It started with forty acres of sagebrush in Utah County, bought in 1979 so a father's sons could turn it into a sod farm and earn money for college. Decades later, one of those sons heard a friend was using nanotechnology to improve a dry-cleaning business and wondered whether the same idea could do something for a farm. The trials that followed beat industry standards — and the sod farm became an agtech company.
That company is Nano-Yield, and its co-founder and CEO, Clark Bell, joins us this week on Agbioscience. Nano-Yield builds a nanoparticle delivery system that helps plants take up the fertilizer and crop protection already going on the field — more from existing inputs rather than more inputs, and it's earned the company a 2026 Stevie Award for agricultural innovation, an EY Entrepreneur of the Year finalist nod, and a No. 2,539 ranking on the 2026 Inc. 5000 on 127% three-year growth.
Highlights include:
- The core problem Nano-Yield is solving for farmers — and why this is the right moment for the technology
- Why "more efficiency from existing inputs" is landing now instead of "add another product"
- Nanotechnology in plain English: what a grower actually needs to understand about how it improves productivity
- What makes the science genuinely different from traditional fertilizer enhancement and other crop input technologies
- From a technical standpoint, what's happening inside the plant that allows the approach to improve performance and efficiency
- What growers have said as they integrated Nano-Yield into their operations
- The USDA backing tied to innovative domestic fertilizer production and business growth — how that support accelerates expansion and validates the opportunity
- Scaling without weakening the science or muddying the value proposition for the farmer
- The measurable results customers are seeing today in yield, nutrient efficiency, crop health and consistency
- A customer story that captures the impact of the technology
- Balancing innovation talk with what farmers care about most: return on investment and operational simplicity
- What the Stevie Award and EY finalist honors mean — and what they say about the company's maturity
- What will define success for Nano-Yield over the next year: adoption, farmer outcomes, partnerships, or something else