Pinion: The key to protecting crops from fungal and bacterial pathogens | A New Production from AEA

Well, hi, friends. Welcome. Welcome to our conversation. Today I'm going to be talking about a new product that I'm very excited about and I've. I've shared some clips and some of the work that has been happening with Pinyon. And I'm pretty excited to talk about the very first biocontrol product that we're releasing here at aea. This is something that, thanks to other priorities always seeming to take precedence, this has been sitting on the shelf here for AEA in a while. I developed an early version of Pinion. Now, it's got to be at least 15 years ago, but the technology has continued to improve and we've kind of incubated it in a slow way. It's really been fast tracked by our team here more recently. We put it out into the field this summer on a number of different crops and last year as well. So we now have two years of field experience with it. And I'm quite excited to talk about it because of the, because of the regulatory environment around biocontrol products. And I just have this, this indoctrination from our regulatory team that we need to be very, very diplomatic and very cautious about how we talk about these technologies and this information, both from an intellectual property protection perspective, but also from, from a, from a regulatory perspective. I, I have to be there. I have to be a bit cautious about how I frame certain conversations and the things that I say. So if I, if you ask any questions, and I know for all of you who've listened to my presentation in the past, you know that I prefer to be very candid and direct and answer questions very directly. So if it appears that I'm answering questions indirectly instead of directly, that is probably why. Well, that's almost certainly why, because it's, it's something that I, it's kind of my, my natural communication style is just to be very clear and direct about what it is that we know and what is it that we think we know and what it is that we know, we don't know. So that's bit of a. An overview of the context of where we are in the. In the overall landscape and ecosystem of what it is that we're learning about Pinion. So let me share my screen here and give you a quick review of what we've been working on. So Pinyon is a, a biocontrol that, as I understand its various mechanisms and modes of action. And we are still learning about them. To be clear. We, we are. This is one scenario where we think we know A number of different modes of action that we are in the process of, of validating and verifying. But there are, there are, there are multiple dimensions of the impact that Pinyon has. And because of that, because of its extremely multimode of action, it will have an effect on both. It's a very broad spectrum for both fungal diseases and bacterial diseases. And it's interesting, we're still trying to discover where the outer boundaries are and where the limitations are. Can this be effective against bacterial diseases in vascular tissue, for example, such as with fire blight or bacterial canker or Pierce's disease or citrus greening, etc. It's, it's very possible because some of the. I mean, the mechanisms that we believe to be the. The key effective mechanisms certainly do work through a plant's vascular tissue. They are not just present in leaves. They're present throughout plant structure and throughout plan physiology. So it's not outside the realm of possibility. But we haven't established that for certain yet. We do not know that. So the point that I want to make is that it is very broad spectrum. There are many different diseases that we haven't yet tried it on. For those that we have tried it on, I have been immensely delighted with our track record of success at this point. So let's get into some of that. So what is pinion? Because of its multiple modes of action, we expect it to be effective against a very broad range. It is an extremely safe product to use. It is a true liquid. So it's unlike some of our suspension technology. It is, I suppose you could call it idiot proof or accident proof. From an application technology perspective, it's very kind to screens and filters and so forth. And from a, from a safety perspective, I of course, know how the product is formulated. So I'm not allowed to say that I would be willing to drink it. But it is, it's a product that is extremely safe. And there is an official regulatory designation that. For which I forget exactly what it is right now, what the designation is called to meet the safety criteria and why we've been able to fast track the regulatory process to get it registered in a number of different states is because of the safety of the ingredients that it's comprised of. So, in essence, you know, when you consider the disease triangle, the disease triangle requires three things. It requires an optimal environment for the pathogen. It requires the presence of a pathogen and a susceptible host. And many of you, I would expect, are probably familiar with some of the approaches that we've taken with, with insect resistance. Where we are simply using nutrition management and changing the plant's metabolic profile, changing the amino acid profile and the carbohydrate profile in such a way that we, we remove the plant as being considered as a viable food source for the insect. In other words, there is still a host present, but the host becomes, I suppose you could say, no longer susceptible. So it is a host, but it's no longer a susceptible host. And opinion has a similar effect in that as we understand it. And again here I'm speaking very diplomatically and cautiously, but as we understand it, there are from kind of, from a macro perspective, there are three different macro mechanisms in play and there are a number of sub mechanisms within each one of these. But the one macro mechanism is that it changes the redox environment on the leaf surface and also to a degree. And this, there's a lot of variability here depending on crop context and its oxidative stress that it's supposed to, that it is exposed to. But it can also change the redox environment quite rapidly within the plant, again to a degree context dependent. So