Abstract
The drug delivery myth has crept into agrochemical R&D — promising precision, smart targeting, and breakthrough efficacy. But crop protection doesn’t happen in a bloodstream.
In this article, I explain why the future of formulation doesn’t lie in borrowed metaphors, but in real agrochemical science — grounded in field performance, biological compatibility, and formulation know-how.
✔ What actually enhances biological efficacy in the field?
✔ What’s the role of surfactants, co-formulants, and adjuvants?
✔ How can R&D move forward with innovation that truly fits?
Let’s bring the focus back to where it belongs: the field, the formulation, and results that matter.
BEYOND THE METAPHOR.
In recent years, a growing number of agrochemical companies have embraced the language of pharmaceuticals to market their latest pesticide formulations. Terms like “targeted delivery,” “controlled release,” and “nano-formulation” now appear across product presentations and R&D pipelines — as if crop protection were simply a matter of applying drug delivery principles to the field. The promise? Dramatic — even tenfold or hundredfold improvements in biological efficacy — through such approaches. It sounds impressive. But it’s also deeply misleading.
Plants are not patients. We don’t deliver actives into bloodstreams or guide them to tumors through molecular targeting. In reality, pesticides are applied to open, uncontrolled environments and must act on external organisms — often through complex biological barriers, in the presence of rain, UV radiation, volatile losses, and shifting pest populations. The variables are extreme, the targets are exposed, and the real success of a formulation hinges on robust physical chemistry, environmental resilience, resistance management, and biological compatibility with the target organism.
The problem of this “drug delivery” narrative isn’t just that it oversimplifies. It’s not merely a case of clever marketing language — it represents a fundamentally misleading direction that risks steering the R&D strategies of major companies and well-funded academic groups alike toward concepts that are scientifically inappropriate for agriculture. Too often, this shift is driven not by field insight or formulation science, but by top-down fascination with fashionable cross-sector analogies, disconnected from the operational realities of pesticide performance.
In agrochemistry, efficacy isn’t achieved through inspiration from medicine. It’s earned through iterative testing, field tuning, and formulation strategies built for the realities of agricultural systems. This article rejects the misplaced enthusiasm around drug delivery analogies — and brings the discussion back to where it belongs: the actual science of making pesticides work better in the field.
PLANTS ARE NOT PATIENTS: THE DRUG DELIVERY MYTH IN AGROCHEMICAL MARKETING.
The appeal of the drug delivery metaphor lies in its familiarity. In the world of medicine, targeted delivery conjures images of precision treatments: molecules designed to seek out specific receptors, guided through bloodstreams to diseased tissues, activated by internal signals — a triumph of molecular engineering within a controlled biological system.
But crop protection doesn’t work like that. And it never has.
Pesticides are not injected into crops. They are sprayed, coated, or applied to the soil — and from the moment of application, they are exposed to an open and hostile environment. There is no circulatory system to guide the active ingredient to a specific organ, no uniform biological pH or enzyme signature to trigger release, and no immune system to assist in the targeting. What we face instead are cuticles, waxy layers, unpredictable weather, inconsistent pest pressure, evaporation, photodegradation, and complex plant surfaces.
In medicine, you treat an internal system. In agriculture, you treat an ecosystem.
Even systemic pesticides — often cited as the closest parallel to drug delivery — move passively through xylem or phloem, not toward a defined target site, and certainly not under receptor-driven mechanisms. Their transport is governed by physicochemical gradients and environmental influences, not molecular recognition. The “delivery” is diffuse, and always vulnerable to being lost before reaching the target. And unlike patients, crops can’t be dozed twice daily under controlled conditions. Farmers get one shot — and that shot must survive everything from rainfall to solar radiation to microbial breakdown before it ever contacts the biological target.
On top of that, we face a challenge unknown in human therapy: resistance not just as a medical concern, but as an evolved ecological defense. Insects, fungi, and weeds develop enzymatic systems and metabolic pathways to degrade or eject pesticides — a built-in resistance mechanism that must be overcome by formulation science, not by molecular targeting.
