- The Gap Is Real, and It Is Mostly a Delivery Problem
- Five Reasons Biological Products Underperform in Real Conditions
- Why Formulation Technology Is the Answer
- What This Means for Growers, Distributors, and Technology Partners
- Biological Crop Protection Still Has a Strong Role in IPM
- FAQs
There's a pattern anyone working with biological crop protection will recognise. A microbial active performs well under controlled conditions. Efficacy looks strong. The biology is sound. Then the product reaches the field, and results are inconsistent, underwhelming, or simply absent.
The instinct is to question the biology. More often, the problem is the formulation.
This article explains why the lab-to-field performance gap exists, what actually drives biopesticide formulation failure, and why solving it requires more than a good active ingredient.
The Gap Is Real, and It Is Mostly a Delivery Problem
Biological actives — whether entomopathogenic fungi, bacteria, nematodes, or microbial metabolites — are sensitive to conditions that synthetic chemistry handles without difficulty. UV radiation, temperature fluctuation, desiccation, soil pH, and the physical dynamics of spray application can all degrade or inactivate a biological active before it ever reaches its target.
In a laboratory, those variables are controlled. In a field, they are not.
The result is that a biological product can carry a perfectly viable active ingredient and still fail to deliver it where it needs to go, in a form that remains active, at the right time. That is not a biology failure. It is a formulation and delivery failure.
The distinction matters because it changes where you look for the solution.
Five Reasons Biological Products Underperform in Real Conditions
1. The Active Degrades Before It Reaches the Target
Many microbial actives are vulnerable during the window between application and contact with the pest or infection site. Fungal spores exposed to direct sunlight can lose viability within hours. Bacterial actives may be inactivated by extreme soil pH. Nematodes desiccate rapidly on dry soil surfaces.
Without a formulation designed to protect the active through that exposure window, field performance will always fall short of what laboratory data suggests.
2. The Product Does Not Adhere or Spread Effectively
Spray coverage on leaf surfaces, soil particles, or pest entry points is rarely uniform. Conventional spray equipment was largely designed for synthetic chemistry, which spreads and adheres differently than biological formulations. A product that beads off a waxy leaf surface or settles unevenly in the spray tank is not delivering the dose the trial data was built on.
Spreading, wetting, and adhesion are formulation properties, not biology properties. A biological active without the right delivery characteristics will behave differently in the field than it did in a petri dish or growth chamber.
3. Shelf Life and Storage Conditions Are Inconsistent
Biological products that are fully viable at manufacture can lose efficacy during distribution, storage, or on-farm handling. Temperature excursions in transit, extended storage before use, and incompatible tank mixing all affect viability.
This is one of the harder failure modes to diagnose because the product appears intact. The packaging is undamaged. The label instructions were followed. But the active was compromised before application ever began.
4. Application Windows Are Narrower Than Expected
Biological crop protection works within biological parameters. Entomopathogenic fungi require certain humidity thresholds. Nematodes need soil moisture and temperature within specific ranges. Bacterial biopesticides targeting early larval stages are ineffective once the pest has developed past that window.
These are not product defects — they are properties of living systems. But growers accustomed to synthetic chemistry, which typically tolerates wider application windows and less precise timing, may apply biological products outside their effective range without realising it.
5. The Rhizosphere Environment Is Not Accounted For
For soil-applied biologicals, getting the active into the root zone and keeping it there is a separate challenge from the application itself. Soil structure, organic matter content, microbial competition, and moisture all affect whether a biological active establishes and persists in the rhizosphere or is rapidly outcompeted and diluted.
A product that performs well in sterilised growth medium may behave very differently in a complex, competitive soil environment.
Why Formulation Technology Is the Answer
Once you recognise that most field failures are formulation problems rather than biology problems, it becomes clear where the solution lies. The active ingredient is the starting point, not the finished product.
Effective biological crop protection requires formulation and delivery technology that addresses each of the failure modes above: protecting the active through the exposure window, ensuring it reaches the target surface in viable form, extending shelf stability, and supporting persistence in complex environments.
This is the core of what Bionema has built. As a Swansea University spinout, the company developed three proprietary platforms specifically to close the lab-to-field performance gap.
Incapsulex: Protecting the Active Through the Exposure Window
Incapsulex is Bionema's microencapsulation platform, designed to protect biological actives from environmental degradation, extend stability during storage and transit, and enable controlled release at the target site. The principle is straightforward: if the active degrades before it reaches the pest or pathogen, encapsulation extends the window during which it remains viable.
Microencapsulation also allows more precise control over when and how the active is released — which matters for actives that need to reach specific pest life stages or infection sites in a viable state.
Adhesulex: Solving the Delivery and Coverage Problem
Adhesulex is Bionema's formulation and delivery platform, addressing the spreading, adhesion, deposition, and target delivery challenges that cause biological products to perform inconsistently in field spray applications.
Where a biological active would otherwise bead off a leaf surface or fail to distribute evenly across a target area, Adhesulex provides the formulation characteristics needed for consistent coverage. This is not a minor detail. Inconsistent coverage is one of the most common reasons field results diverge from trial data, and it is entirely a formulation variable.
