Since its founding, Biome Makers has partnered with growers, researchers and agricultural input manufacturers to revolutionize soil health insights. As a leader in soil microbiome research, we have built the world’s largest and most comprehensive soil microbiome database, spanning diverse crops (201 to be exact), biomes, and agricultural management practices globally.
Our mission is to empower growers with reliable, data-driven decisions to optimize agronomic outcomes. Navigating complex soil data is challenging, as agricultural inputs perform inconsistently across locations. To address this, we developed a cutting-edge recommendation system that harnesses our unparalleled database to deliver precise, individualized, and actionable insights, ensuring growers select interventions with confidence.
Biome Makers’ advanced technology decodes the impact of agricultural interventions on soil biology. With robust data on specific interventions, our system pinpoints soils where a performance increase is likely. Powered by machine learning, our recommendation system delivers unbiased, data-driven insights, predicting intervention success and identifying key soil characteristics tied to performance. Tailored to each intervention’s objectives, it generates precise configurations to maximize efficacy, empowering growers with unparalleled precision.
Testing is a cornerstone of product development for agricultural input manufacturers, with successful trials building grower confidence in a product’s efficacy. However, sustainable interventions, designed to work in harmony with existing biological systems, often exhibit variable performance across different soils. How do you address results showing inconsistent product performance? Embracing transparency about these outcomes fosters trust and enables more informed, effective application strategies.
In scientific research, the “file drawer effect” refers to the tendency to suppress non-significant results, skewing the available data. This bias poses a significant challenge, as growers require comprehensive insights into how agricultural inputs perform across diverse soils to make informed decisions. By applying inputs only where they are proven effective, manufacturers can build grower trust and substantially enhance the cost-benefit analysis for high-value interventions.
With our recommendation system, we aim to provide growers with a comprehensive picture and the tools required to understand it. Our strategy is to empower growers to make informed decisions by providing transparency on the outcomes of interventions.
Transparency and precision have driven an increase in grower adoption for products validated through BeCrop, as growers can confidently apply products in conditions proven to maximize efficacy.
At Biome Makers, we have developed archetypes of agricultural inputs to bridge this gap. These archetypes represent categories of agricultural inputs and provide an initial glimpse into ag input performance, minimizing investments from manufacturers. They enable us to refine our understanding of ag inputs and develop effective ways to communicate this to growers best. They are a first step into a new paradigm where growers can demand and leverage transparency to complement actionable insights.
As scientific validation becomes an increasingly important requirement for grower adoption, the recommendation system is positioned to play a critical role in this process. When validations cover a broad and diverse range of environmental conditions and demonstrate statistical robustness for a given product, the recommendation system can optimize and test configurations for that product with greater confidence. This enables manufacturers to integrate their trial data into the recommendation system and benefit from internally validated models, delivering consistent, data-driven insights with an average performance exceeding a non-informed product selection by 13%. This significant improvement positions our system as a leading solution, offering a tangible edge over others, with a performance boost in agricultural inputs contributing to a major impact on a grower's bottom line. Unlike limited-location trials, this approach ensures recommendations are evidence-based, maximizing positive outcomes. Beyond personalized grower recommendations, the system leverages our global database to guide product development. For soils where products underperform, manufacturers can tailor formulations and usage instructions to enhance efficacy.
Prior to validation, our global zonification system pinpoints regions where product performance may vary, guiding targeted testing. This optimizes costly R&D investments and boosts grower confidence in validations that reflect real-world conditions. Validation goes beyond numbers—it captures the biology driving those outcomes. Our systems ensure this connection from start to finish. Industry data indicate that 70% of manufacturers utilizing such systems achieve a 20% increase in validation efficiency (Precision Agriculture Journal, 2023).