What is an Ag Biological?
It’s a term that’s thrown around a lot in agriculture, but its definition often varies depending on who you ask.
To me, a biological solution is any product that uses biology to produce its active ingredient or mode of action. But we also need to acknowledge that if this definition is the one we’re using, it’s a broad category. And what’s interesting, when we talk about biological products in a nutritional sense in livestock, we don’t actually call them biologicals. We call them feed additives. So this article pertains mostly to agronomic agriculture not necessarily animal agriculture. The same principles apply, but the jargon and terminology is different.
To me, Ag biologicals fall into these functional groups:
🦠 Microbial solutions: Products made from live microbes or their derivatives (like metabolites or specific compounds they produce). This can include an engineered microorganism that produces a desired metabolite like a protein, enzyme, or inhibitor. That then makes the protein, enzyme, or inhibitor a biological product as well.
🪴 Plant-based solutions: This could include plant essential oils, proteins, or whole plant like cover crops.
🐞 Live organisms: Sometimes, biological solutions involve deploying entire organisms—like predatory insects for pest control like using ladybugs to control aphid infestations.
🐄 Animal-based solutions: These are things like manure fertilizers.
There is obviously some overlap with products and products that don’t really fit any. For example, live microbes can fit in the live organism category as well as microbial solutions. And then there are things like compost and compost tea that usually contain plant and animal-based products as well as a consortium of bacteria and bacterial metabolites.
What I'm NOT saying is that bio-based products are inherently 'good' and chemistry products are 'bad.'
The differences in these products are just that, differences. And I think to create a resilient agricultural ecosystems, we need both. And for the past 100 years, we've heavily relied on chemistry based products.
Let's use an example to deep dive into the nuance of this definition.
There is a very famous manufacturing process called the Haber-Bosch process. This chemical reaction creates ammonia which is a critical step in creating nitrogen fertilizer.
➡️ It's a chemistry based process: N2 (nitrogen gas) + 3H2 (hydrogen gas) → 2NH3 (ammonia)
➡️ Catalyst: Primarily iron, with potential for other metals to improve efficiency
➡️ Conditions: High pressure (around 200 atmospheres) and moderately high temperature (400-500°C)
It's takes an incredible amount of energy to produce this product, and we've been heavily reliant on this process since 1913.
Now we can create the same molecule using a biologically-based pathway using nitrogen fixation. Microorganisms can take atmospheric nitrogen and hydrogen and convert it to ammonia by using an enzyme called a nitrogenase.
This is an example of the same end product (ammonia) but produced using chemistry versus biology.
Now I know I'm going to get some folks saying, hey those organisms are using chemistry to product the ammonia within their cells. And technically they are right. Which makes all of this so complex.
But how cool would it be to inoculate soil with a nitrogen fixing bacteria that constantly releases nitrogen to the plant compared to pouring on an ammonia-based liquid or granule? To me, biology is pretty cool.
Product Categories in the Market
In this section I’m going to briefly cover the types of products on the market. We are going to focus on plant agriculture NOT animal agriculture. This is because the terminology is influenced by product registration pathways and since plant and animal Ag products are registered differently, they’ve adopted different ways of talking about their product categories.
Bio-yield, Biostimulant, Biofertilizers
This product category is anything applied in the soil, seed, or foliar that aims to increase the yield of the crop. Now the mode of action (how the product does its thing) can be vastly different among this group. There are tons of ways to influence yield. And even yield can be different depending on the crop. For example, corn is bushels per acre but tomatoes can be either number of tomatoes or the average weight of a tomato.
And even within this category, things get a bit complicated. Bioyield product enhances yield in general. A biostimulant affects a physiological process. Plant growth promotion regulators (PGPR or PGR) is a term used to articulate the kind of biostimulant. These are things like plant hormones, microbial signal molecules, or any other small molecule like a peptide that ‘talks’ to the plant and ‘convinces’ it to do a thing.
Biostimulants can also refer to products aimed to reduce abiotic stress which indirectly contribute to increases in yield or quality.
Soil Amendments
This is an interesting category because it is directly related to product registration. A soil amendment is anything applied via the soil that is designed to do something to enhance the soil. These can be bioyield or biofertilizers because they affect the soil in away that it releases bound nutrients. We see this in phosphate solubilizers added to fields that have high bound phosphate. This category can also control organic acids, water retention products, or other things aimed at making the soil a better medium for growing crops.
Bio-control, Biopesticides, Bioherbicides
These are bio-based products aimed at some kind of control: herbicide, fungicide, pesticide, nematicide, etc. The most famous biocontrol agent is BT - Bacillus thuringiensis. But there are plenty of other examples of bio-based pest control. Another thing that makes this category different is that all these products are regulated at the Federal level. FDA, USDA, and EPA all have a hand in these types of products.
To sum it up, be mindful of your audience.
The terminology really depends on your audience. It’s muddy because regulatory uses one set of terms while producers use a different set. One describes more of the how it does the thing where as the other way describes its utility. I think this occurred because some states didn’t want to add a different category to their registration process. The same thing happened with the Federal government for biocontrol.
And this article isn’t designed to cover product registration categories. This article is designed to shed light on the ways people talk about products and why there are so many different ways of talking about biological products.
