November 27, 2013
Source: Agricen
By Brian Cornelious, PhD, Director of Applied Sciences (@BrianNPK), Agricen
I was recently invited to speak about biostimulants at the annual meeting of the Mulch and Soil Council. This group brings many facets and companies involved in the supply chain, manufacturing, packaging, and distribution of mulch and soil products together to review issues and regulations in their industry. Their interest in biostimulants was focused on ways to use them to enhance their existing products. In this post, I will share some of the highlights from my presentation, providing a brief overview of biostimulants that is relevant to all of these markets.
The biostimulant industry today is improving agricultural sustainability and soil health while generating significant new economic growth. This growth is being driven by the need to produce more food for a growing world population, and to do so more sustainably in response to demands from consumers, advocacy groups, and regulators.
In response to the call for sustainable, biologically derived products for agriculture and horticulture, Agricen and other members of the Biostimulant Coalition are working to develop an industry definition of biostimulants in the US (Figure 1), similar to work that has been done by the European Biostimulants Industry Consortium (EBIC) in the UK.
Figure 1.
We are also working to create standards for these products (e.g., bacterial or microbial inoculants, biochemical materials, amino acids, humic acid, fulvic acid, seaweed extracts), which can broadly be divided into two categories: microbial and non-microbial (Table 1).
Table 1. Categorizing Biostimulants
As groups across the spectrum, including the Biostimulant Coalition, work diligently to address the urgent issues confronting agriculture around the globe, we at Agricen are looking forward to participating in and meaningfully contributing to the search for new innovations and solutions.
Species
