Grainswest - Fall 2026

Fall 2026 Grains West 34 FEATURE Hungria believes Canadian farmers should try biologicals. A majority of Brazilian soybean farmers do so. Photos by George diCenzo. Hungria admitted that while biologicals are a wonderful product, great caution must be taken in handling them; after all, these are living products. “You really have to be careful about adding microbes to the soil,” she said. “If we do not put a very good micro-organism in the soil, we can’t displace it. We have to take care about contamination. If you are not careful, you can include pathogens. Working with biologicals is very different than working with chemicals. It’s life. It’s biology.” Hungria believes Canada can reap the environmental and financial benefits, same as Brazil, with an embrace of biologicals. “I hold Canada in high esteem, the farmers work very hard,” she said. “They should really believe and try the biologicals. I think it’s a good opportunity. Society is understanding and asking for food with less chemical residues. It’s a huge opportunity for using something that is saving money for the farmers, having high yield and helping society.” CAN IT WORK IN CANADA? George diCenzo is one of two leads of the Bio-inoculants for the promotion of nutrient use efficiency and crop resiliency in Canadian agriculture project, or BENEFIT. He is also an associate professor of biology at Queen’s University and an adjunct professor of microbiology at the University of Manitoba. The goal of this project closely mirrors the work done by Hungria in Brazil. diCenzo and a large team have worked on BENEFIT since 2023 and are working to develop bio-inoculants to improve crop growth in Canada. The crops in question are barley, bean, canola, pea and wheat. All the genomic resources related to the project will be made publicly available. Inoculants are not new tech; in fact, they’ve been around for more than 100 years. However, diCenzo believes the efficacy of these products is now at a point where farmers could implement biological solutions in the absence of synthetic fertilizer for certain crops with no drop in results. The goal of the project is two-fold. First, reduce greenhouse gases, and second, boost the environmental and economic bottom lines. “The goal, or benefit, is to reduce the amount of fertilizer used without impacting yield,” he said. “I’m not expecting we stop the need for nitrogen fertilizer, but if we can even reduce it a little bit, that helps both in terms of the environmental impact, but also the economics for growers. Nitrogen is expensive, and inoculants would be a lot cheaper.” Soybeans have a long, documented success story with inoculants that form nodules on the roots of the plants. These fix free nitrogen from the atmosphere. However, the biggest knock against inoculants has also been the variability, even from farm to farm or a single farm between fields. “What we’re trying to do is improve on them, to try and overcome some of those challenges that make them not top choices for adoption and make them more reliable and more likely to give results to growers that use them,” said diCenzo. Much research has shown positive results in highly controlled lab environments. diCenzo said it’s time to ground truth these at real farms and prove inoculants work across a wider variety of crops and growing conditions. Part of the team’s focus is also to screen and assess bacteria that would grow well industrially so inoculants could be produced at scale for purchase by farmers. They’re also working to determine how well certain inoculants survive in various soil types. The bacteria varieties being tested need to be cultivated within giant