Biological solutions are everywhere in 2022. Whether the focus is specialty crops, greenhouse production, ag retail, or international agribusiness, biological crop protection is a topic that touches virtually every agricultural market. To get a closer look at how biological solutions are being adopted across ag, we gathered the editors from several of Meister Media Worldwide’s brands — Carol Miller, Editor, American Vegetable Grower; Eric Sfiligoj, Editor, CropLife; Jackie Pucci, Senior Editor, AgriBusiness Global; Janeen Wright, Editor, Greenhouse Grower, David Eddy, Editor, American Fruit Grower, and Richard Jones, Corporate Content Director, Meister Media Worldwide — for a roundtable discussion. The conversation covered everything from benefits and barriers to adoption, to the role of biologicals in sustainability initiatives, to where they see biological solutions headed over the next few years in the markets they cover.…
Richard Jones: Carol, what is the current state of biological crop protection in the U.S. vegetable market, and how has that changed?
Carol Miller: This is good timing because I've been analyzing our 2022 American Vegetable Grower State of the Industry Survey. Just shy of 60% of the industry says they're using biologicals. That's notable because only 29% say they're organic growers. At one point people really associated biologicals with being an organic grower and that's definitely not the case anymore.
We asked a question about top challenges when it comes to using biologicals and there were three that stood out. Number one was cost. Number two was timing of applications, trying to get it right. You need to make sure the conditions are right, and the timing is in line with the lifecycle of the bug or disease you're trying to control. Number three was efficacy.
One other thing I noticed I was the larger the farm, the more likely they were to use biologicals. When you got to 2500 acres or more of vegetables, 80% of them were using biologicals compared to the average which was 59%. I found that interesting.
Eric Sfiligoj: In the ag retail market, biologicals are a product line that folks have been showing a lot of interest in the last five to seven years. The big thing has been trust issues. CropLife asked the question on a survey in 2018 about the barriers that existed in using biological products. 53% said it was a matter of trust. Do these products actually do what they claim? We did another survey here in 2022, and while the lack of trust is still the leading factor holding back biologicals in the marketplace, it’s only 41% now. That's down significantly from five years ago.
According to the survey, most of the ag retailers in the marketplace are getting their biological products from some of the major companies that they've been dealing with for years and years. For instance, when we ask, who's your source for your biological products? Bayer CropScience was the number one company followed by Syngenta, BASF, and Corteva. These are all companies that are well known for their traditional crop protection product lines. Now they're offering biologicals as well. So, the trust doesn't seem to be as much of an issue as it might have been in the past.
On product types, five years ago in our survey 63% of the respondents said they were selling biostimulant products to their grower customers. For 2022 that number jumped up to 74%. Biopesticides are flat, about 33% five years ago and still the same percentage here in 2022.
Biofertilizers though was the big story — only 30% of the respondents in 2018 indicated they were using those products and offering them to their customers at the time. But here in 2022 that number's up to 50%, so a very nice 20 percentage point increase there.
Jones: Jackie, what are you seeing as biologicals trends on the international side?
Jackie Pucci: I was talking to Mark Trimmer from Dunham Trimmer, the biologicals research firm. He was telling me that adoption in Brazil has really taken off in row crops and that Brazil is seeing at least two times the growth of what U.S. is seeing. And the U.S. is still growing at a fast rate, at least two to three times what traditional crop protection products are experiencing in growth.
As an export market, of course, Europe is just growing stricter. They're taking away tolerances for mancozeb, so finding alternatives for that chemical has been a challenge, although there is one that Trimmer mentioned that was a good choice, which was one called Kasumin from UPL.
I’m hearing a lot about how the consumer is really driving demand in in Europe for that, more so than in the U.S., and that a lot of the marketing at the grocery chains is very overt. Trimmer told me he saw a billboard there at one of the grocery stores saying, “We've banned X number of pesticides.” That message is stronger than what you would see here, even like in a Whole Foods.
Jones: What's going on with biologicals in the greenhouse market now?
Janeen Wright: Biologicals have been around a while in our markets. Every year we get a lot more of our audience using them. I think we're well up over 60% when we do surveys. And with our markets, we have some recent developments that are really pushing that area forward a bit.
I think we're definitely past the efficacy issue and whether they work or not. It's been proven in our markets that biologicals work in a good IPM program. But there's still education needed. We hear questions about to how to use them effectively, how to rotate them with your chemicals, how to deal with other spray treatments that you're doing, things like that. I see a wide range in the knowledge about these products, and I think it directly correlates sometimes to how well or how much the growers are using them.
Jones: Dave, how about the the fruit side? What are you seeing?
David Eddy: Here in the U.S. there's a lot of use of mating disruption and that's going up just gangbusters in fruit. Companies like Suterra and Semios just seem to be really going great guns with mating disruption, but again this is among the big growers.
All this seems to me to break down to larger vs. smaller growers. Smaller growers are often unaware, or they say, “I need I really need to know about more about that.” That's by far the most common response. Among the larger growers, they know more about biologicals, especially the tree nut guys because in California, the writing is on the wall, quite frankly, with traditional pesticides. Removing chlorpyrifos was just the first one, in my opinion. There are a lot of anti-pesticide folks here. This, to me, is going to give biocontrols a huge boost in California among growers who previously resisted.
