Biologicals Have Enormous Potential. But We Need to Get the Delivery Right.
At this year’s Salinas Biological Summit, marking Western Growers’ 100th anniversary, one question stayed with me longer than any other.
Are we focusing enough on how these products are actually delivered in the field?
Biological crop protection is advancing fast, backed by real investment and real science. But developing a great product is only part of the challenge.
Once it leaves the laboratory and goes into a spray tank, droplet size, coverage, deposition, canopy penetration, drift, weather conditions and carrier volume all come into play.
Ultimately, the product still has to reach its intended target.
And that is why I believe delivery needs to become a bigger part of the biological conversation.
The delivery layer
At MagrowTec, we don’t manufacture biologicals. Our expertise is in spray application.
Our technology conditions the spray before it reaches the nozzle, helping improve how the applied product reaches the intended target. It fits the sprayer a grower already owns and works with existing tank mixes, including biological products.
I don’t see this as competing with biological innovation. I see MagrowTec as a potential delivery layer for biologicals.
Biological companies should concentrate on developing the best products possible. Our role is to help give those products the best possible opportunity to perform in the field.
We have already started exploring this through our work with Contact BioSolutions and FireHawk® Bioherbicide.
In a formal, comprehensive field trial run with Contact BioSolutions, FireHawk applied through MagrowTec delivered fast burndown at the lowest carrier volume tested, with effects visible within a single day. It reinforced a simple but important point: for contact biologicals, coverage matters.
But this is bigger than one product or one study. It demonstrates the opportunity that exists when biological innovation and application technology are considered together.
It also has to work for the grower
New solutions cannot ask growers to sacrifice productivity or profitability in the name of sustainability. That means the delivered cost per acre of a biological program needs to hold up against its conventional equivalent, not just on paper, but in the tank. Fewer gallons per acre and fewer passes across the field change that math directly.
Florida grower Jake Rothert’s experience is a good example, and one he speaks to directly in a video interview with MagrowTec. Working in an environment where softer chemistries and biological approaches are increasingly important, Jake has seen improvements in coverage and canopy penetration with MagrowTec while reducing carrier volume and covering more acres per tank.
His experience reinforces something I’ve believed for a long time: application technology shouldn’t be considered separately from the product being applied.
Chemistry gets its own conversation. So do biologicals, sprayers, nozzles and precision agriculture. We treat them as separate technologies.
But the crop doesn’t experience them individually. It experiences the outcome of the whole application system.
As biological crop protection develops, I believe that systems approach will become increasingly important.
If a company has spent years developing an innovative biological product, shouldn’t we also be asking how we can optimise its journey from the tank to the target?
Could better coverage improve consistency?
Could improved deposition help a contact biological perform more effectively?
Could we reduce off-target losses?
Could better delivery ultimately help growers get more value from biological products?
These are questions worth answering.
Let’s prove it together
One of the messages I shared at Salinas was simple:
Let’s prove it together.
MagrowTec understands application technology. Biological companies understand formulation and biological science. Researchers bring independent scientific rigour. And growers bring the reality of commercial farming.
Bringing those capabilities together gives us an opportunity to understand how biological crop protection can perform at its best under real-world conditions.
I believe biologicals have enormous potential. But if we want that potential to translate from the laboratory into millions of acres around the world, we need to think not only about what we put in the tank, but how we deliver it to the target.
At MagrowTec, that’s the part of the challenge we want to help solve.
Our job isn’t inventing the next biological. It’s making sure the one already in the tank gets where it’s supposed to go.
Click here to watch Gary’s pitch at the 2026 Salinas Bio Summit
