Moving on now to our Video of the Week, our Mike Lessiter caught up with Chris Abbott, the CEO of Pivot Bio for an exclusive interview following the move of company headquarters to the Twin Cities. Abbot talked about Pivot Bio’s approach to researching and manufacturing biological nitrogen products and reflected on what they’ve learned the last couple years.  

“Our microbes are gene edited to only fix nitrogen and spoon feed it to the plant on the root. They’re not affected by weather with leaching or volatilization. They just deliver it. So how can the win rate not be higher?”

“Well, what we learned is nitrogen wasn’t the limiting factor for yield in those cases where win rate was a loss. And so, we had to go back and say, what causes that? Number one, total applied rate of nitrogen. If a grower doesn’t need more nitrogen, don’t buy our product. I just said that 30,000 acre customer wanted to buy our product late in the year this year and I said I’m not selling it. We’re not going to sell a product to somebody that doesn’t need more nitrogen.”

“Now some customers say, “But my nitrogen that I bought is volatile and I need an insurance policy or I need to figure out how to get more of my total nitrogen across all my sources to be more applied in season.” So, maybe that’s a shift from anhydrous in the fall to something in the spring or they’re coming out during weed and feed or maybe they’re already in the spring and they want to add a Y drop.”

“We need to help those growers get the best of the total nutrition program. That’s our product as well as what are the best synthetic nitrogen sources and timing that they can apply that. And we had to learn that the hard way.”

That’s just a taste of the conversation. Catch the full interview on the latest No-Till Farmer podcast on No-TillFarmer.com. 

Watch the full Video of this episode of Conservation Ag Update.