Nutrition and Health
Undernutrition is linked to nearly half of all deaths among children under 5.
Low-income families rely on corn because it is cheap, but it lacks key nutrients. This leads to stunted growth, impaired cognition, disease, and lifelong income losses that trap communities in poverty.
Instead of changing diets, we improve the corn itself.
Our biofortified corn contains 39% more zinc, 19% more iron, and 30-80% more lysine and tryptophan (quality protein).
Randomized trials have shown that quality protein corn improves children's growth and that zinc-biofortified corn increases the zinc children absorb.
Livelihoods
Most of the world's poorest people are smallholder farmers, and in the regions where we work, those farmers grow corn.
Farmers who plant high-yielding, climate-resilient corn seeds can earn more income, but the farmers who stand to gain the most often cannot afford them.
In our side-by-side farmer parcels, switching to our seeds improved yields by 9-26% without changing anything else about how they farm.
Our programs and partnerships make improved seeds accessible so the poorest farmers can afford them.
Our farmers often move from producing less than they need to feed their families, to producing enough to sell their surplus into the market.
In 2025, Guatemalan farmers purchasing our seeds paid an average of ~$41 for our seeds and increased their net income by $233.
Climate Resilience
Smallholder farmers are extremely vulnerable to climate change.
In 2022, 56% of surveyed farmers lost crops to extreme storms and 29% to drought, which fuels poverty and migration. As CO2 levels rise, corn becomes less nutritious, further contributing to malnutrition.
We develop our seeds to be the most resistant to storms, droughts, and new diseases and pests.
We start with already climate-resilient seeds and test them in Guatemala’s most extreme environments–only launching the very best and most nutritious.
Our seeds' yield advantage is nearly twice as large during droughts as in normal weather.
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