About Foresight Agronomics
It all starts for me in rural western Kentucky.
The name, Foresight Agronomics, is a homage to my late grandmother, Pearl Forsythe (pronounced “foresight”) Duff. As the strongest and most resourceful woman I ever knew, she could immediately see through somebody trying to pull the wool over her piercing light blue eyes to try to sell her something. Humble is an understatement to describe her beginnings. Born in 1921, she told me that her family never even knew the Great Depression had occurred, as it was already normal life for them to make due with the little they had and somehow find joy amidst the toil.
Agriculture was central to her way of life. Not growing your own food was not an option. What now fills trendy Instagram “homestead” pages was pure survival in 1921 Kentucky.
My grandmother was an unstoppable force. She always found a pragmatic, and often beautiful, way to make due. She would save scraps of shirts to be made into beautiful hand-stitched quilts, or buy costume jewelry for $0.10 at a yard sale, clean it up, and resell it at the flea market for $5.00. She could teach herself how to do anything.
Everybody is tired of Snake Oil.
Like my grandmother, I have found ways (data driven research) to see through the glitter of a great product idea that has no substance. Biologicals often fall into this category. They have developed quite a reputation for being sometimes incredible, but overall unreliable and inconsistent.
After a decade of research and couple of degrees later, I don’t think it’s snake oil after all. I believe biologicals have the potential to completely transform how we grow food. I think they could alleviate much of the stress that growers face with rising fertilizer prices, narrowing restrictions on traditional chemistries, the development of resistant pest and pathogen populations, political and legislative pressures, and more.
I say this because I have seen them work. I have seen incredible disease control with biological pesticides, ground breaking improvements in nutrient uptake with biofertilizers, and consistent resistance to abiotic stress with biostimulants.
What is missing is good research and understanding of biologicals and how they fit into production agriculture. Biologicals are often treated and researched merely as complex mixtures of chemicals from organic sources, or as the fix-all to every problem in every crop. They are usually neither.
Biologicals are arguably more complicated to research than a single active ingredient product. However, if done thoroughly and with an open mind, biologicals research can produce a dynamic spectrum of application.
So back to my Grandma…
I recognize that there are always limitations on research. Limited time, budget, or even logistics of reality itself limit what we can truly test. However, advances in genomics, metabolomics, proteomics, and more have uncovered vast networks of signals and “language” that all living things have in some degree. Plants are of course no exception to this.
I went to school to read this language, with a B.S. in Agriculture Biotechnology and a doctorate in Plant Molecular Biology. However, it has been my experience in the field, with growers, and developing products through industry research that has taught me how to translate this language into something usable and actionable for growers and agriculture companies.
Like my Grandma, I want to see through a great sales pitch, or in our case through blurry performance trials that still leave you unequipped to make a decision on how to optimize a biological product. Let’s work together to define what you need to get out of your research, develop an understanding of your biological or synthetic product, and do impactful research with a great ROI that actually helps people to grow good food with greater ease.
Let’s work together to use available technologies to gain foresight over what a plant might do in response to your product. To gain foresight over how your product might fall short. To gain foresight into the next season of agricultural research.