There is a vial of little blue pellets in Barry Jacobsen's lab.

It contains a bacterium taken from a few healthy leaves in a northeast Montana sugar beet field overrun with disease, and it could save farmers around the world millions of dollars each year.

Since Jacobsen, a plant scientist and pathologist, isolated it during a catastrophic outbreak of Cercospora leaf spot, the bacterium – Bacillus mycoides isolate J, or BmJ for short, has shown some impressive pluses. It has proven effective in fighting a variety of plant diseases caused by fungi, bacteria and viruses. BmJ is a biocontrol agent, as opposed to an industrial chemical used as a pesticide.

Barry Jacobsen with bacterium

"I'd always been looking to develop a viable biological control product that would be beneficial to people growing a range of crops," says Jacobsen. "I always considered that if I could do that, my career would have meant something."

After several years of research, an initial U.S. patent process and licensing to Missoula-based start-up Montana Microbial Products, Inc., BmJ was recently sublicensed to Certis USA, a top manufacturer of biopesticides worldwide.

Certis plans to market BmJ-based products around the globe.

"We think it will be an important tool kin the farmer's tool box," says Certis CEO Jow-Lih Su, who is overseeing work on BmJ at the firm. "Biological disease control that works with systemic acquired resistance represents an area of  the market that we are very interested in and we think the trends there are really very good.:

Jacobsen agreed that there has been a push for ways to control plant diseases using fewer formulated pesticides.

The lack of a biological approach to a particular fungal pathogen – Cercospora leaf spot – was the reason he went searching for answers in the sugar beet planting, where crops had been largely wiped out due to the disease.