To Succeed, you gotta deliver: The 3Bar Biologics story

From the state of Ohio comes one of the most interesting strategies in crop protection we’ve ever seen — and it can be be summarized in one word, delivery.  The company is 3Bar Biologics.

Why? Researchers have known for years that many of the soil microbes that are most beneficial to plants don’t always work well if they’re dried on seeds or mixed into liquid solutions and stored for months in a warehouse, due to high mortality rates. 

3BB CEO Bruce Caldwell told The Digest, “The impetus for this project came out of my corporate experience [as senior vice-president] at Scott’s Miracle-Gro trying to launch these kind of products into the consumer line. They could never survive the supply chain, we could never get consistent results.”

So, it’s a known problem. One of the reasons 3Bar Biologics been well-regarded since its start. The technology was awarded an R&D 100 Award for Green Tech, and the company was recognized as one of the Best University Startups by the National Council of Entrepreneurial Tech Transfer. They received a Phase II SBIR grant from USDA and submitted an SBIR application to NSF. Why? Because delivery has been a big problem — and all the great discovery taking place right now in biologicals won’t amount to a hill of beans if a reliable method for just-in-time delivery of vigorous microbes is found. 

Let’s look into that today.

Supply chain lessons from the pandemic

Among the lessons we’ve had handed to us during the pandemic is that protection of a species is a specialized topic undertaken by scientists but lack of protection of a species will affect all of us in almost every aspect of our daily lives. We also learned that it is not enough to live healthy.  Biological assistants, for example vaccines or therapeutics, go a long ways to restoring our way of life. But it is not enough, as we learned, to have a vaccine, we have to find a way to deliver it right to the point of use, and the devil turns out to be in the details.

There’s acceptance and trust by the user, there’s the business model for delivery, and there’s also the difficulty in ensuring that the protective or therapeutic survives the supply chain.

Turns out, many of the same problems exist in the world of crops. Less protection, less yield. Less yield, less income, food, fuel, feed, and materials. Let me tell you, scarcity of basic materials is not a pretty thing. Ask anyone who’s tried to find and afford basics like towel paper these past two years.

But it’s more than supply, it’s been about freshness. When it wasn’t all that safe to shop conventionally at the produce market and people turned to delivery, they found that some companies were better than others at delivering not just good foods, but fresh ones.

In some ways, 3Bar’s LiveMicrobe is the Amazon Fresh of the biologicals world — it’s about just-in-time fermentation, and the promise made to customers is that the most fresh, viable microbes are delivered to the field every time ensuring product consistency and performance. Commercial-ready product formulations can be  developed and manufactured quickly using LiveMicrobe to break free from shelf-life and logistical challenges currently holding back microbe products cost-effectively getting to the farmer.

The Buffett approach to innovation

I have often heard it described that one of the ways that Warren Buffett and Berkshire Hathaway have attempted to identify value investments in the early-stages of technology transformation was to invest in the consequences of disruption, rather than trying to pick which disruptor will succeed — the latter is well understood as the venture capital approach. What’s an example? Take for instance the arrival of e-commerce on the internet. It was difficult back in the mid-1990s to consistently identify which companies would be the winners in the rush to establish e-commerce. Amazon seems inevitable now, it was not quite as obvious in the early days. But some astute investors surmised that every technology winner in ecommerce, by establishing direct maker-to-consumer relationships and disintermediating the retailer, was going to make direct delivery to the customer more valuable. Companies like UPS and Fedex would become more valuable. Companies like Amazon would eventually vertically integrate to establish their own delivery systems if they became sufficiently large.

There’s that delivery word again, and consistency. What you might call Reliability, or Resilience if you prefer more vogue in your terminology. At the end of the day, that’s what the supply-chain is —or at least the chain aspect of it — the means by which we deliver reliably supply to meet demand. 

Turning our attention to agriculture, you might surmise that it doesn’t matter which pesticide or fertilizer technology emerges as the winner, all technology disruptors tend to create supply-chain disruption because there’s something new to deliver, and the more the focus that is placed on cost, yield and sustainability, the more important the technology to deliver all those solutions.

Just as in the way that as we shift our news and entertainment media consumption to online, the more important the delivery companies become. In the digital economy we call that bandwidth, and if you’ve not heard frustration over “rural bandwidth”, you’re overdue for a meal in a large lunchroom in a small town or a visit to a farm.

The grower problem

For the family farm growing corn, soybean, and wheat on over 500 acres — and there are more than 25,000 farms of this size according to USDA in the Midwest farm belt, the challenge they’ve been facing for many years is the squeeze between cyclical, low-growth crop prices and double digit annual increases in input costs, specifically fertilizers and pesticides. Many also have a significant fixed asset cost as they have invested in new equipment in recent years. The best way for farmers to leverage their fixed assets and ensure their ability to pay down capital debt is to change the variable side of the equation: increase yield while reducing input costs, with an eye on sustainability, too. 

