Ask APH: Episode 3

So the main obstacles for the biostimulants industry really reside around the ability to support it from a legislative perspective; particularly our registration framework and process. This is this is a real challenge for the industry as a whole because there’s an extra level of complexity that goes with the mode of action of some of these technologies and regulators have been very slow to implement clear directives to help the industry and those that have been developed tend to be awkward in their execution.

As an industry, we’ve evolved methodologies around specific kind of criteria for chemistries that are predictable. We look at measuring the percentage rates of kill of a weed, pest, or disease from a from a class of chemistry that we know and we understand. We’re now asking a very different question. It’s more of ‘How much stress mitigation is relevant?’ ‘How much soil health effect is enough?’ ‘What are the phenotypic responses in a crop that we need to measure to prove these value propositions?’’ and, you know, ‘How do we measure them?’  These are not typical frameworks that we’ve worked with in the past from a regulatory perspective.