Bringing Biological Plant Health Products to Market
By Dan Jacobs, Senior Editor, CropLife
Bringing biological crop 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.
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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.”
Developing Partnerships
In late 2022, HELM AG partnered with a European company to bring a new product to market that complemented its own product focus.
Unium Bioscience Ltd, based in the United Kingdom had products that were “commercialized and able to go to market,” Eyrich says. “They were being messaged in a little bit different way. It really took us about two years to redirect the efforts and how we were going to bring them to market and what we're going to center on based on what the strength of the products and the understanding what they could accomplish if they were applied at the right time.”
Unium’s products focus on nitrate conversion. “[A common issue in] crop production — whether it’s fruit and vegetables or corn or wheat — a lot of the time is a plant’s inability to assimilate the nitrate into amino acids and proteins,” Eyrich says.
“Our investment [has been] in genomic research on metabolites, so we understand what they are [and how they affect] a plant’s ability to take its nitrates and change them into amino acids and proteins. What we found [with the nitrate conversion products] made absolute sense. When we first saw that we said, ‘Well, this is probably the way we would like to go anyway.’”
Mosaic Co., known for its concentrated phosphate and potash, uses multiple mechanisms to deliver innovative solutions.
“We have a variety of different ways that we develop and bring new things to the market,” says Ross Bender, Director of Product Development, Mosaic.
According to Bender, the time and cost to take a product from conception to the market varies greatly based on the complexity of the product. On the low end of the range, it could call for a few hundred thousand dollars and less than a year (i.e., reformulation of a product). For a product that is “truly groundbreaking that the industry has never done before, [it] could be as long as five to seven years, and it can be millions of dollars — in some cases tens of millions.
“There are a lot of great startups that have phenomenal ideas, but they need help getting the product to the market, or they've developed proof of concept, but they're not quite sure how to get it into the market in a way that a farmer would use,” Bender says. “Because of the relationships that we have with farmers, the relationship with retailers, the extensive market access that we have we can help bring new technologies to the market.”
“We target attributes based on real grower challenges and agronomic data. We look for stresses where induced systemic resistance or enhanced root development has the greatest payoff — often foliar diseases like blight or abiotic stresses such as drought. Economic impact analysis, such as dollars lost per acre to a given disease and technical feasibility, such as efficacy, guide our decisions.” - Trey Cutts, Tidal Grow AgriScience
Finding the Need, Delivering the ROI
“Our initial expansion efforts targeted regions and crops experiencing similar abiotic stress challenges as those in our core markets in the Western U.S.,” Cultiva’s Hernandez says. “This approach has helped us successfully enter key markets in South America, Europe, and Oceania. More recently, we’ve broadened our focus to include crops like tropical fruits in Latin America, where our technology can deliver strong agronomic value. Our market selection is always guided by crop relevance and the potential impact of our cuticle health solutions.”
The time and costs of bringing herbicides to market are well established — running into the hundreds of millions of dollars and taking a decade or more. While plant health products might not reach those lofty levels, the process requires careful scrutiny.
“Return on investment (ROI) in our space is measured both quantitatively and strategically over time,” Cultiva’s Hernandez says. “From a grower perspective, we look at increases in marketable yield and improvements in fruit quality that can be directly tied to our product’s performance. Those metrics drive adoption and repeat use, which are critical indicators of success.
“Return on investment in our space is measured both quantitatively and strategically over time. From a grower perspective, we look at increases in marketable yield and improvements in fruit quality that can be directly tied to our product’s performance. Those metrics drive adoption and repeat use, which are critical indicators of success." - Luis Hernandez, Cultiva
“Internally, ROI is also measured by how effectively we generate and leverage data to support the product’s value proposition — through trials, grower demonstrations, and knowledge transfer.” Hernandez continues. “Because our products often require multiple seasons of evaluation, especially in permanent crops, we take a long-term view. Strong ROI isn’t just about immediate sales; it's about building trust, establishing credibility with advisors and distributors, and laying the groundwork for sustainable market penetration and growth across regions and crop categories.”
New Technology
“Plant cuticle health is an emerging frontier in crop production, and we believe it's one of the most misunderstood levers for improving plant resilience and fruit quality,” Hernandez says. “As climate variability continues to challenge traditional growing practices, solutions that enhance a plant’s natural protective barrier are becoming increasingly relevant. At Cultiva, we’re not just introducing new products — we’re helping to shape a new category in agriculture. Our commitment is to bring scientifically grounded, field-proven innovations that deliver real value to growers, advisors, and the entire value chain.”
Helm’s Eyrich says the company employs RNA sequencing to learn what proteins can be made and how they “enrich” the various pathways in various crops. That level of deep genomic investigation can be costly, but it gives the company a deeper understanding of its library of metabolites.
“The nice thing about having the genomics work is that you can target your field data very, very precisely,” Eyrich says, “which really shortens up the time from idea to launch or to commercialization. I know what pathways our metabolites and our amino acids affect in the plant. We know what each individual does genomically, so we can mix and match,” he says.
“The nice thing about having the genomics work is that you can target your field data very, very precisely, which really shortens up the time from idea to launch or to commercialization." - Tim Eyrich, HELM AG
Knowing what biological products are doing is half the battle. It starts with knowing what they need.
Like many who work at companies offering solutions, Mosaic’s Bender is also a farmer. “If I can't use the technology [we offer] on my own farm, then I have to ask myself, are we doing the right thing by advancing the technology? So, our goal is to create value and to help farmers.”
In addition to developing products internally, many companies license or work with other companies that might not have Mosaic’s reach.
“There are many technologies that we are excited about internally,” Bender continues. “Depending on the complexity, some may take us a little time to develop. But we also explore partnerships with start-ups that give us optionality on getting great solutions to the market faster.”
Product Focus
As solutions become more targeted, providers must decide where to direct their time and money.
“We target attributes based on real grower challenges and agronomic data,” says Trey Cutts, Vice President of Commercial Agriculture Science at Tidal Grow AgriScience. “The modes of action in our chitosan-based formulations serve as a broad-spectrum elicitor of plant defenses and growth responses as well as direct control. So, we look for stresses where induced systemic resistance or enhanced root development has the greatest payoff — often foliar diseases like blight or abiotic stresses such as drought. Economic impact analysis, such as dollars lost per acre to a given disease and technical feasibility, such as efficacy, guide our decisions.”
Every product Tidal Grow develops must survive a series of touch points “including bench assays and greenhouse efficacy, as well as small plot field trials, to learn how a potential solution can support strategic crops with disease suppression and yield performance,” Cutts says. “At each gate, we assess statistical significance versus controls, formulation stability, safety/toxicity profiles, and projected cost of goods. We have minimum requirements our potential solutions must deliver including yield benefit or consistent disease reduction under certain field conditions to continue bringing the product to development.”
Once the product is developed, the end-stage involves education.
“We first engage with key retail agronomists and crop advisers — those who recommend inputs to growers — through technical workshops demonstrating how our product works,” Cutts says. “We then support pilot growers with trial kits and agronomic guidance, collecting localized efficacy data. Digital assets such as videos and interactive ROI calculators help communicate performance to broader grower audiences, while co-marketing with compatible nutrition and protection products ensures seamless integration into existing spray programs.”
