Pentele: Killing Grain Pests With EIC Accelerator Money

Two-thirds of stored grain is treated with chemicals at least twice a season, the PestiSi project estimated, conventionally by gassing it with phosphine, and the company argued that storage pests are becoming resistant to the gas. Pentele Mezőgazdasági Zrt., a farm of about 1,000 hectares in Dunaújváros, south of Budapest, set out to replace the gas with a powder: diatomaceous earth, the fossilised silica shells of single-celled algae, mixed straight into the grain. The European Commission picked the project, PestiSi, in the 9 January 2019 cut-off of the EIC SME Instrument Phase 2, the forerunner of the EIC Accelerator, and paid €549,311 towards a €784,730 budget, according to CORDIS. Pentele was the only beneficiary named for the project.

The science held up in the company's own warehouse. What the project was built to deliver next, a product authorisation and a market launch, has not been announced in the five years since it ended. In February 2026 the majority owner sold Pentele to a farming group from Lajoskomárom, according to the local paper Dunaújvárosi Hírlap.

A Farm With a New Owner

Pentele is an operating farm, not a start-up. Its former owner, the grain trader Dunagabona, bought the majority of its shares in December 2007, and the site can store 9,000 tonnes of grain at a time and handle 20,000 tonnes a year, according to a company history reprinted by Dunaújvárosi Hírlap in February 2024. In that interview Dunagabona's owner and managing director, Dr László Berta, who had coordinated PestiSi, spoke about Ukrainian grain, dropping rapeseed from the rotation and hoping to break even in 2024. He did not mention PestiSi.

Two years later he sold. Dunagabona's managers had decided to leave the grain trade, a shareholder told Dunaújvárosi Hírlap on 25 February 2026, which named the buyer as Ragalli Kft., a grain wholesaler from Lajoskomárom that farmed 8,000 hectares. In a follow-up interview on 8 March 2026, the buyer was described as the Lajoskomáromi Agrár group and its managing director, Attila Csepregi, said Berta had approached him and that he decided to buy the shares after a few hours of talks. Ragalli Kft. is run by Csepregi from Lajoskomárom, according to CompanyWall. The price was not disclosed. Csepregi's plans, as he described them, are new machinery and three large grain stores; PestiSi did not come up. Dunagabona itself stopped trading at the end of May 2026, its website says.

The company registers confirm the change. Nemzeti Cégtár and CompanyWall list Pentele as operating, with a board of five people who are all registered in Lajoskomárom, led by Csepregi.

The Technology: Sharp Dust Instead of Gas

Diatomaceous earth is not new as an insecticide; gardeners use it against ants and mites. Its microscopic crystals damage insects mechanically rather than chemically. "Insects breathe through a capillary system," Berta told CORDIS in December 2021, and "the needle-like crystals of diatomaceous earth can enter these holes (spiracles) and kill the insects." Because the effect is physical, the company argued, it is harmless to people and livestock and pests cannot build up resistance, unlike with phosphine, the gas most stores use now.

The difficulty is dosing a powder evenly through hundreds of tonnes of grain without spoiling it. Pentele's answer was a mixing machine that coats the grain as it goes into store, plus a formulation from a Hungarian diatomite deposit at Erdőbénye, named in the project's permission report. The company claimed that one treatment kills pests within two weeks and protects grain for a year, and that the dose stays below EU limits for inorganic dust, so the powder need not be sieved out before sale, according to both CORDIS and a July 2021 article the company placed on the farming portal Agroinform.

What the EU Paid For, and What CORDIS Shows

PestiSi had two EU grants. A Phase 1 feasibility study, project 789748, received €50,000 for December 2017 to February 2018 and concluded the product could be permitted. The Phase 2 project ran from 1 May 2019 to 31 July 2021, three months longer than the 24 months first planned; the project's April 2021 use case report already gives the duration as 27 months. Its stated aim was "to commercialise our diatomaceous earth as insecticide material during storage", with a pricing strategy, distribution channels in Europe and standardised production.

The final report on CORDIS lists real technical progress. Pentele finished validating the method in its own warehouses, found no insects in treated wheat, maize and barley "even during long-term storage", and showed in a milling test that flour from treated wheat was of identical quality. Tests were run by SGS in its Cegléd laboratory and by the inspection firm MertControl; in June 2021 MertControl measured 0.07% PestiSi residue in sieved wheat after six months in store, well under the 0.5% the company aimed for, according to a post on the PestiSi website. The report also says the company filed a patent application, registered a European trademark, agreed terms with suppliers, OEM producers and two distributors, and "received some concrete orders". It names none of them.

