F
or years, growers would ask me 
the same question after a field 
trial. We’d found a microbe that 
made their crop healthier, more pro­
ductive, and they’d ask if they could 
get the product for their own farm. I 
had to tell them no, because this was 
“just research.”
I said that more times than I can 
count, and every time, it bothered 
me a little more. In the meantime, 
I was writing federal grants, and in 
every single one I wrote the same 
sentence: This work will make agri­
culture better.
One day, I looked honestly at 
what I had done with that funding. 
I had published papers and taught 
students, but it wasn’t enough for 
me. I wanted to make a bigger 
impact for farmers.
It wasn’t a funding problem, 
but a problem with the approach. 
The industry was only asking one 
question about microbes: What can 
this one do? But that’s the chem­
istry question, and it comes with a 
chemistry answer. You isolate an 
active ingredient, deploy it broadly, 
and expect it to perform the same 
way everywhere. Microbes don’t 
work like that. They’re living organ­
isms, and living things exist in inter­
active partnerships. A microbe’s 
usefulness depends on who it is 
with and whether it can colonize a 
root, persist through a season, and 
function inside a soil community 
that’s already been operating suc­
cessfully for a very long time. The 
... living things exist in 
	 interactive partnerships... 
BIOLOGICALS
complex interactions among microbes within the soil community are key to 
the effectiveness of the community in supporting crop health and produc­
tivity. Deploy a microbial inoculant like it’s chemistry, and you get exactly 
what the industry keeps getting: a result that worked 
once, with no way to predict when it doesn’t.
That reframing is what sent me to my universi­
ty’s technology commercialization office instead 
of back to my lab. I had a library of thousands 
of microbial isolates, built over 30+ years 
of asking how these organisms behave 
together in real soils. What I didn’t have 
yet was a way to put that library to work 
outside of a research paper. That’s why 
we started Jord.
Since then, Jord and our big goals 
have grown in ways that I would not 
have predicted. We are pioneering 
microbial activator technology, utilizing 
microbial inoculants to stimulate the 
full potential of the soil microbiome 
to support crop productivity. We’re 
active on substantial row crop acre­
age, moving into specialty crops, and 
bringing new products to the market 
that offer a clear return on investment 
for both commercial partners and the 
farmers we all serve.
The acreage and company growth 
are wonderful, but the ultimate goal is 
changing the model for the entire industry. 
I want to see all of us moving past this idea 
of a single magic microbe doing all the work, and 
toward an ecology-first approach built on the under­
standing that microbes need the right partners to colonize, persist, and 
perform. Do that well, and we won’t just have grown a company. We’ll have 
helped move an industry past a habit it should have broken a long time ago. 
If you’re a seed or biological company still deploying microbes the old way 
inside your pipeline, know that our library and process aren’t sitting in my 
lab. They’re built and ready to be shared.
Linda Kinkel
Founder and Chief Science Officer, Jord BioScience
OCTOBER 2026  SEEDWORLD.COM /  33

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