A biological can deliver impressive results in the lab, greenhouse, and field trials and still never become a viable seed treatment product.
The problem isn’t necessarily the extract, microorganism, or active ingredient. It’s everything the product must endure after discovery: formulation, treatment chemistry, drying, storage, transportation, and application. By planting, a promising biological may be far less active — or never reach the market at all.
“There’s a lot of innovation out there,“ says Matti Tiainen, CEO of Frontera. Where companies struggle, he says, is in “not being willing to understand or not doing enough work to understand the constraints of the supply chain. Essentially falling in love with the technology itself.”
Tiainen’s view is shaped by experience. He and much of Frontera’s team previously built Pro Farm Technologies, the Finnish biologicals company acquired in 2019. Products developed by that team were among the naturally derived seed treatments Corteva reported in use on more than 10 million hectares of European seed in 2021.
Those constraints are particularly unforgiving in commercial seed treatment. A biological seed treatment must be compatible with fungicides, insecticides, and other recipe components, and fit within the limited “real estate“ on the seed without requiring additional drying, increasing dust-off, or affecting processing. And it must be manufacturable at scale, economically viable, and consistently effective. Shelf life adds another hurdle.
“It’s understanding the whole complexity of that supply chain on a given crop that makes or breaks companies trying to enter the seed treatment industry,“ Tiainen says.
He’s watched the same pattern repeatedly, and been caught by it himself: a foliar technology shows promise as a seed treatment, and the opportunity looks obvious. It rarely converts.
The lesson, he says, is that seed treatment can’t simply become a bonus application for a biological developed with another market in mind. “Seed treatment isn’t an adjacent market you step into. It’s a discipline you build for.”
That argument also challenges seed companies to rethink how they assess incoming technologies. Tiainen believes they could set standardized early requirements for chemistry compatibility, on-seed shelf life, dust-off, and rate calibration. Developers would clear those hurdles through recognized testing partners before entering a seed company’s already crowded evaluation program.
“I think the seed companies hold more power over that first evaluation layer than they use. Setting the bar earlier would benefit everyone,“ he says.
That shift from industry-wide hurdles to company-level practice is where Frontera’s work comes in. Frontera’s first seed-applied product, RESILIENCE n9, is registered for broadacre crops in EU27 and is now in field testing with commercial partners. In June the company acquired PlantSustain, a U.S. biologicals business built by Generation Food Rural Partners around university-licensed technology, bringing both a seed-treatment platform and a route into U.S. public research. The logic, Tiainen says, is that promising biology isn’t in short supply; the ability to deliver it to the field is.
Products at Frontera are designed around a defined market need, with compatibility, shelf life, regulatory requirements, and commercial manufacturing considered from the outset. Candidates that can’t clear those development gates are dropped early.
The company is also exploring delivery systems that could allow biologicals to coexist more effectively with conventional products — including, potentially, keeping a live microbe viable alongside a highly acidic fungicide.
“We’re not advocating against chemistry,“ Tiainen says. Instead, he expects biologicals to complement conventional products by potentially reducing chemical load rates in some applications, adding modes of action and helping address resistance and emerging climate pressures. “My guess is, we’re going to need a marriage between chemistry and biology for quite some time.“
