The Product Vision

So being an entrepreneur especially in this business where you’re changing the paradigm of how farmers produce their food with, with the products and substituting one produce for another what we found is that the academic scientist would test product in an artificial situation so that they would actually introduce insects or moulds to the field in a very high level in a little test plot and then test my product side by side with the chemical. And it was totally artificial. The farmers don’t do that at all. The farmers use lots of different products in cocktails so they’ll mix five products in a tank and spray it out, a fungicide, an insect killer, a weed killer, maybe even two fungicides at the same time. Or they’ll rotate products, so they’ll have a program to prevent insects and moulds of the fungus from developing resistance to the chemical so that the chemical will still work. They rotate from one chemical to another so they never use anything standalone. But all the government was done, I mean, the academic work was done with standalone very artificial situations. So I actually formed a group called the Bio Pesticide Industry Alliance in the year 2000 I called all my colegues in the industry and said let’s get a trade group together and start lobbying to change some of these things. Which we did, which is now a non-profit with an executive director with and dues paying at about 29 members. And we go the Environmental Protection Agency in the US Department of Agriculture to fund a program, they always say that if you want in the university – at least in our Lagfoed university – to do something they go where the money is so. So the seed it and put out a lot of grants and as part of the grant proposal, they had to, if they’d sent in a grant proposal, a grant application that had them stand alone side by side immediately rejected. The whole idea was that they would get money for on farm research where it would integrate these types of bioproducts just like the farmer was doing in a more practical way. That completely changed the attitude of these types of university professors, extension professionals they call them. When they say that they getting really good data on the farm they saw these products getting; when you integrated one of bio products in the farmer was getting higher yields, at least as good control and even often a better quality. On of the farmers I met in Mexico when I was down there talking to customers, he saw that when you break this chemical cycle, its like a plant on steroids all the time and so its chemical, chemical, chemical ……. And eventually the health of the plant poofs out and when you have this break with the biological product in there it can give a little break and the plants health increases. And time and time again the growers tell us that there’s a higher yield and higher quality when they incorporate our products in