SUBTARC · Scaling Up Biostimulant Technology for Agriculture Resilient to Climate change

Today, drought and salinity constitute two of the most severe threats to global food security, and are rapidly increasing as climatechanges progress. These stresses have a high impact on plant’s ability to use nutrients, resulting in a significant reduction in cropyields. Accordingly, ca. €90 B/year are lost due to salinity and drought, representing 800+ M ha of arable land affected globally only by salinity. To tackle this clear socio-economic problem, new, sustainable solutions are urgently needed. Players in BioAgriculture have been developing a new class of solutions termed biostimulants, i.e., substances or microorganisms stimulating plant response, which improves its utilization of nutrients and tolerance to abiotic stresses. Despite such solutions already exist on the market, they typically rely on the application of large doses, rendering the solutions expensive and difficult to implement in existing agronomic practices. To address this market gap, Agrobiomics is developing a new biostimulant solution produced by bacterial fermentation, which effectively tackles the limitations of existing solutions. Agrobiomics’ solution presents an unseen potency on stimulating a sound plant’s response to drought and salinity, requiring thus very low dosages. With the solution validated for different types of broadacre and Fruits & Vegetables crops, Agrobiomics now aims to optimize and scale-up the production and demonstrate the efficacy of its solution in large field trials, essential to develop the regulatory package needed for approval and to convince end-users and big BioAg companies about the robustness of the technology. These activities will be key to unlock the commercialization of this new product. Therefore, the EIC-A support is critical to co-finance the final technology maturation steps and market entry, thus allowing Agrobiomics to disrupt the biostimulants market with a new solution that makes agriculture resilient to climate change.