The weak point is the permit. Deliverable D3.1 promised "permission for at least 3 different European countries" by month 16, August 2020. The report filed in November 2020 describes no permission at all: it sets out a plan to first prove the Erdőbénye diatomite equivalent to a source already approved in the EU, and only then to seek authorisation of PestiSi as a plant protection product. In October 2021, after the project had closed, project manager Emese Karácsonyi told Agroinform that the application was still pending with NÉBIH, the Hungarian food chain safety office, and that the product could go on sale once it was approved. No approval has been announced by the company, NÉBIH or the trade press since.

1. Validate the treatment at industrial scaleDeliveredWheat, maize and barley kept insect-free in Pentele's store; SGS and MertControl tests, per CORDIS.
2. Industrial mixing systemDeliveredBuilt and used on site; homogenous distribution reported.
3. Product permission in at least 3 countries by August 2020Not achievedNone by November 2020; still pending in Hungary in October 2021; none announced since.
4. Market launch and European distributionNot achieved"Some concrete orders" reported, no named customer; the launch promised in July 2021 "within a year" was not announced.
5. Patent and trademarkPartlyEU trademark registered 2021; patent filed January 2021, grant could not be verified.

What Happened After the Grant

The public trail of PestiSi goes cold in 2022. The October 2021 Agroinform article, published under Pentele's name, mentioned plans to test the product with "a large multinational company" and promised details later; none followed on Agroinform or the company site. North Data records the EU trademark "Pesti Si" for Pentele on 17 November 2021, the last PestiSi entry in its file on the company, according to North Data. The pestisi.hu site was rebuilt as a blank WordPress page in November 2022, re-posted older news in February 2023 and was disabled by April 2024, snapshots in the Wayback Machine show. The project's patent application, filed in January 2021 according to CORDIS, could not be found in public patent databases for this article, so whether it was granted could not be verified.

Pentele's other public funding since the grant is ordinary farm support: a COVID-19 liquidity guarantee worth HUF 60.6 million in 2020, risk management aid, crisis aid linked to the war in Ukraine, and excise duty refunds, according to the state aid entries listed by North Data. It took no other EU research grant. As a grant-only award of the 2019 SME Instrument, PestiSi carried no EIC equity, and Pentele does not appear in the EIC Fund portfolio.

The Money

The farm's accounts show a business about the size it was before the grant. Total revenue was HUF 625.1 million in 2022, HUF 875.3 million in 2023 and HUF 804.9 million in 2024, with net results of minus HUF 51.5 million, plus HUF 21.1 million and minus HUF 69.3 million, according to filed accounts summarised by CompanyWall. Opten and Nemzeti Cégtár give 2024 net sales of HUF 575.2 million and a 2024 loss between HUF 50 and 100 million, consistent with CompanyWall. Equity stayed between HUF 862.9 million and HUF 880.4 million. Berta had predicted in February 2024 that he would be glad to break even that year; the accounts show he did not.

Why Europe Should Care

PestiSi was pitched straight at EU policy. The Farm to Fork strategy aims to cut the use and risk of chemical pesticides by 50% by 2030, and CORDIS presented PestiSi as a way to help reach that target. But the binding law meant to enforce it, the regulation on the sustainable use of plant protection products, was rejected by the European Parliament on 22 November 2023, and the Commission's withdrawal was published on 6 May 2024, according to the European Parliament's legislative train and AGRINFO. The 50% goal remains, but without the binding law that would have forced grain stores to look for alternatives such as PestiSi.

Pentele's experience also points to a gap in how the EIC funded such work. The project's own permission report shows that authorising a diatomite source and a new plant protection product under EU Regulation 1107/2009 is a multi-step, multi-year process, yet the grant agreement set a 16-month deadline for approvals in three countries. A farm with 17 employees validated the science on EU money, but the slow part, getting the product legally on the market, was left to after the money ran out.

The Verdict

Pentele, its former owner and its new owner have not been asked for comment for this article. It is based entirely on public records, company statements and EU project data, linked throughout.