Speciality crop biologicals program Platform10 has signed a memorandum of understanding with the Biological Products Industry Alliance (BPIA), North America’s main trade organization for advancing ag biologicals.
Both parties signed the MOU onstage last week at the 2025 Salinas Biological Summit, an annual ag biologicals conference hosted by Western Growers and agrifoodtech consultancy Wharf42.
Platform10 originated at the Salinas Summit in 2023 before launching a series of field trials around the world in 2024 to test biological products on a variety of speciality crops, including some in California.
As was discussed at the Summit last week, there’s an ever-growing pool of startups in the ag biologicals space, which is projected to reach $19.6 billion by 2027. However, the sector continues to grapple with varying levels of efficacy in products, lack of adequate communications with growers, lengthy timelines for product testing, and of course the current funding glut impacting most of agtech.
“The [Salinas Biological] Summit demonstrated that no company or country could solve all the challenges facing growers today,” Wharf42 founder Peter Wren-Hilton told AgFunderNews. “The Platform10/BPIA MOU has been designed to accelerate cross-border and counter-seasonal collaboration to help enable this to happen.”
The MOU, he added, “aligns North America’s key biologicals industry body with the world’s first global grower-led field trial network. It allows key BPIA stakeholders to meet and engage with similar industry, research, and policymaker bodies world-wide.”
For BPIA, the agreement means “developing another avenue to promote greater adoption and use of biological products such as biopesticides, biofertlizers, and biostimulants,” BPIA executive director Keith Jones told AgFunderNews.
He said the collaboration will also “enhance grower confidence in biological products on a global scale.”
‘An excellent template for other countries’
The BPIA’s task force will help Platform10 develop product criteria for those applying to the Platform10 field trial program, along with a “transparent, multi-stakeholder review process” for applications and field-testing protocols for those products accepted into the program.
The task force will also develop protocols for study findings and design grower outreach strategies and programming “to support grower adoption of assessed products,” said Jones.
According to Wren-Hilton, immediate next steps will be to start the final field trials in California before kicking off the first ones in New Zealand and Australia in 2026.
Platform10 expects to unveil more global partnerships in the second half of 2025.
“As more biological industry and grower organizations become aware of the significant grower-led opportunities that Platform10 provides, we expect accelerated engagement as we continue to build the world’s first real grower-led field trial program,” said Wren-Hilton. “The terms of the MOU provide an excellent template for other countries looking to partner with Platform10.”
The Southern Hemisphere programs in Australia and New Zealand will allow Platform10 to test products across seasons around the world.
The initiative will look to extend its programs to new markets over the next year, including Europe, Asia, and Latin America.
“The MOU provides a working model to achieve that objective,” said Wren-Hilton.
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