What’s New with Bioherbicides

Can We Bring More Microbes to Market?

Bioherbicide is expected to boom between now and 2030. Increasing by 15% over the next four years, the global market could value close to $8 billion. Policy supporting integrated pest management strategies coupled with artificial intelligence and precision technology has worked to grow our knowledge of naturally occurring weed suppressants very quickly.  But, all that we have learned has not yet made it economically feasible for farmers to invest in alternative pest control without assistance.

Chemical Resistant Weeds

Chemical options still make up the largest percentage of herbicide usage in the world. The United States alone uses 1 billion pounds of chemical weed killers on farms and lawns, spending roughly $6.6 billion annually to combat plant pests while total global spending on bioherbicides just pushes over $3 billion. Scale of production makes chemicals both the most readily available and low priced option on the shelf. However, glyphosate in particular has decreased in value since 1996 when it first became evident that weeds were developing a resistance to the herbicide. To date, at least 500 weed varieties are known to be resistant to chemical herbicides.

Today the cost to value ratio of chemical herbicides considers soil and water health just as much as it does weed eradication and crop yield.  For farmers constantly weighing the cost of pest management strategies against their predictable effectiveness, increasingly resistant weed varieties present a problem. The problem is compounded if those very same chemicals are jeopardizing soil and water health. Bioherbicides hope to fill the gaps left by chemical options that are not perceived to hold the same value they once did.

Are Bioherbicides a Viable Option?

Whether they can fill the gap or not remains to be seen. The idea of bioherbicides is well accepted. Farmers are happy to replace chemicals with living organisms that can perform the same task; if they can afford to do so and can see measurable results on the ground. But, bioherbicides are a fundamentally different approach to pest management than chemicals and therefore have very different production methods. Those methods are, for now, expensive.

Because bioherbicides rely on living organisms, typically at the microbial level, the right microbes must be identified, isolated, mined and kept alive while further formulated into something that can be applied to weeds or soil structures as a liquid, oil, surfactant or additive.  If the living organisms die or they undergo extensive processing, the final herbicide can be closer to chemical than biological.  Scientists walk a fine line during development and the extensive process is reflected in the price tag. Farmers spend $5-$15 per acre for chemicals but can pay anywhere from $15 to $100 per acre for bioherbicides.

The targeted approach of bioherbicides means that a specific gene in a single variety of weed can be manipulated before the plant even emerges through the soil without harming the development of a commodity crop.  In theory, a single application could prevent the growth of one weed and then later in the growing season produce a deadly pathogen in an already emerged weed.  Unlike chemicals, the ultimate goal is a farm specific formulation that can be used one time to fight multiple pests throughout a full cycle of commodity production, or longer, if microbes remain alive and active in the soil.  

Someday, with the help of artificial intelligence that can identify and isolate microbes faster, test and formulate farm specific recipes quickly and leverage precision technology to apply it efficiently, farmers could pay far less for pest management.  And if living organisms stay central to the process, farmers could also see increased yields, healthier soil and fewer water contamination issues from toxic chemical residue.

Bioherbicide Barriers

Production hasn’t yet reached a point of reliability for farmers. The bioherbicide industry faces well known challenges including regulatory standards, production complexity and competitive pricing. Despite the fact that the EU has policy in place to support integrated pest management strategies, they may also have strict quality standards for bioherbicides that will keep products expensive. This is a trend that varies across the globe with many nations working to reduce costs for farmers while others focus on quality and regulatory parameters.

The very methodology that could allow a farm to have its own pest management recipe, right now, is too complex to put a price on.  A bioherbicide formulation that works well in India might never be able to work in Brazil or Canada, whereas glyphosate has a proven track record on multiple continents. We could easily be talking about hundreds of thousands of targeted gene manipulation strategies each with its own price point, not to mention the precision technology investment needed to apply that unique microbial formulation to a specific commodity crop.

Biologicals of all types will always battle shelf life. How do we effectively transport living organisms to be used as pest control or fertilizer?  Artificial intelligence may help us learn how to do it, but even once we develop the way, entire supply chains will need to be built around the process. Until then, farmers may opt to risk weed resistance for the sake of predictable yields until the path to bioherbicides becomes reliably streamlined and therefore the most cost effective option.