The team behind North Texas-based diversified agricultural holding company BPS Agriculture has launched a venture that wants to help farmers reduce their environmental impact while increasing profitability.

Called PureAcre, the new startup will focus on bringing high-performance management products—like Earth-friendly biostimulants and nutritionals—to field crop growers. The intent is to significantly improve nutrient delivery and boost plant performance, while solving huge challenges that often come with large-scale farming.

Those challenges include how to reduce farming’s environmental footprint while at the same time improving a grower’s economics.

With PureAcre’s agricultural products, which use its proprietary technology called OpusMAX, and a more advanced delivery system for nutrients and biostimulants, the startup believes it can do so.

For instance: PureAcre’s forthcoming nutrient enhancer, Augere, can allow farmers to maximize their fertility dollars, Technical Director David Coorts told us. For many in North Texas that struggle with soil fertility, Augere would make the nutrients applied to their crops more available for uptake and utilization by the crop.

“Ag extension agents have cited that soil samples in the DFW area have seen a decline in phosphorus or potassium content over the years,” Coorts told Dallas Innovates. “In some cases, this can be driven by a perfect economic and environmental storm: average crop yields increase, but low commodity prices result in growers reducing fertility inputs to maintain profitability.” 

PureAcre products aim to specifically help with three main nutrients: nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium. Coorts said the startup is able to assist growers in maintaining low use-rates while increasing the utilization per crop. That remediates soil fertility issues.

The goal is to improve the performance of seaweed extract, humic acid, and terrestrial plant extracts by double-digit percentage points. Humic acid and seaweed extracts, which account for 60 percent of the global biostimulant market, are commonly used to increase nutrient use efficiency.

In leveraging such Earth-friendly materials and OpusMAX, PureAcre should enable growers to improve their results in an eco-friendly way. According to the startup, OpusMAX demonstrated a significant increase in biomass when added to humic acid and seaweed extract products during internal and third-party lab tests.

The results were two-fold: There was better performance at lower use rates, benefiting growers and the environment.

“The results we’ve seen have been profound,” Coorts said. “When we incorporate OpusMAX with seaweed extract and humic acid, we have seen an impact of 25 and 35 percent increase in plant mass, respectively.”

PureAcre is taking on a large feat, especially considering today’s growers are getting increasingly concerned about environmental impact. John Appel, president of PureAcre, points out that around 6 million tons of nitrogen in the U.S. are lost through volatilization, run-off, leaching, and other pathways.

That’s simply not sustainable.

“As crop yields increase to meet global food production demands, fertilizer rates would increase to support those needs with today’s technology,” Coorts said. “Our goal is to deliver higher yields through increased nutrient utilization.”

PureAcre’s go-to-market strategy is to offer agriculture retailers the option to directly sell PureAcre-branded products, partner with the startup on their own private-label products, or license OpusMax.

The team currently consists of Coorts and Appel, who are planning to relocate to Argyle once the new BPS Technology campus is open. There, PureAcre will incubate and perform R&D at the BPS Technology site.

The new startup joins Verano365 and Farm Shield in BPS Agriculture’s portfolio of companies

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