In recent years, the term “biological” has arguably become one of the loudest buzzwords in agriculture. Retail shelves are crowded with new jugs of products promising revolutionary results, but some agronomic experts suggest that starting the conversation with the product is exactly where many farmers go wrong.
Instead of asking which biological to buy, farmers need to shift toward a more fundamental question: “What problem am I trying to solve?”
This solution-first mindset is the cornerstone of the strategy at Loveland Products, Nutrien’s in-house brand for high-performance crop inputs. According to Jake Walker, director of marketing for Loveland Products, the category of the input matters far less than its ability to address a specific field challenge.
“Farmers need solutions, and I don’t care if the answer is a biological product or not,” Walker says.
Start With The Goal, Not The Jug
Rather than chasing the latest trend, Walker encourages agronomic advisers and farmers to work backward from growers’ specific production hurdles. Before a single product is recommended, several key questions must be answered, including:
- Is the primary issue nitrogen loss?
- Is poor soil structure or compaction limiting crop growth?
- Is an imbalanced pH shutting down nutrient availability?
- Is the goal to stretch fertilizer dollars or push for top-end yield?
- Is there published field data supporting product claims?
“Not every product has to fit on every acre,” Walker tells farmers. “We’re not trying to say, ‘This product is a fit for you’ just because it’s new or biological. We want to understand what you’re trying to accomplish first.”
In a 2026 survey by CropLife, 98% of ag retailer respondents said their grower-customers typically use biologicals alongside conventional products rather than as replacements.
A Longer History Than You Realize
While biologicals might seem like a new frontier to some farmers and agronomists, Walker points out that for companies like Nutrien, some of the biological technology is well-established. They have been in the biostimulant business for more than 20 years — long before the term became a marketing staple.
“It’s nothing new to us,” he says. “We just didn’t categorically speak to them as biologicals. We just said, ‘These are solutions for you.’ It wasn’t a buzzword.”
Many biologicals have been used on farms for years, Walker contends. The difference now is the level of scrutiny applied to new offerings. The focus isn’t on whether a product can be labeled as a biological, but whether its performance can be defended with rigorous data.
A 2026 study of 604 U.S. farmers who grow corn, soybeans and wheat, conducted by Stratovation Group, a Columbus, Ohio–based agricultural market research firm, found that 50% of them had used a biological.
The Importance Of Vetting
The biological space hasn’t always had a sterling reputation. Walker is candid about the “snake oil” era of years past, where products were often sold with bold claims but little payoff.
“Somebody would come into the market and say, ‘I’ve got a biological that is going to give you 8 bushels an acre,’” Walker recalls.
Frequently, the product didn’t deliver. Frequent reasons for that: the live bacteria products were mixed with incompatible salt fertilizers or applied in harsh conditions, leading to zero results and frustrated farmers.
Proven performance is still the biggest hurdle, according to the 2026 Stratovation research. It identified cost and disappointing performance relative to expectations as leading reasons some farmers discontinue biological products.
To combat this, Nutrien has implemented a disciplined testing and vetting process. Before a product reaches an agronomic adviser’s toolkit, it undergoes:
- Testing across hundreds of observation points in diverse environments.
- Rigorous analysis to determine where it fails as much as where it succeeds.
- The development of realistic probability rates rather than “guaranteed” wins.
“With biologicals, to say we’re going to get a 100% win rate every time is just not accurate, and I don’t think anybody can say that,” Walker says.
Diagnosis Before Prescription
For farmers interested in exploring biologicals, the first step isn’t making a call to their retailer — it’s a trip to the field with a soil probe, according to Lizzie French, manager of soil biology at Waypoint.
French notes that many seemingly “biological” problems are actually foundational chemistry problems. In the Midwest, she frequently sees pH issues and nitrogen loss (via leaching or denitrification) as the primary culprits behind poor performance.
“Before you try to do anything on that field with biologicals or anything else, you’ve often got to fix pH,” French says. “That’s often an easy, baseline place to start.”
Matching Tools to the Challenge
Once the nutrients basics of things like pH, N, P, and K are understood, biological tools can be layered in as part of a broader management strategy, French contends, particularly regarding nitrogen efficiency.
By using soil biology tests to determine existing microbe populations and nitrogen-cycling potential, advisers can then determine if a biological fix — or a traditional chemistry — is the right move.
“If you say, ‘I need to protect my nitrogen,’ we have multiple tools to do that,” Walker says. “Some are biological, while some are chemistries that influence the biology in the soil.”
Walker’s ultimate goal is to move past the biological label. Whether an agronomic solution is synthetic or biological, he says its value must be measured by one thing: its ability to solve the farmer’s problem.
