Why one breeder collects 90% of royalties and another collects 22%
Collection rates run from around a fifth of what is owed to over ninety per cent. The gap is built, not given, and it is built out of data.
Take two breeders with comparable varieties, comparable markets, and comparable licences on paper. One collects close to all the royalties owed to them. The other collects a fraction. The variety did not fail. The licence was not obviously worse. The difference is almost never the law, and almost always the system sitting behind the licence.
The size of the gap surprises people. In our own royalty-collection work we have seen rates run from around 22 per cent of what is owed to roughly 94 per cent. That is the spread between a variety that pays for the next one and a variety that quietly subsidises everyone further down the chain than the breeder.
The gap is built out of data, not luck
Weak collection has a recognisable shape. It runs on hope: static spreadsheets, records scattered across people and inboxes, and follow-up driven by whoever happens to remember. There is no single, current view of what is owed, so what gets collected is whatever comes in voluntarily, which is rarely the whole of it.
Strong collection has the opposite shape. The breeder knows what royalties are due, from whom, from where, and when, because the data is gathered continuously rather than reconstructed after the fact. The variety sets the ceiling on value. The collection system decides how much of that ceiling the breeder actually reaches. Two businesses with the same variety can therefore end up a long way apart, entirely on the strength of the machinery behind the licence.
The variety sets the ceiling on what you can earn. The collection system decides how much of it you keep.
Where the leakage hides
Most of the lost royalty does not vanish dramatically. It seeps out at the points nobody is cross-checking. The best-run setups do not only monitor growers; they pull data from the choke points in the chain, the processors and the dealers, and reconcile what those handlers report against what licensees declare. Discrepancies that would never surface from a grower's own return become visible the moment two independent records are compared.
The usual blind spots are predictable once you look for them: farm-saved seed that goes undeclared, harvested-material flows that are never tracked, dealer networks that report loosely or not at all. Depending on the crop, a striking share of the gap between owed and collected lives in exactly these places, not because anyone is necessarily acting in bad faith, but because no one is reconciling the numbers.
What the high-collection breeders do differently
The pattern among breeders who recover most of what they are owed is consistent. They treat collection as a data discipline rather than an annual chase. They build the traceability that lets them reconcile declarations against independent signals from the chain. And where the model allows, they design royalties to follow value, charging on harvested volume rather than only a flat fee at planting, so that returns scale with the crop instead of being fixed before the season even begins.
Structured licensing arrangements point the same way. Platforms built on fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory terms, such as the International Licensing Platform in vegetables, work because remuneration is transparent and predictable, which is the same property a good collection system gives a single breeder: you know what is owed, and you can show it.
None of this requires a large team. Most small and mid-size breeders simply have no agreed standard for it yet, which is precisely why their rates vary so widely. The gap is solvable, and the process can be made far more accurate, automated and cost-efficient than the manual approach most breeders inherit. Closing it tends to be the cheapest revenue a breeding business will ever find, because the royalties are already owed. The only question is whether the system behind the licence is built to collect them.
Frequently asked questions
How wide is the spread in royalty collection, really?
Wider than most owners expect. In our own royalty-collection work we have seen rates run from around 22 per cent of what is owed to roughly 94 per cent, depending heavily on the systems and terms behind the licence. That is not a rounding difference. It is the difference between a variety that funds the next one and a variety that quietly subsidises everyone downstream of the breeder.
If two breeders have similar varieties, what explains the difference?
Almost never the law, and almost always the system. Weak collection tends to run on hope: static spreadsheets, scattered records, and follow-up by memory. Strong collection runs on traceability and reporting across the whole chain, so the breeder knows what is owed, by whom, from where, and when. The variety sets the ceiling on value; the collection system decides how much of it you actually keep.
Where does the leakage usually hide?
Often at the points nobody is cross-checking. High-performing setups do not only monitor growers; they pull data from the choke points in the chain, processors and dealers, and reconcile those against what licensees declare. Farm-saved seed, harvested-material flows, and dealer networks are common blind spots. Depending on the crop, that is where a surprising share of the gap between owed and collected tends to sit.
Is this only a problem for large rights holders?
In our experience smaller and mid-size breeders are more exposed, not less, because many have no clear standard or best-practice process for collection yet. That is a large part of why rates vary so much. The encouraging side is that the gap is solvable: the process can be made far more accurate, automated and cost-efficient than the manual approach most breeders inherit.
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About the author
Tomer Biran, Founder of Greenstone
Tomer Biran is the founder of Greenstone. He has spent more than twenty years on both sides of the table: as a qualified lawyer and former General Counsel to international organisations across multiple jurisdictions, and as a founder and operator of B2B and B2C businesses across the UK, EU, and US. He has served as General Manager of a leading plant breeders' company with a global footprint and as General Counsel of an international fresh produce marketing group. He holds a Master of Law and Business from WHU and Bucerius Law School in Hamburg, where he was a Joachim Herz Excellence Scholar, and a Bachelor of Laws. That blend of commercial operating experience and legal depth is what drives Greenstone's commercial-first approach to plant variety rights and commercialisation.
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