The plant inoculant business is headed in the same direction as the seed industry, with a proliferation of varieties and increasing brand recognition.
“Up till now inoculants have been a commodity just like seed used to be a commodity. Then it was differentiated by variety and sold on a brand name basis. That is where we are headed with inoculants,” said Sanford Gleddie, head of marketing for PhilomBios, a Canadian inoculant maker.
His views are generally echoed by Ben Libby, head of sales and marketing for MicroBio RhizoGen Corp., known as MBR, another player in the field.
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Gleddie said that although root zone, or rhizobial, inoculants are probably the oldest crop input, going back 100 years, only recently have they generated much innovation and interest.
Brand name recognition was almost nil.
“The way I look at it, we are at the Tobin-Westar date,” he said, referring to the early days of canola seed development.
Libby said Canadian companies are taking the lead in changing the industry.
Although rhizobial inoculants can be used on soybeans, they weren’t popular in the United States because they were difficult to use.
“(Pulses) are a fresher, newer crop here in Western Canada whereas in the States they’ve been growing soybeans for years and years and years.
“They looked at inoculants in the past that were very low quality, cumbersome and difficult to work with and they decided they’d rather dump on heavy amounts of fertilizer to replace it.”
Growing market
In Western Canada, peas and lentils, and now beans and chickpeas, have been the Cinderella crop, exploding in acreage as farmers realized the benefits for pocketbooks and soils.
They want to manage these crops for maximum return and inoculants are part of that. Manufacturers have responded by making products easier to use, first improving peat-based types by sterilizing the peat, allowing the bacteria to densely colonize the material.
More recently came liquid-based products and now granular ones that can be applied as farmers seed.
Libby thinks name recognition will come with this convenience factor.
“I see a big jump (in name recognition) coming with the granulars.”
Gleddie predicts it will develop differently.
He thinks companies will eventually have strains of rhizobial bacteria they will market as superior to the competition’s bacteria.
The root zone is alive with bacteria. Some varieties have the symbiotic relationship with a pulse plant that allows them to take nitrogen from the air and make it available to the plant.
Some strains do a better job of it than others.
So, just like canola variety A in field trials yields three percent better than the competitor’s variety B, inoculants will be marketed on a comparison basis.
But that will require farmers to reach a new level of understanding about inoculants.
“I used to hear ‘I need some of that dirt for my peas.’ Now it’s ‘I need some of that liquid or granual for my peas,’ ” Gleddie said.
Many farmers are not aware that inoculants are specific to certain plants. Although the same inoculant can be used on peas and lentils, a different type must be used on chickpeas, he said.
Also, there will be an increasing number of inoculant types, other than nitrogen-fixing rhizobial inoculant products.
PhilomBios already markets Jump Start, a phosphate inoculant based on the soil fungus Penicillium bilaii.
Other inoculants will be developed to suppress disease and insects, Gleddie said.
