— Barry Bonner, Regenerative Agricultural Development
No single practice saves the soil. But living biology, combined with the right approach, might.
You have stood in front of farmers across every state in this country and held up a jar of their own soil falling apart in water. You have shown them, as plainly as it can be shown, that the problem is not the weather, not the equipment, and not the seed. The problem is that we have taken the life out of the ground.
The microbial community that holds soil together, that moves water through it, that cycles nutrients and sequesters carbon, has been depleted across tens of millions of acres of American farmland. The farmer feels it as rising input costs and shrinking margins. The land shows it as compaction, runoff, and an inability to hold rainfall.
RAD Microbes is not here to tell you what you do not already know. We are here because of what you teach, and we are building the biological tools to deliver it. This document is the story of what we are doing, where we are in the process, and why we believe your life's work and ours are pointing at the same thing.
The mission of RAD Microbes is to stop the desertification of the Midwest by returning living microbial consortia to the soil at a scale and price point that makes them accessible to every farmer who needs them, in America and across the world.
A 2-acre trial in Prosper, Texas compared our Bacillus consortium applied with no additional NPK fertilizer against standard NPK-only control acres. The treated field carried residual fertility from the prior season. No fresh synthetic inputs were added. Soil was analysed via 16S rRNA sequencing by Environmental Genomics. Equivalent plant height and bushel yield. The control plot spent $420 per acre on fresh NPK fertilizer to get there. The microbial plots did not. We are not suggesting on the basis of these results that farmers should stop fertilizing. We are suggesting the biology changes what becomes possible over time.
Important context
This scenario is based on a single field trial conducted in Prosper, Texas in 2025. It is not statistically significant. We do not have enough data yet to make this a proven claim. What follows is a narrow extrapolation from that one trial, expanded to 100 acres to illustrate what the numbers could look like if the results hold at scale. This is a scenario. It is still unproven. We present it honestly and in that spirit.
At $420 per acre in synthetic fertilizer and $28 per acre for our microbial consortium, the cost comparison across a 100-acre corn operation is straightforward. The chart below shows three scenarios: conventional fertilizer only, microbial consortium with a 75% fertilizer reduction, and the potential saving per acre and across the full farm.
We are not suggesting zero fertilizer. We are not making a proven claim. We are showing what one trial suggests could be possible, and we are building the data to find out.
On a 1,000 acre operation the same model produces a saving of $287,000 per season in input costs alone, before any yield improvement is factored in. The biology compounds over time. As the microbial community establishes and the soil system recovers, fertilizer dependency continues to fall. The first season saving is the floor, not the ceiling.
Desertification is not a word most people associate with Iowa, Illinois, or Texas. It should be. Decades of synthetic fertilizer dependency, monoculture rotation, and tillage have stripped functional microbial life from vast areas of the most productive farmland on earth. What remains is increasingly degraded soil that cannot hold water, cannot cycle nutrients without chemical input, and cannot withstand the pressure that climate variability is placing on it.
Synthetic inputs treat the symptom. They do not restore the system. A field that sheds rainfall rather than drawing it down into the soil profile is a field moving in one direction. RAD Microbes is building the biological response to reverse that movement.
What follows is shared in confidence. RAD Microbes currently operates with one specific Bacillus megaterium consortium, delivered as a liquid inoculant at planting. This is our R&D formulation, applied consistently across all current trials to build clean, comparable data. Each species was selected for a specific, documented role in the soil system. Together they cover nitrogen cycling, phosphate availability, soil structure, pathogen suppression, and chemical remediation. That is the full stack of what degraded agricultural land is missing. As the science matures, formulations will be developed specifically for individual land types and soil profiles.
This information is proprietary to Regenerative Agricultural Development LLC and is shared solely for the purpose of this conversation.