that is, that is the one macro mechanism. And if you're familiar with Olivier Husson's research work and the, the work that he has done on developing his redox map of susceptibility of various pathogens, this is one of the mechanisms that we are essentially changing the redox environment on the plant leaf surface and within the leaf fairly rapidly. And so that is one of the, one of the observations from people who've used Pinyon with a number of different diseases is the speed of response that occasionally in some contexts, and again this will not be a universally applicable outcome I wouldn't expect in some context, in some scenarios there's an extremely rapid response. Like within 24 to 48 hours there's this extremely rapid disease suppressive response. And as I understand the various macro mechanisms that are contained within Pinyon, the only one, the only category of mechanisms that can produce that rapid of a response are these redox mechanisms where we're changing the redox environment. So that's one kind of macro category. The second macro category is changing the expression of the microbiome that is on the leaf surface and inside the leaf and all the associated endophytes that are associated with the leaf and with these various plants. And here again the, the response, because you have such a broad array of different endophytes and different plant species in different environments, it's kind of the best that I can do at the moment is to just generalize very Broadly and to say that as we understand it, we are changing the genetic expression and the, the composition to some degree of the microbiome that is within the leaf and on the leaf. And that that change in composition is a reflection of as, as you add various microbial metabolites and as you add different compounds to a leaf surface, then you have, you create an environment that is selective in favor of some microbes and not others. And the objective in the case of pinyin is that we create an environment where we had this proliferation of this group of organisms that are known as phytosanitary organisms or phytosanitary bacteria, and that there is an effect, there's both an out competition component, but there's also direct antagonism where the, the microbes that are naturally present on the leaf surface and within the leaf are able to in effect out compete or to antagonize any potential pathogens. So that is the, the second kind of broad category of our, of my current understanding of the way the mechanisms and the way that I believe pinion to be effective. And then the, the third kind of group of mechanisms is activation of the plant's various immune pathways. So once we start looking at MRNA signaling, we start looking at which immune pathways are being activated by pinyin. And again, there's lots of generalities here and variation between different crops and different environments, which is, I'm speaking very broadly here, but we're seeing some, in some cases quite dramatic changes in plant expression, plant leaf expression and changes in, I suppose you could say, genetic or epigenetic expression, which we're seeing at a very macro level. At a high level, we are seeing changes in genetic expression that indicate a very strong activation of a number of immune pathways. And we're still in the process of documenting what all might be happening in different scenarios with different crops. So if you think about what I just described with these various mechanisms or groups of mechanisms from a macro perspective, with the exception of, of redox changes on the leaf surface, those changes can be quite rapid, but they can also be quite temporary. Depending on how the plant and the microbial community metabolizes pinyon as it has been applied or after it's been applied, that effect in a plant that's exposed to a lot of oxidative stress, that effect might only last for 24 to 48 hours. It might have an effect on arresting the disease, but it can be very temporary. And then the potential pathogen can continue to proliferate. And I'm bringing this forward because as we are learning more about These various mechanisms and modes of action. Oh, I guess I was one slide ahead of myself here. As we understand these various mechanisms, the two groups which really have long lasting impact, I'm not sure if we have this here on the slide deck. I might speak about this a bit as well. But these groups or these, these mechanisms that have a long lasting impact are mechanisms that take some time to fully express. So if you think about changing the microbiome composition on the leaf surface or the endophytes within the leaf, this is not something that happens overnight. It takes a period of time, it might take a few days, it might take a week or more. And changes to genetic expression and MRNA activation, the changes can occur fairly rapidly, but the full expression of those various plant immune mechanisms can also take a period of time, a few days to a week or more, depending on plant growth rate, oxidative stress, all the various environmental factors that plants are exposed to. So what all of this means is these, we have this, this one mechanism or one group of mechanisms that is quite fast acting. And the two that have, but can be temporary, the two that have the most significant and long lasting effects take some time to really activate and an expression. I had this conversation with Greg Pennyroy on the podcast. He was one of the growers that experimented with Kenyon in a small way last year. And they, Greg was very pleased and very impressed with being able to put on a single application opinion at the beginning of powdery mildew susceptibility season and having it, if I'm remembering my, my Greg's experience correctly, he had it out and that single application over a period of six week peak susceptibility window outperformed repeat applications of other products that it was being compared against in some, I think in the cases of some products, as many as five applications. And so the reason for that long lasting effect is because of these two macro changes of microbiome composition and epigenetic expression. But the caveat again is that these changes in plant metabolism are a reflection of, of everything