BiofilmTech: Persistence in the Root Zone
BiofilmTech is Bionema's root-zone microbial platform, supporting biofilm formation and rhizosphere persistence for soil-applied biological actives. It addresses the fifth failure mode directly: ensuring that a biological active applied to soil establishes and persists in the rhizosphere rather than being rapidly outcompeted or diluted.
For biostimulants and biofertilisers as well as biopesticides, root-zone persistence is the difference between a product that delivers measurable agronomic benefit and one that shows no meaningful effect beyond the first few days after application.
What This Means for Growers, Distributors, and Technology Partners
The implications differ depending on where you sit in the supply chain.
For growers and agronomists, the practical takeaway is that biological product performance is heavily dependent on formulation quality and application conditions. Inconsistent results are not always evidence that biologicals do not work — they are often evidence that the formulation was not designed to bridge the lab-to-field gap, or that application timing fell outside the product's effective window. Understanding what a product's formulation is designed to do, and what conditions it requires, is as important as understanding the biology of the active itself.
For distribution and commercial partners, the lab-to-field gap is a commercial risk. A biological product that performs inconsistently in customer trials damages confidence in the entire category. Formulation quality is therefore a due-diligence criterion, not just a technical detail. Products built on platforms designed to address stability, delivery, and persistence carry materially lower risk than those where formulation is secondary to the active.
For technology and licensing partners, the formulation platforms themselves represent the defensible IP. Biological actives can be replicated or sourced from multiple origins. A proprietary microencapsulation or delivery platform that demonstrably closes the lab-to-field gap is a different category of asset entirely. The fact that Syngenta Crop Protection acquired two Bionema products and supporting technology in 2021 is relevant here: it confirms that the formulation and delivery work met the evaluation standards of a Tier-1 agrochemical company, not just academic or small-scale commercial assessment.
Biological Crop Protection Still Has a Strong Role in IPM
None of this is an argument against biological crop protection. The European biopesticides market is growing at 9.97 percent CAGR through 2031, and the global biologicals market reached USD 2 billion in 2024. Regulatory withdrawal of chemical actives across the EU and UK is creating genuine demand for proven biological alternatives across agriculture, horticulture, turf, and forestry.
The argument is more specific: biological technologies can meaningfully reduce reliance on synthetic chemistry within IPM programmes where they are technically and commercially appropriate. Getting there consistently requires taking the formulation challenge as seriously as the biology.
A biological active that cannot survive the journey from laboratory to field — or that cannot be delivered to its target in viable form — does not contribute to an IPM programme regardless of how well it performed under controlled conditions.
FAQs
Why do biological products often perform differently in the field compared to laboratory trials?
Laboratory conditions control for UV exposure, temperature, humidity, and application uniformity in ways that field conditions do not. Biological actives are sensitive to these variables, and without formulation technology designed to protect them through the exposure window and deliver them consistently to the target, field performance will diverge from controlled-trial data.
Is inconsistent biological product performance always a formulation problem?
Not always. Application timing, pest life stage, soil conditions, and storage handling all contribute. But formulation quality — specifically whether the product was designed to address stability, adhesion, and delivery in real field conditions — is one of the most common and underdiagnosed causes of the lab-to-field performance gap.
What is microencapsulation and why does it matter for biopesticides?
Microencapsulation involves enclosing a biological active within a protective shell that shields it from environmental degradation and allows controlled release at the target site. For biopesticides, this extends the window during which the active remains viable after application and can improve the consistency of field results.
How does spray adhesion affect biological product efficacy?
Biological formulations behave differently on leaf surfaces and in spray equipment than synthetic chemistry. Without the right spreading and adhesion properties, a biological product may distribute unevenly or fail to contact the target surface effectively — meaning the dose delivered in practice is lower or less uniform than the dose used in trials.
What should growers look for when evaluating a biological product's formulation quality?
Look for evidence that the formulation was designed to address stability during storage and transit, delivery and coverage in field spray conditions, and persistence at the application site. Products built on named, proprietary formulation platforms with documented development rationale are generally more likely to have addressed these variables than those where formulation receives little attention.
Can biological crop protection replace synthetic chemistry entirely?
Biological technologies can reduce reliance on synthetic chemistry within IPM programmes where they are technically and commercially appropriate. They are not universal replacements for conventional chemistry in all situations. The most effective programmes use biologicals strategically alongside other tools, timed to pest biology and supported by products with the formulation quality needed to perform consistently in the field.
How do I know if a biological product has been formulated to close the lab-to-field gap?
Ask the supplier directly about the formulation platform the product is built on, what it is designed to address, and what field trial data exists under conditions comparable to your own. Products developed by companies with dedicated formulation R&D and a documented technology transfer history are more likely to have been through rigorous field validation than those where the active ingredient is the primary focus and formulation is an afterthought.
The lab-to-field gap is not inevitable. It is a formulation and delivery problem, and it has formulation and delivery solutions. To understand how Bionema's platforms address it across agriculture, horticulture, turf, forestry, and public health, visit bionema.com.
