There’s always a new piece of ag tech hitting the market. In the 1980s, it was no-till. In the 1990s, it was herbicide-tolerant seed. In the 2000s, it was VRT. In the 2010s, it was drones.
Now, it’s biologicals.
But how do you cut through the clutter to decide if these new technologies are right for you and your farm? Six farmers from across the Midwest asked that very question during the inaugural season of Frontier Fields™ in 2024.
They headed to the field to see for themselves where biologicals worked — or didn’t.
2024 BioPath Results
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As a former soil conservation scientist and current financial planner, Andrew Focht knows that understanding his soil biology is one of the best business practices you can have.
Andrew grows corn on corn in southwestern Iowa and utilizes a variety of tools and sustainability practices to keep his soil healthy and productive from season to season. But he’s sure to put every one of these tools and practices to the test before adopting it across his farm.
“There really aren’t many people in my area that grow corn-on-corn and use strip-tilling, so to get the data I need, I’ve got to be the one out there doing the trial,” he says.
Iowa throws Andrew a lot of weather challenges, too. Last year, his BioPath trial field faced hail damage, green snap, wet planting conditions and then extremely dry harvest conditions.
Despite these challenges, Andrew’s prediction of some of his best yields came to life. He saw an average of +12.31 bu/ac in his BioPath trial. Here’s how the results shook out:
- Hybrid A with BioPath: 300.32 bu/ac average
- Hybrid A control: 247.77 bu/ac average
- Hybrid A trial results: +52.55 bu/ac
- Hybrid B with BioPath: 279.96 bu/ac average
- Hybrid B control: 281.75 bu/ac average
- Hybrid B trial results: -1.79 bu/ac
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Brooks Reid is a self-proclaimed student of the crop and a trained agronomist who has expanded his understanding of soil and plant health while managing his north-central Missouri farm.
Yield potential begins with the seed bag, and every action farmers take after opening it influences their harvest, according to Brooks. By carefully developing his management plan, he aims to maximize that yield potential season after season.
“Success is not measured in monuments. It’s measured in decades, really,” says Brooks. “You might have a trial that looked like a home run or a terrible loss one year, and it may have been something that was outside of the product’s control.”
In his 2023 trial, Brooks saw an increase in nutrient uptake through his tissue samples. Then in 2024, he saw an increase in fibrous root structure and plant health. However, those qualities didn’t translate to bushels in the bin that year.
Despite the control winning by +4 bu/ac, Brooks is ready to try BioPath again in 2025.
“I want to understand what the limiting factor was. Because we went out in the season and did root digs, dug up plants, looked at plants and saw a plant response. But, at the end of the day, it didn’t put bushels in the tank,” he says. “Is it maybe just a question of the difference in [plant] size? It’s like talking about livestock — I’ve got a 1,000-pound cow and a 1,400-pound cow. Maybe it took more nutrients to carry that size of plant.”
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Over 15 years ago, Dave Schrock had a change of heart — literally. A heart transplant led him to downsize his farm and focus on making the most out of his north-central Indiana acres.
With an active, hands-on approach to fertility, Dave is constantly seeking out anything — big or small — that helps him be more efficient. He’s found that BioPath is one thing that’s helping him do that.
Dave and his family have put BioPath to the test on their farm on both highly productive soil as well as less productive soil. Their 2023 trial averages were about +7 bu/ac, with some spots in their trial field seeing upward of +20 bu/ac.
He saw BioPath help get in-soil nutrients into his growing corn in his high organic matter soils. In his lower productive fields, he saw that BioPath helped the applied nutrients be taken up by the plants.
In 2024, he applied BioPath to about 300 acres both in furrow and side-dress, across a variety of soil types, and saw increases from about +4-5 bu/ac.
“There is a difference in the plant stature and just how the plants were able to take the early wet and then the drought that followed,” says Dave.
Even with multiple seasons of BioPath trials under his belt, Dave isn’t done exploring how the biological can work for him.
“What we want to do going forward with BioPath is fine-tune where we place it on our farm, and that’s not something that happens in one year of trials. That’s kind of a moving thing, and we learn more every year about where to place it,” he says.
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Granvil Travis has heard biologicals called just about every nickname in the book — snake oil, bugs in a jug — but despite that, he’s been determined to form his own opinions about them.
As the only member of his generation full-time farming, he’s also determined to find new ways to maximize his ROI and keep his 100-year-old diversified southern Illinois farm profitable for the next generations.
That’s where BioPath comes in. You’re already in the field, and you’re already filling the planter with liquids. Dumping one more jug and potentially seeing increased nutrient availability and uptake, as well as a yield increase, is a no-brainer, according to Granvil.
“One thing I look for to see if it’s working is I start to pull tissue samples around V3 or V4 to see if I’ve got better nutrients in the plant in the trial areas compared to the control,” he says. “Once we get on up to V5 or V6, I would hope that the plant would look a little better, and once I can start pulling ears, if it’s a couple more rows around or five or six kernels longer, I think that’s the visual proof that what you did was the right thing to do that year.”
Even when there’s clear in-season differences in trials, Granvil knows it’s important to test things more than once. In 2023, his BioPath trial didn’t see a yield advantage over his control. However, in 2024, he saw clear in-season advantages in his trial that also translated to a yield increase during harvest.
“We weighed out about a +4.5 bu/ac advantage,” says Granvil. “To me, that’s a good, positive ROI — about a $20 an acre increase in revenue — so this will be something that we try more on our better ground next year. From this trial alone, it does show that biologicals may have a place on our farm.”
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Brothers Jake and Ryan Drozd are two sides of the same coin when it comes to managing their Michigan family farm — Drozd Family Grain.
Ryan keeps a careful eye on the bottom line, while Jake stays in tune with agronomic decisions. Both work together to meet the challenges that diverse soil and weather conditions and fluctuating markets present.
“Our cost per acre is high where we live, so we have to find different ways to make that dollar do more, and I think biologicals are a way,” says Ryan. “We’re using biologicals to make our fertilizer work harder for us.”
In 2023, the Drozd brothers trialed BioPath and saw a +6.88 bu/ac advantage over their control field. That was more than enough for the product to get their attention, so in 2024, they spread BioPath across different fields with different qualities like soil type, irrigation and tillage.
“If I can replicate something two or three years in a row, I’ll start adding it across more and more acres,” says Jake.
In 2024, the Drozds saw a +4.36 bu/ac advantage in one trial and a +4.2 bu/ac advantage in another. This translated to a 2:1 ROI, which is exciting, according to the brothers.
“It’s a pretty interesting product. We’ll up the acres, and we’ll go a third year and see how things go and try a couple other positions for it,” says Jake.
“For now, I think we’re so far along in this process that we’re finally to the stage of instead of if it works, we’re asking how it’s going to work best for our operation,” adds Ryan.