That brings the mode of delivery, shelf-life and consistency right onto the table. “If we are expecting biologics to start to displace synthetics in any meaningful way,” Caldwell notes, “whether it is fertilizers or pesticides, we have to address this whole issue of delivery and shelf-life and consistency.”

The 3Bar Biologics solution

3Bar’s technology is a patent pending microbial inoculant delivery system that delivers the freshest and most viable biologic product in the world. The system is disposable, easy to activate, and highly economical for the grower. It consists of a solid-state storage chamber for the microbes with optimal conditions to maintain inoculant vitality. With the press of a button, the solid inoculant is immersed in a growth chamber initiating exponential growth, so within 24 hours the user has grown billions of new viable microbes, which are then easily applied to seeds, plants, and soil. The device enables any person unskilled in microbiological technique to effectively grow his or her own beneficial microbe population.This approach opens the potential for commercialization of beneficial microbes proven in research but not previously available to the commercial market.

Here are the 3 points that 3Bar emphasizes:

1. Providing the farmer with a freshly grown culture mimics the conditions of the original research when the benefit was discovered and proven in replicated trials – since this discovery work is invariably conducted on fresh cultures not aged stability samples. No other living microbial product on the market is able to achieve this level of viability.

2. By storing the microbes as a biofilm on a solid matrix, they’re able to optimize the conditions for the specific species in a way no other product can match. After activation and 24-hour fermentation, the product is a liquid solution of living colonies which is easy for the farmer to apply to seeds, plants, or soil. This approach opens to the door for many microbial strains which have been proven in research but never made available commercially.

3. Because the system does not have the overproduction and waste associated with centralized fermentation and storage, they’re able to sell the product at a lower price point providing excellent economic return for the farmer.

The Vig

Let’s look at the field of agricultural microbe discovery. It’s, er, blooming. Or, rather. You might call it intellectual vigor, we’ll call it The Vig. By any name, it’s striking, the pace of innovation.

Caldwell agrees. “The discovery work continues to accelerate and it’s fascinating. But to bring products forward into the market, I believe what is required is a different approach to fermentation. For centuries, it’s been about what the organisms can make in the fermentation vessel, what biochemistry do they produce in the tank. You get forced into multi-step processes and scale — whereas we are pushing into more just in time fermentation and modular packaging. It decouples when the product is made in the big fermenter and when it needs to be delivered. “

“The successful delivery  – it has to compete, it has to colonize. To make that happen consistently you have to start with a very viable population and that means freshness, and you want them when they have that youthful vigor and are in the growth stage, not when they are in decline.” Caldwell makes a point — looking at human scale, who ever sent 80-year old codgers out to found a colony. Invariably the opportunity falls to younger people. Vigor counts. And the troops that stormed Normandy Beach were in their teens and twenties, not too many sixty-year olds crowded in the Higgins boats. 

The AgBiome partnership

In May, news arrived that 3Bar Biologics had partnered with AgBiome on innovative, non-spore forming bacterial strains to be evaluated in the LiveMicrobe technology platform.  Through its GENESIS discovery platform, AgBiome has discovered multiple lead strains with encouraging trials showing fungal disease and nematode control against important pests for growers in sub-Saharan Africa. “Partnering with 3Bar’s LiveMicrobe system will allow us the ability to extend shelf-life, decrease application rate and improve the economics overall for the grower, opening up the possibility for markets globally.” said Dave Ingham, product development lead of AgBiome. 

Caldwell sees AgBiome as a perfect example of a partner. “3Bar Biologics is not a discovery company. AgBiome is. And, a top-drawer discovery company, a range of applications, top investors. There’s value for them in partnering with us, focused on delivery, and we feel it’s very complimentary. Nearly 80% of what is being discovered – and is most beneficial to the plant in commercial microbial R&D pipelines are non-spore forming bacteria. Yet the majority of what is being commercialized today are spore-formers. The industry is due for a major paradigm shift, and we see AgBiome as a perfect partner in this.”

Other product lines

The first product that the company released in the late 2010s, Bio-YIELD, utilizes unique microbial strains discovered by researchers at The Ohio State University to improve crop yield for corn, soybeans, and wheat. Future products under development deliver a range of benefits including control of soybean cyst nematode and control of numerous fungal pathogens important to commercial production of a range of target crops.

The Bottom Line

This is an interesting company — not just for companies developing solutions who need a means to deliver reliably and cost-effectively to the grower. 3Bar is bringing hope to people who wonder how much more science can reliably push corn and soy yields at affordable cost. Not to mention other, even pricier feedstocks. It’s part of a revolution in the controlling and taking advantage of the microbial communities around the root system — affordable yield, and the affordable products that flow from affordable raw materials, it turns out, begins with effectively delivery. Do that well, you’ll win a big share of the pie, we suspect — and as companies like Domino’s have known for a long time.

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