If a grower were to pull together the claims from the biological products on the market today and add them up, using all of them should allow the grower to produce 650 bushels of dryland corn or 200 bushels of dryland wheat per acre. Obviously, that’s not reality – but what will it take to reduce the noise and make the signal stronger for expanded adoptions of biological products?
As new products have been introduced and regulatory pressure on conventional pesticides has increased, agronomists and growers have turned more interest toward biological products as additions or replacements in their systems. Developers of these products are looking for ways to successfully introduce their solutions and expand their adoption. Growers are looking for better and more cost-efficient solutions, but do not have time to evaluate every available product. Retailers can fill an important role in screening and testing products on behalf of growers, but they have limits on how many they can handle at one time.
But there is one thing that both growers and retailers are looking for, and if developers are able to provide it, their adoption journey will be much more successful. That one thing is reliable, trusted data produced in local conditions that demonstrates return on investment (ROI). Variability in climate, soil type, disease and weed pressure, elevation, and many other factors means that data produced in central Illinois plots is irrelevant for a producer or retailer in Nebraska, or even one in southern Illinois.
This challenge is not limited to growers and retailers in the United States either. I recently led a project for the Global BioAg Alliance, that brought together ag retail representatives from North America, South America, and Africa to identify the barriers to increased biological product adoption from a retailer’s perspective. The group listed barriers that exist in their home markets, and then we ranked them in importance as a group. At the top of the list was a lack of reliable data generated under local conditions to allow agronomists to make confident recommendations.
In fact, the top four barriers to expanded adoption are all related to quality data and marketing information:
- There is not enough reliable data generated under local conditions for retail agronomists to confidently recommend biological products.
- Biological products on the market today are not meeting the most important needs of our farmers.
- Retailers lack sales and educational literature and support from product developers to help them promote the products.
- Farmers are resistant to using biological products because of cultural objections or lack of proven ROI.
What is striking about this list is that none of these barriers are insurmountable — they are largely informational and relational in nature. They do not point to a failure of the science. They point to an inadequate go-to-market strategy.
Marketing literature must be truthful, set reasonable expectations, and be supported by the data. Overclaiming is not just a credibility problem for one product — it erodes trust in the entire biological product category, making the retail agronomist’s job harder with every exaggerated claim that hits a grower’s inbox.
The biological products that are gaining traction in the market share a common thread: their developers invested early and consistently in localized, replicated trial data. They partnered with retailers, university extension programs, and trusted agronomists to run trials in the geographies where they intended to sell. They came to the conversation with plot books and side-by-side comparisons over multiple growing seasons. That approach earns a place on the recommended list.
Translating the performance into dollars is essential to get to the desired endpoint of demonstrating return on investment. The most convincing argument to a grower will be to show a positive return from a dollar invested in a new product under a variety of conditions in their local area.
For developers who have not yet made this investment, the path forward is clear. Build a structured trial program that mirrors the geographic and agronomic diversity of your target markets. Engage local retail partners not just as distribution channels, but as collaborators in the data generation process. A retailer who helped design a trial, watched it in-season, and saw the results firsthand is your most credible and motivated advocate. That relationship cannot be replicated by a national sales team armed with university data from a different climate zone.
The biological products sector is at an inflection point. The market interest is real, the regulatory tailwinds are real, and grower openness to new solutions is genuinely growing. But that window will not stay open indefinitely. Developers who invest now in the local data infrastructure that retailers and growers are asking for will earn durable market positions. Those who continue to rely on generalized efficacy claims will find themselves screened out — not because their products don’t work, but because they couldn’t prove it where it matters most: in the field.
