For the first time, The Scoop’s audience has voted a biological as new product of the year. It’s a moment in the market as retailers are widely understanding the potential and fit for this rapidly growing class of products.
Therein lies the rub—it’s a seemingly ever-growing category of products. Farmers and retailers are being offered hundreds of different biologicals with different performance promises, applications, effective rates and more. It’s a complicated matrix. Many are left scratching their heads.
So what makes successful launches of biologicals such as AMVAC’s BioWake—the top-ranked new product—rise above the rest? I’ll cut through the clutter with one takeaway: a large-scale demonstration program with the retail channel.
The partnerships help pinpoint the perfect position for the biological products. Retailers can help farmers sort through the variety of products to find which could be best fit their crops, fields and conditions. On the same side, retailers can help companies find scale with products, so they fine-tune where they capture the greatest success.
In our cover story, you’ll see how retailers’ biggest custom application gains have been in biologicals. And in the near term, retailers are projecting increased sales of some biological categories near 60%. These are more signs of how retailers can seize a business opportunity with recommending, selling and applying products in this category.
AMVAC’s BioWake is also part of another growing opportunity for retailers: planter seed box treatments. In addition to their on-site seed treatment products, this evolving group of products is opening up untapped potential. Specifically, we highlight almost two dozen products for the corn or soybean acre that replace traditional talc or graphite blends to offer not only seed fluency but also additional crop enhancements. Some of these are crop nutrition; some of the products are biologicals.
A year ago in our February 2023 edition, I reported on our joint study with Aimpoint Research that outlined findings about the retailer of the future. One of the five things this group would do is “offer new inputs.” Maybe your future is now.
