By: Phillip Rucks

Column • April 10, 2025

Maryland AgTech company Silvec Biologics is working to release a revolutionary agricultural technology to combat citrus greening, the devastating disease that has nearly devastated the Florida citrus industry. The product is still in the trial stage and has yet to receive final EPA and State of Florida approval, but test results point toward a promising new approach to growing citrus unaffected by greening. 

Silvec Biologics CEO Rafael Simon says the company’s product uses a benign virus that has been modified to include a spinach peptide to prompt plants to produce antibacterial agents to fight against the bacteria that causes greening. The product leverages the virus’s natural function of replication to continually spread disease-resistance throughout the plant. In current greenhouse trials, Simon says the product controls greening by reducing bacteria levels to an insufficient amount. 

“You’re inducing the plant to produce its own medicine. And once you introduce it into the plant … it stays for the lifespan of the plant, and every second the plant is producing the anti-microbial agent,” he explains.

The product was created through technology developed at the University of Maryland and advanced by Silvec with the help of U.S. Sugar, the other company to have created a similar technology to combat greening. When U.S. Sugar switched their focus away from citrus several years ago, it agreed to sign a license agreement with Silvec that allowed them to leverage the U.S. Sugar technology along with their own.

“[U.S. Sugar] put a lot of money into this and a lot of effort, and they also care deeply about the industry, and I think they were very happy to see that we might be able to take up the mantle and make sure that all that work they had done was not in vain,” Simon says.

The partnership with U.S. Sugar also helped push Silvec’s product further down the path toward commercial availability. While the product is still in review, Simon expects final EPA approval to happen by the end of 2025. Soon after that, Silvec can leverage relationships with nurseries to start getting their product to farmers. The next step for now, though, will be field trials.

“The results that we’ve seen in the last six months have made me much more optimistic. You know, in science you start on model plants, you’re starting in petri dishes. But I really want to see this to work in the field. That will be the ultimate test.”