American farmers are running one of the hardest businesses in the country right now. Net farm income has been compressed for three straight years. Commodity prices haven’t kept pace with input costs. And the input costs themselves — synthetic nitrogen, potash, phosphate — are tied to geographies and trade policies that have turned fertilizer pricing into more of a geopolitical instrument than a market.
The squeeze is structural, not cyclical. Three reasons it won’t ease on its own:
Supply concentration. Most of the world’s potash sits in three countries. Phosphate in four. The Haber-Bosch nitrogen process is energy-intensive, which means natural gas prices set the floor on synthetic nitrogen costs. None of that geography or chemistry is changing.
The input treadmill. Decades of synthetic-only fertility have left American soils with less organic matter, lower microbial diversity, and worse water retention. We pushed corn yields from 20 bushels per acre in 1940 to 320 today — and the soil paid for it. The ROI on the next pound of synthetic nitrogen keeps falling. Farmers are spending more to hold yield steady.
Regulatory drift. Nitrogen runoff is back in the conversation — Gulf dead zones, drinking water nitrates, state-level limits in the Midwest. Whatever you think of the politics, the trajectory adds cost to the synthetic side of the ledger, not the biological side.
Farmers aren’t waiting for a policy answer. They’re testing biologicals at the field level because the math is starting to favor it. Two of those biological inputs are in our portfolio.
Holganix is a soil amendment that delivers 800+ species of beneficial microbes — bacteria, fungi, protozoa — directly into the root zone. The microbes cycle nutrients, suppress pathogens, and unlock minerals that plants can’t reach through synthetic inputs alone. For farmers, the headline is the spreadsheet line: a 25–50% reduction in synthetic fertilizer use without sacrificing yield, applied through equipment they already own. It pencils out per acre.
Kula Bio is solving the harder problem — biological nitrogen fixation for both specialty and row crops. Nitrogen is the single largest input cost in modern agriculture and one of its largest environmental costs. Biological N-fixation has been a holy grail for a century; the engineering problem was keeping the microbes alive and active long enough to ship, apply, and perform in the field. Kula’s shelf-stable formulation is the unlock. It substitutes for synthetic nitrogen at unit economics that make biological N a procurement decision, not a sustainability one.
Both companies are wedges into the same shift: agriculture’s input layer is being rebuilt around biology because the chemistry is no longer the cheap option. This is the moment biologicals stop being a sustainability story and start being a cost-of-goods story.
For us, that’s also where Food Is Health begins. What happens in the soil sets the ceiling on what’s possible downstream — nutrient density, food quality, the long-run cost of chronic disease. You can’t get nutrient-dense food out of depleted soil. The Soil-Rooted Revolution is one of the forces we believe will eventually rewrite the relationship between agriculture, food, and health.
But that’s the long arc. Right now, in the field, the story is simpler: the better input is becoming the cheaper input. That’s the moment categories flip.
