For years, the main obstacle encouraging farmers to use gene-edited crops in Europe was the law, not the laboratory. That balance has now shifted. According to executives behind a new agri-biotech partnership, a change in European regulation (rather than any fresh scientific breakthrough) is finally persuading plant breeders to embrace gene editing.
Speaking at the World Agri-Tech Innovation Summit in London, Lotte Westerhof, co-founder and chief scientific officer of Hudson River Biotechnology, said that the technology has existed for a long time, but finally the regulatory environment has changed. In her words, what is “greasing the wheels now is the regulation.”
Why the Law Changed
The backdrop is one of the most significant shifts in European agricultural policy in a generation. In June 2026, the European Parliament gave final approval to a new regulation on New Genomic Techniques (NGTs), published in the EU’s Official Journal and in force from 16 July. It replaces a system that, since a 2018 ruling by the EU Court of Justice, had regulated gene-edited plants under the same strict rules as conventional genetically modified organisms (GMOs).
That old regime made bringing a gene-edited crop to the European market slow, expensive and legally uncertain. The new framework splits NGT plants into two tiers. The first, covering plants with small genetic changes that could in principle have arisen through conventional breeding, faces far lighter requirements. The second, involving more extensive edits, remains more tightly controlled, with mandatory labelling and the option for member states to restrict cultivation. Gene-edited crops stay banned from organic farming.
For companies that had been sitting on their hands, the removal of that uncertainty is the signal they were waiting for. Westerhof argued that firms previously too cautious to commit are now willing to explore gene-editing programmes and partnerships.
The Harder Question: What to Edit?
Hudson River’s own experience points to a curious twist. The company specialises in CRISPR-based crop improvement and had expected breeders to arrive with precise shopping lists of genes they wanted changed. Instead, many turned up asking something more basic: what should we edit in the first place?
That gap is the reasoning behind its new partnership with Biographica, a company that builds predictive algorithms to work out which genes are linked to desirable traits. The idea is to pair Biographica’s computational “target discovery” with Hudson River’s genome-editing and plant-regeneration know-how, giving breeders an end-to-end service from identifying a promising gene to producing and testing an actual edited plant.
According to Biographica’s chief executive, Dominic Hall, disease resistance is the single biggest area of demand, followed by tolerance to drought, heat and other environmental stresses. He offered a note of caution that will resonate with any farmer: pathogens evolve too. A gene that looks like a promising defence in a scientific paper may already have been outflanked by diseases in the field.
Breeders Go Shopping for Innovation
Hall sees the sector maturing in the same direction the pharmaceutical industry took years ago, with big players increasingly outsourcing early-stage discovery rather than doing everything in-house. Large seed companies, he said, are turning to outside partners to widen the range of traits they can pursue beyond what their own teams can manage. He reports a growing number of conversations with the “external innovation” units now common at major seed firms.
Next Stop: The Dinner Plate
The first wave of gene-edited crops is likely to focus on resilience: plants that resist disease or shrug off a heatwave. But Hall believes the next frontier will be aimed squarely at shoppers. He pointed to developments such as vitamin D-enriched tomatoes, suggesting future varieties could offer better nutrition or flavour without sacrificing yield. If consumers can see a direct benefit on their plate, he argued, adoption could accelerate faster still.
That may be the real test of Europe’s new rules: not whether scientists can edit a crop, but whether shoppers decide they want to eat one.
Morrison, O. (2026). Regulation, not technology, now driving gene editing adoption in Europe, says Hudson River. AgNavigator, 26 October 2026. https://www.agnavigator.com/Article/2026/10/26/regulation-not-technology-now-driving-gene-editing-adoption-in-europe-says-hudson-river/
Regulation (EU) 2026/1388 on plants obtained by certain new genomic techniques and their products, EUR-Lex: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reg/2026/1388/oj