Roger Marshall Boosted Pesticide Products His Wife Is Invested In

This is part two of a two-part story. Read part one here.

Republican Sen. Roger Marshall’s longtime Kansas business partner and campaign donor Dan Tasset’s private equity firm Nueterra has primarily been focused on rural health care, engaging in several troubling instances of buying up hospitals, extracting large management fees, and running them into bankruptcy and closure, leaving a trail of pain for patients and health care professionals.

But more recently, Nueterra has made an unlikely pivot into the pesticide business by promoting a series of new agricultural products known as “biological pesticides,” which claim to be a safer and healthier alternative to glyphosate, the pernicious weed-killer synonymous with everything from kidney disease to subsistence farmer suicides. Glyphosate has drawn negative attention from the MAHA wing of the Republican Party, and two Nueterra-backed biological pesticide companies could have an opening to win favor in Washington. They appear to have found a friend in Sen. Marshall—whose wife is directly invested in the companies. 

The two companies are NewLeaf Symbiotics and Vestaron, both owned by a Nueterra venture fund called NCM Bioscience Partners. NewLeaf manufactures Terrasym, a bacteria-based insecticide that can be sprayed on crops or applied “in seed” to “establish a natural, permanent partnership with plants.” It also sells “biostimulants,” which it says produces more abundant and hearty plants. Vestaron’s peptide-based insecticide product is called SPEAR, which it claims is derived from the venom spiders use to kill bugs and has “no known resistance or cross-resistance.” Both companies tout the products as environmentally friendly, quick-acting, and effective.

Marshall’s wife, Laina Marshall, has been a 3 percent investor in NCM Bioscience Partners since at least 2015. The investments, listed in Marshall’s Senate financial disclosure forms, are not large: between $1,000 and $15,000 in NewLeaf, and between $15,000 and $50,000 for Vestaron. But these are startup companies only beginning to reach agricultural markets; that investment has the potential to pay off handsomely, if the companies can overcome their disadvantages compared to powerful incumbents. 

Government can close that gap with grants and regulatory relief. That’s precisely what Marshall has been pitching in legislation since 2022. If successful, not only would Nueterra and Tasset benefit from having a senator in their corner making policies that would boost those companies; Marshall’s family would directly benefit as well.

Four years ago, Marshall dropped his first bill aimed at helping the biostimulant and biological pesticide industry. While the bill was focused on domestic fertilizer production, it would have required the Department of Agriculture to assess biostimulants as an “eligible conservation practice standard,” meaning that farmers could gain federal benefits from using the product.

In May 2025, Marshall introduced a bill called the Plant Biostimulant Act that would boost new products like Terrasym, by establishing a statutory definition of a biostimulant and related products, as well as mandating a Department of Agriculture study on the benefits of biostimulants and best practices. But the real goal of the bill is to explicitly exempt biostimulants from regulation as pesticides under the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act (FIFRA). The bill sponsors, including Marshall, said that this would “establish a consistent regulatory pathway to market.”

Freeing NewLeaf and Vestaron products from regulation would significantly reduce compliance costs and put them at a significant advantage. NewLeaf is part of a trade group, the Biological Products Industry Alliance, that lobbied for the bill. 

The Plant Biostimulant Act made its way into this year’s Senate version of the farm bill, which passed out of the Senate Agriculture Committee on a party-line vote. Marshall, a member of the committee, voted for the bill, and in his statement praising passage noted the inclusion of the Plant Biostimulant Act.

The statement did not mention Laina Marshall’s investments in NewLeaf and Vestaron. 

Marshall’s work on behalf of the biostimulant industry didn’t stop with the Plant Biostimulant Act. A separate bipartisan bill released this year aimed at increasing domestic fertilizer production includes a section awarding grants for developing biostimulants, like the ones NewLeaf and Vestaron manufacture. 

Marshall has also been subtly promoting biological pesticides in the media. “What I try to do is focus on healthy soil,” Marshall told NewsNation this February, in response to concerns about glyphosate. “I’m also trying to bring around new chemicals or more biologics, I would say, that we could use in place of glyphosate.”

In a second television appearance this spring, Marshall again touted biostimulants. “There’s also a lot of biologics out there, microorganisms that function as fertilizers,” he told RFD-TV. “So trying to promote those and get those to market as well.”

In a statement, Steve Roberts, a counsel for the Marshall campaign, said: “Senator Marshall operates in full compliance with all applicable rules and laws.” Tasset did not respond to a request for comment.