At this stage of research and development, we are not customising the formulation per site. We are working with one specific Bacillus megaterium consortium applied consistently across all trial partners. This is deliberate. We need clean, comparable data before we begin tailoring. The future is bespoke, dedicated microbial formulations built for a specific landowner's soil type, and for the variations within that soil profile where required. That is where large-scale adoption lives. Getting there requires the data we are building now.
Application. The liquid inoculant is mixed into a water supply with a small amount of molasses to activate the biology. Within thirty minutes of activation, it is delivered to the soil. Soil contact should occur within twenty-four hours of mixing. There is also an opportunity to coat seed directly with the inoculant prior to planting, though this carries additional process complexity and is not the primary method at this stage.
Trial structure. Farming partners do not need more than one acre under the microbial treatment. The adjacent control continues under their existing programme, whatever that is. No changes to their standard practice on the control side. At end of season, before harvest, we collect two root samples: one from the treated acre, one from the control. Roots are collected dry with a small amount of attached soil, vacuum sealed, and dispatched to our genomics laboratory in Houston for 16S rRNA sequencing analysis. That comparison is the data. Treated versus untreated, same season, same land, same conditions.
The roadmap. Liquid delivery suits our current manufacturing structure. As we move into 2028 and 2029, we are developing a pelletised format to support dryland farming, reduce logistical complexity, and carry a richer microbial load. The biology improves as the delivery evolves.
RAD Microbes does not operate in isolation. The organisation I am partnered with is an established leader in industrial bioremediation, specifically the response to petrochemical damage. When an oil company contaminates water, soil, or a waterway, this is the organisation that gets called in. Their formulations, their laboratory capability, and their field science have been deployed at some of the most demanding remediation environments on record, including events of national scale.
That infrastructure, those laboratories, that decades-deep formulation science, sits within our partnership. What they have not driven toward is agriculture. That is where RAD Microbes comes in. We are our own entity, independently led and operated. The agricultural direction is ours entirely. We are not a division of anyone. We are a partner, and agriculture is our lane.
Why this matters. Early-stage bioinoculant programmes typically face two constraints: the science is underdeveloped, or the resources to validate it are not there. RAD Microbes does not face either. The formulation science is deep and field-proven across extreme environments. The laboratory infrastructure is already in place. What we are building now is the agricultural application of that capability, and we are building it to last.
Each of the following is attributable to one or more organisms within the consortium, supported by peer-reviewed science and our own field data. This is not a list of aspirational claims. It is a list of documented biological functions that occur when a healthy, diverse microbial community is present in the soil.
These functions do not operate in isolation. The value of a consortium over a single-strain inoculant is that the organisms work together. Nitrogen fixed by Microvirga becomes available through the nitrification pathway supported by Nitrospira, in soil whose structure is maintained by filamentous bacteria, in a root zone cleared of pathogens by Bacillus subtilis. The system restores itself. That is precisely what three decades of conventional management has prevented it from doing.
Conventional soil sampling tells you what is present in the bulk soil matrix. It is a useful baseline. But it is not where the biology that matters most is operating. The microbial community that directly governs plant health, nutrient uptake, and stress resilience lives in the rhizosphere, the narrow zone of soil immediately surrounding and attached to living plant roots. Bulk samples dilute that signal almost to nothing.
Within our field trials, we have the capability to extract root samples directly from the ground and run 16S rRNA sequencing on the rhizosphere community specifically. What comes back is a molecular picture of exactly which organisms are colonising the root system, what they are doing there, and how that community shifts in response to our inoculant. It is a level of diagnostic resolution that conventional agronomic soil testing does not approach.
What this means in practice
When we apply the consortium to a trial site, we are not guessing at whether the organisms established. We can pull roots, sequence them, and show exactly which species are present on the root surface and in what proportion at the end of the season, compared against the untreated control plot. That is the data layer that allows us to refine formulations with precision, publish peer-reviewed outcomes, and build the kind of scientific record that survives long after any single field season ends. It is also the data layer that most commercial inoculant programmes are not collecting.
