What It Takes To Bring Biological Plant Health Products To Market

Bringing biological plant health products to market might not be as expensive or time-consuming as their synthetic counterparts, but that doesn’t mean it’s a simple process.

While still fledging offerings compared to more established chemical inputs, biological solutions are increasingly accepted around the world. And whether they come from well-established or nascent providers, biological products can offer growers solutions in ways many synthetic products simply cannot.

For a variety of reasons including regulatory, environmental issues, consumer demand, and resistance, the biological product market continues to grow at an accelerated rate despite being hampered by a lack of understanding from a skeptical segment of the growing community. To overcome the doubts and to facilitate adoption, providers have developed a variety of strategies to bring new products to market.

“A major challenge we face is educating the entire value chain — from growers to advisors and distributors — on this novel approach to improving plant health and mitigating abiotic stress,” says Luis Hernandez, CEO, Cultiva. “Because our products are often evaluated annually in permanent crops, gaining meaningful adoption can take multiple seasons. This requires long-term vision and commitment to demonstrate value and overcome initial skepticism about a new category in the plant health space.”

“Knowledge generation and transfer are central to our growth strategy,” Hernandez continues. “We invest heavily in R&D, sales, and marketing to strengthen our cuticle health narrative and expand into new crops and geographies. This includes basic research to deepen our understanding of the mode of action (MOA), as well as extensive field trials and grower demonstrations. By producing data and real-world results, we build credibility and showcase how improved cuticle health can directly lead to increased marketable yields.”

Education is a constant mantra among biological providers. Understanding how new products work and how they need to be applied is critical to their success.

“We want to be seen as a valued partner (so that growers) understand what we’re doing and that’s why we invest in the genomics,” says Tim Eyrich, Vice President of Innovation and Agronomy for North America, HELM AG. “That’s why I’ve hired very experienced agronomists who understand crop nutrition, understand the physiology and the genomics of the plant, and why a plant does what it does under certain conditions and how you manage that. We’re very education-centric. That’s how we want to differentiate ourselves.”

For more, click here to continue reading the full article as part of our special report on Plant Health.

In addition, check out the previous reports in Meister’s Global Insight Series covering a range of topics from Irrigation Innovations to Agricultural Technology.