that's happening in the ecosystem. They are a reflection of the microbial environment, the microbiome environment that the plant has and is surrounded with natively. They are a reflection of that plant's inherent genetic resilience. They're a reflection of the macro environment, the growing environment, oxidative stress and so forth. And I'm just pointing this out to say that the experience that Greg had where he put on one application and got a six week or an eight week effectiveness treatment window isn't necessarily Universal, that is that is somewhat ecosystem and context dependent. In other words, your mileage is likely to vary. In some ecosystems or in some contexts, opinion may need to be applied as frequently as a conventional fungicide. In other contexts, one application may outperform four applications of fungicide. And also the key point that I wanted to iterate is because of this kind of activation period for peak epigenetic immune system response and, and peak microbiome response, it is much wiser to use pinyon proactively. If you've been listening to our work for a while and to my work and how we think about conventional fungicide and insecticide applications, I'm generally if we really desire to build and regenerate soil biology, I'm generally in favor of waiting to use most fungicides until absolutely necessary and do not apply them prophylactically because our experience generally is that when you apply them as a preventative, they actually increase susceptibility later on in the season. And pinyin is the exact opposite of that. It will have the opposite effect. Applying it early will actually enhance immunity and will have a sustained long term effect. So we're, we're still in the process of, of learning mechanisms and modes of action and doing a lot of data collection. So but I wanted to just provide some preliminary anecdotes of the results that farmers are experiencing. This. This one was in organic vineyard wine grape production. They applied stylet oil four times to the entire vineyard and this was before they received pinion. Once they received opinion and received approval for use, the control treatment continued to receive three more additional style up oil applications. And the pinion treatment got two applications of pinion at four quarts an acre. And that resulted the treated versus the control on that resulted in 39% of the observed clusters in the treatment block. In other words, the stylet oil had active mildew infestations while only 31% did in the treated block. And so we got effectively an 8% effective percentage reduction in powdery mildew in the cluster itself. But the key point here, I actually expect that number would have been a lot higher if we would have been able to get pinyin applied earlier. But because it was already present, the infection was already present. And there's this delayed reaction reactivity perspective, there's some time perspective there. And that's why I expect we didn't see a bigger response otherworld I would have in another scenario where we would have been able to apply it earlier, I would have expected to see a much bigger response. So and of course a greater Reduction in severity as well. This is what that looks like when you, when you take these numbers. Whoops. When you take these numbers and look at what they look like visually, there's a pretty significant difference in, in the mildew infestation and the coverage of the overall berry. This is in Temecula. Believe this was with Greg Pennyroyal, a control block that was treated with conventional fungicides, treatment block that was treated with pinyon. This crop has very high disease pressure. I'm sure we'll be. I'll be in California talking to a group of wine growers in November. I'm sure Greg is going to be speaking about the experience that he had there because I can't communicate the story nearly as effectively as he is able to. But this, this variety, this block is very powdery mildew susceptible. Two years ago they had complete crop loss. And with opinion application, we were. Pedro was able to observe only a single grape with powdery mildew in a year with fairly intense powdery mildew pressure this summer. So this is Jim Dunlop on a, on a pet project at home with a pumpkin crop and powdery mildew. And this is trying to recall the timeline. I think this is the exact same leaf or leaves on the same plant that were treated and untreated. Maybe it's two different plants. Leaves and two different plants that were treated and untreated. 21 days after the treatment with Pinyin, there's this continued regression, stabilization and then regression of powdery mildew. And here's one that I find quite interesting personally. This is fire blight. And this is why earlier in the conversation I brought up these various mechanisms and modes. These macro mechanisms can also be effective in plant vascular tissue, not on the leaf surface. So we can't give credit here to pinyon alone because pinion wasn't applied alone. It was also applied with nutrition with the macro pack and micro pack and rebound manganese and rebound iron. So these, you have the photo on the left that was taken on September 22nd and then a week apart on the 30th and 10th, 6th of the exact same location. And you can visually observe the regression of the fire blight symptoms and leaf expansion of what? Of a leaf. And a tip that if we were followed to follow a logical progression of fire blight would be completely dead at this point. So we're still actively learning about pinyon. What the preliminary knowledge and information, the experiences that we have at this point are very promising and very exciting to say the least. The piece that I'm intrigued about and Again, I don't expect this to necessarily hold true in all environments. But if even 70% of the time or 80% of the time, if we can put on one application of Pinyon proactively and replace the need for multiple fungicide applications later, that's probably not going to happen on every farm and every crop context. But I think it can happen quite frequently. If that happens, that is. First of all, there is this significant ecosystem improvement in health, there's a significant improvement in crop health, but