- Biologicals’ mechanisms and long-term soil impacts remain poorly understood.
- Independent testing and safety checks are vital to protect farmers.
- Collaboration across disciplines is key to advancing biologicals.
While biologicals are often presented as the future of agriculture, Dr Yvonne Pinto, director-general of the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), offered a sobering assessment of the scientific knowledge gaps that remain.
Despite growing interest in biologicals, Pinto highlighted that fundamental questions remain unanswered.
Although a growing body of research and field data points to the potential of biologicals, scientists are still not able to explain exactly how these products work to reliably reproduce the results.
“For many biologicals on the market, we don’t know the mode of action. We know something happened, but not why or whether it will happen again,” said Pinto during the closing remarks of the Asia Biologicals Summit held in Singapore on 26 October.
“We don’t know how microbial communities assemble, or whether an introduced organism will persist, displace others, or simply disappear… We don’t fully understand how biologicals interact with fertiliser, though our long-term experiments suggest heavy inorganic use can suppress the very soil life we want to harness, and we still cannot define a healthy soil.”
The consequences of knowledge gaps
Most fundamentally, Pinto noted that scientists still lack a universal definition of healthy soil.
“For human health, we have a scale and a range. We know what normal looks like. For the biology of soil, we have nothing in the world.”
Furthermore, researchers are increasingly finding that plants actively shape and are shaped by the microbial communities around them, said Pinto.
“The plant is not a passive recipient of whatever we apply. Plants release compounds from their roots that recruit particular microbes, and their ability is shaped by their genes. We are now finding links between a plant’s genetics and what its roots release under drought, salinity, flooding, and in different contexts with different soils. This suggests that some of what we call stress tolerance may belong not to the plant alone, but to the plant and its microbial partners together.”
These knowledge gaps have practical consequences, Pinto warned.
“Without that understanding, every new field becomes an experiment, and farmers are definitely the ones who carry the ultimate risk.”
Scientific responsibility
As biological innovation accelerates, Pinto stressed that scientific responsibility has become increasingly important to avoid repeating the mistakes of the Green Revolution.
“The Green Revolution, which I really was proud to help advance, fed millions of people. But it also proves that intensification carries those costs. We did not measure those at the time. With biologicals, we have the chance to build in those lessons from the outset.”
She highlighted the need for greater scientific rigour from the outset of product development.
“We know it requires testing across many locations and many seasons with the proper controls, ideally the standard protocols, and an understanding of the mechanism… The people who validate a product should not be the same people who sell it.”
She also called for researchers and companies to be willing to publish negative findings, which are just as valuable, she argued.
“It requires the courage to publish the negative result. The ‘not yet’ or ‘not here’ is valuable knowledge and it requires us to look for consequences before they find us.”
Pinto also pushed back against the assumption that products are automatically safe because they are naturally derived.
Using the example of rice production, she noted that adding organic matter to paddy systems can increase methane emissions, demonstrating that environmentally beneficial intentions do not always produce desirable outcomes.
“Good intentions are no substitute for measurement,” she said.
She also urged the industry to ask more questions about how introduced microorganisms may affect native microbial communities and what long-term impacts could emerge after repeated use.
“What happens if an introduced microbe outcompetes native communities? What if something accumulates in the soils over the years? If we engineer a plant to release a beneficial compound or edit a microbial community to perform better, what safety questions should follow? Very few people are asking these questions today. They should really ask now before products reach millions of hectares, not after they do.”
While speed is important because farmers urgently need solutions, Pinto cautioned that products launched without adequate evidence risk undermining trust in the entire sector.
“Speed without evidence is how trust is lost. Responsible speed means investing in the evidence that lets good products grow quickly and stops poor ones early.”
The integration bottleneck
Looking ahead, Pinto said that the next challenge is not discovery alone but integration across disciplines, institutions and countries.
“In my experience, discovery is rarely what holds us back. Integration is the problem. The breakthroughs will come when disciplines, institutions, and countries work as one system. That means collaborations across disciplines: breeders with microbiologists, soil scientists with data scientists, social scientists with economists, who understand why a farmer adopts or doesn’t.”
