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May 1, 2023 by Shane Thomas, Upstream Ag Insights Crop-agnostic, nitrogen-fixing biological products have huge potential in agriculture. Crops like corn or wheat fixing even a portion of their Nitrogen needs can increase yields and quality, decrease deleterious environmental impacts and streamline logistical costs and time across a farm operation by minimizing application needs. The agribusiness and venture capital world knows the potential. The maker of nitrogen-fixing product ProveN 40, Pivot Bio has raised over $617 million to date. Sound Agriculture, the maker of Source, has raised over $170 million. Kula Bio (an organization that is pre-commercial), has raised over $74 million. Corteva Agriscience purchased biological company Symborg in 2022 ( for an undisclosed amount), a company whose most prominent product has the active ingredient Methylobacterium symbioticum, a nitrogen-fixing bacteria. Developing a crop-agnostic, nitrogen-fixing product is incredibly challenging though. As early as 1917, scientists attempted to cultivate the rhizobia from legumes and inoculate these into other crop species. To date, however, none of these attempts to transfer the complex root nodule to non-legume plants has succeeded. However, the identification of N-fixing organisms that are less efficient at nitrogen fixation than traditional legume rhizobia have been discovered and commercialized. These products were tested by several USA extension groups over the last few years and the results are linked above. In March I highlighted the Tracking Biostimulants Farmer Survey from Stratus Ag Research where one of the insights from the survey was the following: N-Fixing Biologicals have the fewest satisfied users and the most dissatisfied users. I stated the reasons for this being the expectations-to-performance gap, it could also be a lack of systems agronomy, or it could simply be poor performance in totality. This past week an NDSU summation of trial work was published that tested the performance of products like Envita (from Azotic), Utrisha (from Corteva Agrisciences), ProveN, and ProveN40 (Pivot Bio), and MicroAZST (from TerraMax) throughout the North Central USA, including in North Dakota, Illinois, Minnesota, Kansas, Missouri, and others. The results were abysmal: Sixty-one site years of N rate trials with and without the use of biological N fixing products were conducted in corn, spring wheat, sugar beet and canola in 10 states within the North Central Region of the U.S. Of the 61 site-years, 59 site-years had no yield increase with use of the product over N rate alone. Two site-years in corn had yield increases due to product use over the N rates alone. Given the low rate of positive benefits to the use of these products, growers should be skeptical of products that claim to provide asymbiotic/nonsymbiotic N-fixation for the purpose of allowing a farmer to decrease fertilizer N rate. That's an increased yield rate of 3%. And it is not clear if those two were economical increases either. To read the entire report click here. Tweet |
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