Miller: I agree on the education issue. Many growers have been tending their crops with traditional products for generations and biologicals do not work the same way when you’ve got a problem.
It’s turning things around. We are trying to prevent getting to the point where you need to apply an emergency application. It's just a different way of thinking when you're doing something new in a career that you've been doing your whole life, and for generations back. It is awkward. It's frustrating. But once you have it under your belt, we’re seeing that slow but steady adoption.
Sfiligoj: In our survey, we asked about what would help move the needle for ag retailers and the row crop growers in the marketplace. I think 56 or 57% said more education was important because again, a lot of the growers that the ag retailers are used to dealing with, if they if they spray a conventional herbicide at 8:00 in the morning, when they come back into the field at noon time, they want to physically see that the plant is starting to wilt or die.
Biological products are effective, but that effectiveness may be measured in days, not hours. And that is part of an education program that at the moment is missing and probably would help everyone in the market to be more accepting of these products going forward.
Jones: Dave mentioned mating disruption. What other success stories are you seeing out there?
Wright: In the greenhouse market, we have seen advances with predatory mites. It’s sometimes been harder to work with them because of they are so cannibalistic it's hard to provide them with the food source that they need to give them the time to get to the grower and be healthy. But there have been some advances there.
And then there's also a new predatory mite that was discovered at Vineland Research and Innovation Centre in Canada. It's not here in the U.S. yet, but hopefully it'll be coming soon. They describe it as a predator that when it goes to feed everybody runs because it's just so aggressive.
Eddy: Predatory mites are one thing fruit growers use, but I think it's because as Eric says, they want more immediate results. So, they'll fly over actually and just drop zillions these predatory mites that eat the spider mites that they want to get rid of. That is fairly widely used and has a bit of a success in fruit.
Miller: Something I'm watching, since cost was vegetable growers’ number-one concern in our survey… I've been hearing from a lot of different growers that grocery stores and warehouse groups have been asking growers about what they're doing to be more sustainable. And biological use is one of those things they can highlight. I'm wondering if some prices given to growers may increase as a result of this when you have a position that's more appealing to consumers. But we're also in this inflation mode right now. There's not a desire to increase food prices any more than they already are. It's a complex issue. I don't know exactly where it's going to land.
Eddy: Fruit growers complain a lot about the fact that retailers want increased sustainability, but they don't increase prices for it. So, they're afraid of going out on a limb to invest in a lot of new things they aren't familiar with. It’s a huge problem right now.
Pucci: I thought I'd add on to what Carol said about sustainability. I was talking with Sound Agriculture recently, and the chief executive, Adam Litle, said that one of the other bonuses with the rise of alternative products like biologicals is helping to diversify away from the focus on a small number of synthetics in high volume. So, whenever you get shocks to the system, you're better off with a more diversified strategy.
Jones: One last question for everybody. From your perspective, where do you see things going with biologicals in your market in the next three to five years?
Eddy: Definitely, there'll be more adoption. Smaller growers will get educated. But I have to say, I think that the loss of chemicals — and I think it’s going to really start in California — is coming. It will be longer than three to five years from now I would guess. But it's going to be building and a lot of people will be looking for alternatives.
I see biocontrol really building, because of that and also increased education. And some of this is up to the industry too. If they really want smaller growers to start buying in, they need to start thinking about ways to reach out to these smaller growers. Clearly, they're not hearing enough on this stuff from some of my surveys.
Wright: I definitely think adoption is just going to continue to increase in the greenhouse. We’re going to get better at applying them, figuring out the compatibility issues with synthetics, things like that. One thing I've already noticed starting in our markets, and I think this is going to continue in the next three to five years, is partnerships between some of the biocontrols suppliers with technology companies. We're seeing them working with robotics and artificial intelligence companies to do more data-driven advances in this area.
Pucci: One of the things that many have pointed out is that they don't see the future as either one or the other, biological or synthetic, that it's both. When you pair a well-performing synthetic with a biological, there will be benefit to your crop health and overall yields. So as consumer awareness drives adoption and regulatory shifts in favor of biologicals, it's continued growth in that segment, but it's not going to replace synthetics in the end.
One other person I was talking to, Chris Judd from Certis Biologicals, was saying that the near future will bring a level of uniqueness above what has been seen in the space historically. He told me that the depths of research in universities and startups all the way up to the big agrochemical companies are going to help the industry develop solutions in addition to bacillus in the next ten to 15 years.
Sfiligoj: In our 2022 CropLife survey on biologicals, we asked, “How does your company plan to sell or distribute biological products in the future? 68% of the respondents said they plan to increase the number of offerings in this sector for their grower customers. And another 18% said they would maintain the levels they're currently at. That's 86% of the respondents are saying that they're going to be offering the same number of products there today or increasing the number of offerings in this category. So yeah, I think the future looks very bright for ag retailers and the growers that they cater to.
Miller: One of my columnists, Richard Smith with the University of California wrote an article for American Vegetable Grower not too long ago about how when we go through times of stress, that’s when you start seeing some really innovative breakthroughs.
I think we're in that situation when it comes to biologicals. We have the stress of fewer chemicals being available. We're seeing rules getting more strict. And there's more consumer demand for being able to prove that their food is sustainable.
I think that's kind of a perfect storm for innovative ideas. I'm really looking forward to seeing what comes out of this.