A word on independence
The last company to develop a genuinely effective commercial microbial consortium was acquired by Bayer for $300M. Their formulations were quietly shelved. The product disappeared. The farmers who needed it never got it.
That is not what RAD Microbes is here to do. We are not building toward an exit. We are building toward the field, toward the farmer, toward the data, toward a published scientific record that cannot be bought and buried. The infrastructure around microbial agriculture is crowded with incumbents who benefit from the status quo. We intend to move through it regardless. The formulations work. The data will prove it. And the data will be public.
RAD Microbes is currently in its second year of active research and development. Our field work is grounded in real farm partnerships, genuine agronomic relationships, and measurable outcomes. This is not a laboratory proposition waiting for the field. We are already in the field.
Working relationships with agronomists from Texas A and M University and Louisiana State University, providing scientific rigour and institutional credibility to our field research programme across both states.
Multiple working farms in Louisiana are running our microbial formulations this season alongside university-coordinated test plots. These are live commercial operations on real ground, not controlled greenhouse studies.
Stephen Thompson has committed his farm as a dedicated microbial research site focused on industrial hemp cultivation alongside our formulation work. This gives us a controlled test plot environment that is not possible on commercial operations alone, with full data capture across the growing season.
We are working with Panda Biotech, one of the world's largest industrial hemp extraction facilities, providing access to their farming network and seed supply as we scale our field programme across more operators and growing regions.
A developing relationship with Hemp Farms Australia is exploring hemp variety optimisation for Midwest growing conditions combined with our microbial formulation, identifying the most effective plant-biology pairings for large-scale soil remediation programmes.
Moving from liquid inoculant delivery toward a pelletised format incorporating biochar as a carrier medium, making application compatible with standard farm equipment and opening access to a wider range of conventional operators.
A note on the global picture. Soil degradation is not an American problem. The same conditions that are depleting the Midwest are at work across Central America, Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and Australia. RAD Microbes is building a model that can be deployed internationally, making precision microbial tools available to farming economies where the soil health crisis is equally severe and the resources to address it are far fewer.
Soil degradation is not an American problem. The same forces stripping the biology from farmland in the Midwest are at work across Central America, Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and Australia. The need for what we are building exists wherever the land has been farmed hard and the biology has been displaced. That is most of the world.
RAD Microbes has the expertise to ship living microbial cultures internationally. The regulatory knowledge, the cold chain requirements, the packaging and documentation that keeps a consortium viable across a long freight journey — we understand that process and we can execute it. There is no geographical limitation on where this science can go.
The work you have done through the Soil Health Academy and Understanding Ag has changed how farmers think about what is beneath their feet. You have taken something complex, the living economy of the soil, and made it plain enough that a farmer standing in his own field can see what is wrong and understand why it matters. That is a rare thing.
What you teach, we are building the tools to deliver. The science is there. The formulations are working. What we do not have, and what cannot be manufactured quickly, is the kind of long-standing trust with farming communities that makes a trial programme succeed. Getting farmers to stay the course across a full season, to resist the pull of conventional inputs when the biology is still establishing, to believe in something they cannot yet see in the yield data. That requires a relationship that was built over years, not months.
As you may know, I am English. I came here because I was called here. America is where this work can make the most significant difference, and I believe that with everything I have. What I do not yet have is the depth of relationship with farming communities across different states that this programme needs to grow. You do. And that is exactly what the next phase of this requires.
What I am asking is straightforward. We would supply our consortium to farmers within your existing network, at no cost to them, in exchange for their participation in structured trials. Your relationships carry the trust. We carry the science. The data we build together will be published, and what comes out of it belongs to the farming community. Not to a corporation, not to an acquirer, not to anyone who would bury it.
Where we are going — a five year programme
We are currently in year two of a five year research and development programme. The objective during this period is straightforward: gather data, publish it, and let the science speak. Education is the most important tool we have, and you know that better than most. But education without data is just opinion. We are building the data. Products will follow as the science is proven, introduced progressively through the programme at the points where we have enough to stand behind them properly.
