Curdlan is a water-insoluble polymer that has structure and gelling properties that are useful in a wide variety of applications such as in medicine, cosmetics, packaging and the food and building industries. The capacity to produce curdlan has been detected in certain soil-dwelling bacteria of various phyla, although the role of curdlan in their survival remains unclear. One of the major limitations of wider use of curdlan in industry is the high cost of production during fermentation, partly because production involves specific nutritional requirements such as nitrogen limitation. For broader application in industry, the production of curdlan needs to be significantly cheaper and avoid competing with human nutritional resources such as glucose, sucrose or starch. Engineering of the industrially relevant curdlan-producing strain Agrobacterium sp. ATTC31749 is a promising approach that could decrease the cost of production so that agricultural waste flows could be used as fermentation substrates. Here, during investigations on curdlan production, it was found that curdlan was deposited as a capsule. Curiously, only a part of the bacterial population produced a curdlan capsule. This heterogeneous distribution appeared to be due to the activity of Pcrd, the native promoter responsible for the expression of the crdASC biosynthetic gene cluster. To improve curdlan production, Pcrd was replaced by a promoter (PphaP) from another Alphaproteobacterium, Rhodobacter sphaeroides. Compared to Pcrd, PphaP was stronger and only mildly affected by nitrogen levels. Consequently, PphaP dramatically boosted crdASC gene expression and curdlan production. Importantly, the genetic modification overrode the strict nitrogen depletion regulation that presents a hindrance for maximal curdlan production from complex media. With this biotechnological innovation, apple pomace was used as an example of agricultural waste for curdlan production and demonstrated excellent potential for achieving high yields using cheap substrates under relaxed fermentation conditions.