Further regulating plant nutrition products puts even more market control in the hands of large agricorporations
Take a step back and look at the average daily life of an American. You are surrounded by regulations. Depending on your profession and location, you may face more or less, of course, but regulation is all around us — driver’s licenses, insurance requirements and permits and regulations on what we can sell from our home and how items must be made, stored, shipped, etc.
Is regenerative agriculture the next thing to begin facing mountains of regulatory obstacles? Unfortunately, the short answer is yes, and it’s already happening.
The question at hand is whether nutritional products should be officially registered with the government — be that federal or state — as pesticides. Some companies are already doing this. There are many worthwhile questions to ask about this, though. Should we as an industry support this? Can regulation make nutritional products more effective for the farmer and better for the environment? Or should we take a more general approach and simply become better educated on the different microbial species, nutrients, and forms of nutrients, to know what is best for the plant and soil?
Research shows that nutrients can prevent and even cure different disease and insect infestations. Regenerative agriculture purists preach that pesticides are not needed for a healthy and productive crop. The question thus becomes, are the supplemental plant nutrients farmers apply vital nutrients, pesticides, or both?
Low-Cost Solutions Need Not Apply
I recently attended a seminar on agricultural chemicals that was hosted by an organization in Texas, in order to receive my required annual continuing education units (CEUs). The meeting focused on information and new advancements in conventional agriculture. As an agronomist who has always tried to place the grower’s needs first, I was very alarmed, yet not shocked, at both some of the things that were said at this meeting and the (lack of) reaction from the crowd at those statements. For example, while giving a presentation on the time and expense required to register a new pesticide, the presenter — a long-time researcher for a major chemical company — said (out loud!) that many products in development are shelved because they do not meet the return on investment needed by the company. He went on to say that many of those products could “revolutionize” agriculture.
What was alarming to me was that not one agronomist or farmer in the room even flinched. Have we — an industry that is supposed to help farmers — become immune to, and even grown to expect, that farm input companies will value their profits over helping the farmer? I know I chose agronomy as a profession because I wanted to help farmers succeed.
Speaking strictly financially, though, the presenter wasn’t wrong. It takes many millions of dollars and years of research to develop a new product, register it and place it on the market. Registration channels are onerous, expensive and time-consuming. These simple facts put a very high limit on the size of company that can be at the table to supply products to farmers. Even basic fertilizer formulations require large amounts of investment dollars to prove the product works as intended, does not harm the plant, and is user friendly.
Do we really want to further cede control to a select few agrochemical manufacturers, who currently approach regenerative agriculture merely as something that can be added onto conventional agriculture — not something that, if properly implemented, would completely change our agronomic system? Requiring nutritional products to undergo more stringent regulatory requirements would do just that — it would put even more market influence into the hands of those large corporations.
A Crossroads
We are at a crossroads in agriculture. Every day it feels like we have more division within our industry. Conventional vs. organic vs. regenerative, no-till vs. conventional till vs. strip-till — the list of disagreements goes on and on. Even more disappointing is when I see growers, including leaders in regenerative agriculture, laughing at or putting down their peers for not following the methods they feel are appropriate. One thing I have learned as a large-territory agronomist is that there is no one-size-fits-all approach; we must take many factors into account for the farmer to realize success. We have enough external obstacles to overcome — we do not need to create our own drama.
How nutritional products are perceived, used and regulated is entering the crosshairs. Scientific discoveries are forcing us to change many things we agronomists thought we knew about how plants even work. I was taught, for example, about the importance of nutrient solubility for nutrient uptake, and that EDTA chelation was hands down the best foliar formulation. In the past few years, though, we’ve learned about how plants receive nutrients from microbes via the rhizophagy cycle, about the benefits of fulvic acid chelation, and about a host of other mechanisms and methods that us old timers were never taught. Our greater understanding of, and appreciation for, soil biology has made fertility programs much more complex. We no longer live in the world of basic math calculations to determine a fertility program — we have “discovered” that plant nutrient levels and interactions can have just as much of an impact on plant health as a pesticide application.
But if precision biological and nutrient applications are able to better feed and protect our crops than conventional fertilizers and pesticides — and if these alternative solutions are also lower cost — what will the agrichemical companies do? In other words, what happens when the farmer no longer needs the agrichemical company?
It seems that part of the answer is that those companies will push to label nutritional and biological products as pesticides. It’s happening at a limited level right now, but I worry about the future. What will it mean for grassroots regenerative and organic companies that desire to help growers optimize plant nutrition and disease resistance without breaking the bank — and without becoming reliant on external inputs?
The other issue is that conventional agronomists do not have the training or knowledge, in most cases, to recommend a program not ridden in pesticides. That is not their fault — this was me just a few years ago. We are all a product of what we are taught and experienced. I’ve worn the conventional hat, but after recommending multiple pesticide sprays every week on vegetable fields, I knew I had to find a way to change. Training and working in regenerative agriculture has been refreshing to my career, and I finally believe I am helping farmers succeed every day. This type of agriculture is as much an art as it is a science.
A Slippery Slope
As with many different industries, some government intervention is inevitable and is mostly benign. But increasing regulations on how plant nutritional products must be categorized is a slippery slope. It is a move that will shift influence away from small regenerative input companies trying to do the right thing for growers toward larger agricorporations that are only incentivized to bring their most expensive products to market in order to cover their costs and to meet profit demands from their shareholders. This will reinforce the reliance of farmers on those companies.
One of the important ways to advance regenerative agriculture, in my opinion, is to keep regulations under control. Farmers do not need the extra burden of paying pesticide prices for fertility inputs. Regulations around quality control and purity of product can benefit the farmer due to the vast number of products on the market, but freedom to choose inputs, and the consultant’s knowledge, should be the difference at the end of the day.
I’ll close with what I tell the growers I work with: if I do my job as a regenerative agronomist, you may not need me in ten years. At the field level, let’s all work together to make farming profitable again.
Jeffrey Kleypas, CCA, CPAg, is a consultant with Advancing Eco Agriculture.