there's also a significant reduction in cost for growers that a single application opinion can be a whole lot less expensive than two or three or four, half a dozen applications of a fungicide, depending on the context. So, and as I think perhaps a key point, it's somewhat implied in what I said up to this point, but what we're essentially communicating is that because of these macro mechanisms and modes of action, Pinyin has the it triggers a systemic effect throughout the plant that can survive in the long term if, if that plant is supported with the right nutrition, with the right microbiome, that so they can support a sustained response. So that's it. That concludes the the presentation. I'm going to switch to Q and A and answer any questions that you might have. So let's see here. Question from Jared what is the status of this product for usage in certified organic production needs to be reviewed and approved by our certifier? I'm not sure exactly what the status is and haven't been a part of the conversations yet around possible Omri certification but. Or well yeah, there's a whole conversation there. But it needs to be reviewed and approved by our certifier. But it is NOP compliant and has already been reviewed and approved by several organic certifying agencies. Is it possible to use this to use Pinyon in combination with other products for periods of severe crop stress such as after a hail such as after a hailstorm. And the answer is yes, you can combine it with nutrition products. You can combine it with other AEA products. You saw the example on on the Fireblight treatment where it was applied in combination with nutrition. So you can apply it in combination with nutrition. The only thing that I would suggest caution of and again we are still very much in the learning phase but when you think about the that one macro group impact of it's having an impact on the Redox environment, the implications of that are that I would suggest avoiding at least until we learn more. But for now I would suggest avoiding it, avoiding tank mixing it with A product that is a strong oxidizer. So I'm sure you're all familiar with what strong oxidizers would be, but they could be products such as elemental sulfur, strong oxidizing agents such as potassium nitrate for example. And so at this, to be clear, at this point we don't have evidence that it doesn't work in combination with those elements because obviously it would still have the second and third macro group of mechanisms, but we don't know yet. We don't have experience. And so what I know about that first type of impact, I would just suggest exercising caution by tank mixing it with any strong oxidizing agents. Question from Brian. Is this a biocontrol product that had to go through EPA registration? It's a good question, Brian. And I should have prepped in advance of this. This is actually, I forget exactly what the category is. It's like 25B or something like that. But it is composed of ingredients that are recognized as being safe that they are exempt from going through the EPA registration process. So we've been able to accelerate and fast track registration and get this product out into the field much more rapidly because of that. But I do expect that as we continue to develop as a company and develop further financial resources, then here's Kish Class 25B. Thank you Kish. Then we will at some point go through that registration process as well. Can it be used on fruit trees and berries? Yes it can. There is no roi, there is no pre harvest interval. And pinion be used with foliar inoculants. A question here from bryce. Such as micro 5000 compost extract, etc. Would there be a benefit since it is modifying the microbiome? That's an interesting question, Bryce. Hypothetically, yes, it will selectively, just broadly as we understand it, its impacts from a redox perspective, from a disease suppressive perspective, you can apply it in combination with microbial inoculants and I would expect it to accelerate the development of those microbial inoculants. But to be clear, it's not something that we have a lot of data on that we're prepared to publish or to really talk about at this point. There's still a lot of need for additional trial work and additional data development in that, in that space. But conceptually, as I understand the mechanisms, the modes of action, yes, it should complement the applications of foliar inoculants very, very well. Let me question from Lisa. If applying as a preventative early implant growth phase, will the immune response transfer to new Leaf growth or are repeated applications necessary on the new leaves? Ah, Lisa, this is an awesome question. Thank you for asking me that question. This is actually one of the things that made me do a bit of a double take on one of our treatments last year was on newly planted wine grapes that were a year old that had, these were in a very high rainfall environment and they had severe downy mildew pressure. By the time the product arrived and they applied it, there was already significant leaf loss from the downy mildew pressure that had already been present. And so the, the new growth emerged. This was after application. There was one application made on the old foliage. Um, that application caused the disease to shut down over, I'd say about a week or so period. But at that point there was already significant leaf damage. Those old leaves dropped then over a several week period following the application, and there was this flush of new growth that came out. And over the remainder of the season there was about 3 to 4ft of new growth on these, on these new vines. And, and the new growth had this glossy, waxy sheen on the leaf surface. And this, this was one of the experiences that I kind of made an obtuse reference to earlier where there was the, this physiological appearance that is associated with a very strong genetic immune response. And so yes, it does, at least in that particular instance, it obviously transferred into the new growth because the new growth that emerged, even though we had this continued high rainfall, high humidity environment, that new growth did not express the disease susceptibility that, that pretty much decimated