmers and independent seed companies in previous Capitol Forum reporting, is now under investigation by DOJ’s antitrust division.
As such, last week’s filing in the Corteva v. Inari lawsuit in federal court in Delaware provides a window into DOJ’s perspective on the industry. And it’s a marked departure from policy elsewhere in the second Trump administration, which has otherwise given more deference to patent holders.
“The need for an affordable and secure food supply chain is vital for every American, and that begins with the seeds on which American farmers rely,” antitrust division Deputy Assistant Attorney General Dina Kallay said in a statement. “Ensuring that the path to innovation is accessible for businesses, both big and small, is essential for enabling robust competition in the seeds industry and benefits consumers.”
DOJ didn’t reply to a request for further comment on the filing. Inari declined to comment on active litigation.
“Continued American leadership in agriculture depends on companies like ours having the confidence that valid patents will be vigorously enforced, rewarding our considerable investment while we, in turn, provide broad, legal access to our groundbreaking technology,” a Corteva spokesperson said in an emailed statement. “We are doing our part – investing roughly $1 billion every year in seed innovation and further supporting competition by licensing that innovation to small start-ups and independent seed companies.”
The department doesn’t take sides in its statements of interest, acting instead as an expert third party in issues of antitrust and competition law. But in what amounts to a mini amicus brief, the division’s arguments fell exclusively on the side of Inari and its rights to at the very least access patented materials.
Stifling rivals’ access to the patented seeds of dominant firms would insulate their products from competition, without the trade-off inherent to the IP system: transparency that allows the public to learn what is patented both in order to avoid infringing it and to enable follow-on innovation, DOJ argued.
“In particular, the Court should not deem any activity to constitute ‘infringement’ if it is a means of accessing and ‘reading’ biological material that the law requires be made publicly available in exchange for a valid patent or other IP protection,” the division wrote to Judge John P. Murphy, the Biden appointee and former intellectual property lawyer who’s overseeing the case.
The case raises questions about the boundaries of IP rights and how much freedom competitors and researchers will ultimately enjoy to access, study, and build on biological materials, said Daryl Lim, a professor, associate dean, and intellectual property expert at Penn State’s Dickinson Law.
“DOJ’s statement of interest is notable because it reframes access to deposited biological material as a competition-and-follow-on-innovation issue, while stopping short of endorsing unrestricted commercial use of protected germplasm,” Lim said.
Breaking into the industry. Inari’s goal, it said in filings, is to bring lower-cost and more sustainable seeds to market. Its plan is to use gene editing tools like CRISPR as a shortcut on the typical 7–10-year research and development cycle for new seeds, and it purchased seed samples from the repository where Corteva filed its patent samples to understand their underlying genome structure.
Corteva contends that that purchase and the following research—conducted outside the limits of U.S. intellectual property authority, in Belgium—violated its patents and related protections under the Plant Variety Protection Act. DOJ pushed back on some of those arguments, saying that buying and sequencing the genetics of a patented seed must be protected under the Patent Act because it represents the same act as reading the blueprint for a patented machine.
“To hold otherwise would penalize those who access and use the biological material to understand its specifications, thereby disrupting the carefully crafted balance—protecting competition and innovation—underlying the patent laws,” the division wrote.
But it went farther than just arguing in favor of seed patent transparency, characterizing the lawsuit as central to competitive dynamics in the industry.
“This litigation raises competition concerns because it involves questions of interpretation of the IP laws that impact permissible conduct and may lead to an outcome that ‘squash[es] nascent, albeit unproven competitors’—a result that would be ‘inimical’ to the goal of promoting innovation and competition,” the division wrote, quoting from the D.C. Circuit’s decision in the 2001 United States v. Microsoft monopoly lawsuit.
“For entry by a new competitor to be possible in this highly concentrated industry, the established dominant firms must be held to their side of” the patent trade-off by ensuring their products are adequately disclosed to the public, DOJ added.
The building blocks of life. The lawsuit—and, experts say, the extreme concentration in the industry—is largely a result of the unique properties of the patent system’s intersection with seeds. Unlike most inventions that receive a patent, seeds can’t be replicated or reproduced with raw materials and a blueprint.
Instead, breeders ideally need both a breeding history of the plant and a sample of the patented seed itself, said Paulina Jenney, a researcher and outreach program manager at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who co-authored a 2023 report on seed industry concentration for the Department of Agriculture.
“You can’t make a seed from scratch. You can’t look at a seed deposit or read an application and build your own version,” Jenney said. That’s why the Patent and Trademark Office “allows patent applicants to deposit seeds in order to enable their inventions, because they recognized that you just simply cannot fully describe a biological invention with words alone.”
Patent protection has been a major factor in the dominance of Bayer and Corteva over corn and soybean markets, said Diana Moss, vice president and competition policy director at the Progressive Policy Institute, a left-leaning public policy thinktank. Bayer, Corteva, and Syngenta have vertically integrated their businesses from seed R&D at the top of the chain to agrochemicals and digital farming data at the bottom, she said.
That control makes it virtually impossible for smaller companies that operate at a single level to break into the market.
“Patent protection is a huge way to maintain those integrated platforms and the dominance of the Big Ag biotech,” Moss said. “My take is that Corteva is alleging that Inari…infringed their patents [that] they were accessing legally, publicly available biological material. That is not patent infringement.”
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