This is not a product launch. It is a five-year research and development commitment, with data published as it is gathered, year by year. We are currently in year two. The reason this takes five years is deliberate and scientific. Rather than combining a broad spectrum of microbial species and hoping for results, we are researching and proving each organism individually before compiling the consortium. You cannot know what is working if everything is applied at once. We are building the evidence for each species separately, then assembling the formulation from proven components. The consortium grows in complexity as each element is validated. This takes time. It is the only way to do it properly.
From now through the end of the programme, the constant requirement is farmer relationships. We need strong, committed farming partners growing a wide range of staple crops across different states. The broader the crop base and the wider the geography, the more useful the data becomes and the more people we can ultimately reach. Ray, this is where your network is the difference. We need farmers who will stay with the trial through a full season, who understand what we are doing and why, and who are growing crops that matter at scale. Across years two, three, four, and five, expanding those relationships across more crops and more of America is the single most important thing we can do outside the laboratory. We are not asking to take over anyone's operation. The trial footprint is small. A single acre, or a defined section of an existing field, treated with our consortium versus an untreated control running alongside it under the farmer's standard programme. That is the comparison. We can expand beyond one acre where the farmer is willing and the land allows, and we would encourage that, but the minimum ask is modest. One section. One season. The data does the rest.
We are not limiting ourselves to one type of farmer. Our microbes are relevant across the full spectrum. Conventional farmers spending heavily on synthetic fertilizers represent the largest land mass under cultivation in America. Converting even a portion of that ground to a more biologically active, lower-input approach would be one of the most significant things we could do for the soil. The economic argument is there, a direct and demonstrable input cost saving, but it is secondary to the bigger picture. These are the farmers working the most acres. If the biology works on their ground, and we can show it does, the cumulative impact on soil health across the country is enormous. Farmers already working with low till, no till, organic compost, or manure-based fertility systems are the integration argument: our biology fits within what they are already doing and can show what happens when the microbial layer is added to an already regenerative approach. Ray, you already have relationships with farmers moving in this direction. Identifying where our consortium fits within those operations is as important as the conventional conversion story. One perspective is not enough. We want our microbes working across all facets of farming.
As the trial data accumulates, we will be writing and publishing. This is not something that happens at the end of the programme. It happens throughout it, as each season's genomic analysis comes back and each crop comparison is completed. The published record is the foundation everything else is built on. It is what makes the education credible, what protects the science from being dismissed, and what makes our formulations defensible when we eventually take them to market at scale against deeply entrenched industry interests.
At some point during this programme, possibly 2027, possibly 2028, we will begin educating publicly. Social media, long-form content, accessible explanations of what soil microbiology is, why it matters, and what the data is showing. Ray has spent his career proving that education is the most powerful force for changing how farmers think about the ground. We believe the same. But education without evidence behind it is just opinion, and opinion does not move the industry we are trying to move. We are not putting a date on this yet because the date will choose itself. When we have enough data to back up what we are saying publicly, we will say it. Until then, we are building quietly, deliberately, and with our heads down. The work comes first. The story follows the work.
By the end of the five-year programme, the goal is a published body of field evidence across multiple crops and soil types, a formulation that has been built and validated organism by organism, and products positioned at the points in the programme where the data is strong enough to stand behind them properly. We are not rushing to market. We are building something that lasts. When we do go to scale, we will be going with evidence that cannot be dismissed, against an industry that has held the ground for decades. That is the plan. Everything we are doing now is the foundation for it.
"The earth is the Lord's, and everything in it."
Psalm 24:1
We are stewards of it. Not owners. The work we are doing, returning living biology to degraded ground and giving farmers back something that was taken from them, feels, to both of us, like more than agronomy. We mention it not to preach, but because it is true, and because we think you will understand exactly what we mean.