the vegetation that was there when the initial application, the only application was made. It's an outstanding question. See a comment here from Chris. Must be salicylic acid. There is no salicylic acid in the product, not as an ingredient or as a metabolite. Doesn't show up at all. Question from Bryce. Does pinion move in the plant or is it critical to have uniform droplet coverage on the leaf top, bottom penetration into grape clusters? So Bryce, because of the, because of the mechanisms that are internal, or let's say you could say genetic activation, epigenetic activation, MRNA expression or microbiome structure there, there, the effect obviously does transfer. We already talked about that a little bit. But if you have, let's say you're in a scenario where you have the early stages of an infection occurring of downy or powdery mildew or some type of disease, you still want to get coverage that is relatively uniform and fairly good coverage because you want to protect the entire leaf as rapidly as possible. So I would still be in favor of getting good coverage. Unless you're doing very proactive preventative early treatments, then that becomes a lot less important. Question, Thomas. Do you plan on releasing it in smaller quantities? Yes, it will be available in smaller quantities. Can it be used in furrow? It's a good question, Kyle. I don't know the answer. We haven't tried it in furrow. The genetic expression changes when it is absorbed by a root. I would expect to be similar. There will be some similar responses in terms of microbiome responses, but it's very possible that because the product is now diluted in a bulk soil environment that your response will be much less than if it is applied as a foliar. But we don't know. We don't have the experience and I don't. I don't have an informed opinion or perspective on that. Question from Jared. What effect does pinyin have on nutritional integrity and a nutrient nutritional density of plants? Thinking ahead to your presentation tomorrow. Thanks, Jared. We're gonna have fun tomorrow. The. Well, it has pinion has a very positive effect on the microbiome and has a very positive effect on plant genetic expression, both of which are going to contribute to better efficiency of absorbing nutrients from the soil. So that's the way that I would think about that. Question from Lisa. Can you please discuss the shelf life and storage requirements? So we're taking a very conservative approach here and suggesting that we have a shelf life of 12 to 18 months. Given what I understand about the product formulation and the way that I expect it to perform on the shelf over a period of time, I actually expect it's going to be much longer than 12 to 18 months in good storage conditions, which essentially is not freezing and not too warm, not above, let's say, 75 to 80 degrees Fahrenheit and out of direct sunlight and so forth. So I expect it to be longer than that, but we don't have the data to support that. So I can't say that at this point because we don't have product that's been around long enough for us to be able to say that definitively. So I think that's a wrap on the questions that have come through when as you use pinion. I really believe that from what we've observed in pinion so far, this is going to move the needle for fungicide applications and has the capacity to replace a lot of synthetic fungicide applications because from what we're observing, this product has the capacity to outperform conventional fungicides in most situations. And it's. It appears also be an effective treatment for bacterial control, of which, as we know, there are not a lot of products out there that are effective for control of potential bacterial pathogens. So I'm extremely optimistic about how I expect to see this product continue to perform and the data that develops and as you use it, we'd love to hear from you what have your experience has been and in particular, if it doesn't perform, obviously we want to hear when it does perform well, but we also want to hear when it doesn't perform so well, because this is a product similar to many of the other biocontrol products. It is a softer product where its effectiveness is to some degree a reflection of where the plant and the soil ecosystem is to begin with. One of the things that we've known about biocontrol products for a long time is that the better a plant is supported with good nutritional support, the stronger the response to abiocontrol is. And the same is almost certainly going to be true of Pinyin as well. And so whenever you have an experience where pinyin does not perform as you would have expected or desired it to, or perhaps you haven't gotten the six or eight weeks of control that other people have experienced, we would particularly like to hear about those and to learn about those settings so that we can better understand what are the, what are the particular contexts in terms of tank mixes and disease or disease and crop and soil and environment combinations that opinion has been less effective in. So I want to say thank you to everyone for all the work that you're doing. Please do get some opinion from us, try it out, and let us know how it works, and let other people know on social media how it's working for you as well, because we know that one of the significant challenges in regenerating our soil health, regenerating soil microbial communities, regenerating plant health so that we have ever greater yield and productivity responses is the very detrimental impact that conventional fungicide applications have on soil biology. And if we can have a viable product that replaces the need for conventional fungicides and even outperforms them and is more economical, this will have significant positive benefits for regenerating soil health and improving the quality of the food that we're producing generally. So thank you all for all the work that you're doing. And also I would ask that you please share opinion with other people, spread the word, let other people know about what we've been working on, what we've been up to, and connect with our team at AEA if you have any follow up questions and look forward to hearing from you all. Thank you all. Happy Growing.