We’re excited to introduce our brand new audio series. In each episode, you’ll hear insights from the Acadian Plant Health team on matters relevant to the agricultural industry.
In this first episode, we asked our SVP of Portfolio Development James Maude “How would you describe the current state of the biostimulant market?”
Listen to his thoughts on this below.
[Speaker: James Maude]
So the state of the biostimulant market at the moment is one of transition. Biostimulants traditionally have been a nice to have compliment to a crop protection portfolio or fertilizer portfolio. It’s now moving to an essential component of sustainable agriculture. Biostimulants now are featuring more as a core technology than a nice to have. This transition is happening right now putting the market in pretty much a hyper growth situation.
The optimization of biostimulant technologies, particularly those that support sustainable ag – i.e. those that are green or regenerative – and provide solutions to big ticket items like climate change and soil health. These are the technologies that will continue to drive rapid growth as the industry, well the agricultural industry, looks to its future needs. So we’re really looking at a technology that has been under invested and looked past because other technologies have been available. Synthetic chemistries have been have done the job very well, but now are in decline due to environmental or human health concerns and regulators are starting to remove those tools from our toolbox. Genetic traits are kind of well invested but slow I think to come to solve bigger issues and bio control is well advanced, so kind of hitting a mature stage.
Biostimulants are not. Biostimulants are very much unoptimized, which means they have a lot of potential to provide solutions for some key issues in agriculture today. So the market is moving and it’s moving pretty quick.