A Third of the Soybean Seed Market Rests on Patents That Expired in 2010

USD 3.90 billion of the global soybean seed market — 31.0 per cent of the USD 12.60 billion it was worth in 2025 — sits on herbicide-tolerance traits whose original patents have expired. Roundup Ready 1’s patent expired in 2010. Roundup Ready 2 has lapsed. On any ordinary reading of intellectual property, a third of this market should by now be a commodity.

It is not. That third still earns a royalty, and understanding why is the difference between forecasting soybean seed at 4.12 per cent and forecasting it at something much lower.

The royalty is attached to a package, not a patent

In soybean, a grower buying an off-patent trait stack from a certified supplier is not paying for the molecule. He is paying for the germplasm around it, a current trait version in a current elite variety, a seed treatment, the service that comes with the bag, and the legal right to plant it. Remove any one of those and the transaction does not happen — a farmer cannot buy a certified lot of a 2010 trait in a 2015 variety from an unauthorised seller, because that lot does not exist.

That is why the price did not collapse when the patent did. It is also why the category behaves so differently from corn. Each corn trait generation adds insect protection, herbicide tolerance and yield together, so the grower must trade up or lose performance. In soybean, glyphosate tolerance in old germplasm is genuinely cheap and genuinely adequate for a large share of hectares. There is no forced upgrade path.

The United States figures make the consequence concrete. A bag of soybean seed cost USD 63.05 per planted acre in 2025 on USDA ERS data, roughly three-quarters of the corn figure. That gap — not agronomy, not area — is the whole difference between a 4.12 per cent market and a 4.60 per cent one.

Brazil is where the package is being tested

Three court actions in Brazil challenge the collection of royalties after patent expiry, and the Supreme Federal Court is expected to hear the oldest in 2026. The question in front of it is narrow and decisive: does the royalty survive the patent, or does it survive only as a contractual term attached to certified seed?

The stakes are larger than the legal point. Brazil is USD 3.95 billion of soybean seed value, 31.3 per cent of the world market, and South America is 44.0 per cent of it. A ruling that royalties terminate with the patent would not simply compress prices on the off-patent third — it would remove the mechanism that funds the trait pipeline that replaces it.

The channel data already shows how fast the cheaper route can grow when the legal ground is uncertain. Soybean area in Brazil went from about 40.9 million hectares in 2021/22 to 48.6 million in 2025/26, an increase of 18.8 per cent. Over the same four seasons, area sown with uncertified seed rose from 3.1 million hectares to 9.6 million — a 3.1-fold increase. Certified area went from roughly 37.8 to 39.0 million hectares. Essentially all of Brazil’s expansion was sown with seed that did not pass through a certified channel.

What the third is actually worth

The 31.0 per cent figure is not a claim that off-patent traits are sold at full price. It is the share of market value that attaches to varieties built on expired herbicide-tolerance technology, at whatever price the package commands. The premium is real but it is thin, and it is what an enforcement regime is defending rather than what a patent is defending.

That distinction sets the forecast’s shape. Volume grows 1.19 per cent a year — slower than corn, because soybean area is not converting to anything. The remaining 71 per cent of growth has to come from price, mix and trait content, and it has to come against a legal backdrop where the oldest and largest single trait technology in the crop is already off-patent.

If the Brazilian court upholds royalty collection, the package holds and 4.12 per cent is achievable. If it does not, the third of this market that rests on expired patents re-prices faster than the rest can absorb, and the certified-seed model — which is the only model this industry has for funding the next trait — has to be rebuilt on something other than the patent.

The sentence to take away

Soybean seed is the one major seed market where the incumbent technology went generic at the same time as the replacement arrived. It has held its price so far because the industry sells a package rather than a licence. Whether it can keep doing that is now a question for a court in Brasília, not for a breeder.

The full dataset, regional split and eight-year value path are in the Global Soybean Seed Market report. The trait-and-germplasm structure it sits inside is set out in Global Genetically Modified and Biotech Seeds.