The metaphor fails not just biologically, but functionally. It overlooks the hard realities that make agrochemical formulation a discipline of its own — one where the challenges are not about delivering molecules to internal tissues, but about getting them through barriers, keeping them stable, and outmaneuvering the target’s natural defenses.
If we’re serious about efficacy, we must stop pretending that drug delivery principles can be repurposed for pesticide development. The systems are fundamentally different — and pretending otherwise leads to wasted resources, distracted R&D, and missed opportunities for real innovation.
FICTION AND FUNCTION: WHAT ACTUALLY ENHANCES PESTICIDE PERFORMANCE.
If we set aside the metaphors, what are the real methods by which formulation science enhances the biological efficacy of pesticides in the field? The answer lies not in abstract targeting concepts, but in two well-established and complementary strategies grounded in agrochemical science:
Synergistic strategies, which aim to enhance the biological interaction between the active ingredient and the target organism by improving penetration, uptake, or overcoming resistance mechanisms.
Protective strategies, which aim to preserve the active ingredient’s availability and integrity under environmental stressors such as UV light, rainfall, volatility, and pH extremes.
These two approaches define the real foundation of efficacy enhancement in modern crop protection — and both can be implemented in different ways depending on the product and application system. These strategies can be applied either within the formulation itself or externally via tank mix additives. When integrated into the formulation, they are part of the product’s designed performance. When added by the user at the point of application, they are referred to collectively as adjuvants.
Despite the different points of intervention, the underlying mechanisms are the same: whether built into the product or added at the spray tank, the goal is to optimize how the active ingredient behaves between application and biological action.
In the real world, biological performance depends on the pesticide's ability to reach, interact with, and persist on or in the target pest or plant. The barriers are physical — waxy cuticles, hydrophobic leaf surfaces, insect cuticles, fungal cell walls — as well as environmental (UV, rain, wind), and biological (metabolic resistance mechanisms, pest avoidance). And it’s here — in overcoming these barriers — that adjuvants and formulation systems do their real work.
Some strategies enhance the entry and interaction of the A.I. with the target: surfactants that improve wetting and spreading, oils that aid penetration, organosilicons that flood stomata, or synergists like PBO that inhibit pest detoxification enzymes. Others focus on protecting the A.I. in the field, delaying wash-off, reducing volatility, buffering pH, or screening UV light to slow degradation. Whether embedded in the product or added externally, these approaches are not theoretical — they are practical, validated tools of formulation science.
Here’s the reality: real efficacy improvements through formulation are rarely dramatic — and certainly never the kind of tenfold or hundredfold jumps sometimes implied by overreaching claims. When optimized carefully, synergistic strategies can improve efficacy by 10 to 30%, and in some cases, restore it to previous levels in the face of resistance — but this is recovery, not breakthrough. Protective strategies typically preserve 5 to 15% of efficacy that would otherwise be lost under environmental stress. And even these figures must be understood in context. In agronomic practice, ±100% variability in field efficacy is not only common — it’s expected. Pest pressure, weather conditions, application timing, and crop stage all influence performance. It’s entirely possible to see a formulation perform brilliantly one season and deliver average results the next, with no change to the chemistry. That’s the nature of working in open biological systems.
So, any claim of improvement must be viewed through the lens of this natural variability. A few percentage points gained — and statistically sustained across trials — is a real success. But it’s also a reminder: the true measure of efficacy isn’t what happens in a controlled lab test, or even in a small plot trial — it’s what contributes to real, measurable yield at the end of the growing season.
For those who want a deeper dive into adjuvants and their chemistry and functionality, I’ve provided a full review at: https://michberk.com/adjuvantsinagriculture.aspx.
And while the foundations of efficacy remain consistent, there is room — and need — for real technological progress. But such progress must emerge from within the agrochemical discipline itself: new co-formulants, improved formulation systems, and smarter application strategies — all grounded in biological realism, field conditions, and formulation science, not in metaphors borrowed from medicine.
BRINGING IT BACK TO THE FIELD: WHAT ACTUALLY MATTERS.
At the end of the day, pesticide performance is not measured in theoretical models or conceptual breakthroughs — it's measured in the field. A formulation succeeds only if it achieves consistent, repeatable control under real agricultural conditions: variable weather, uneven pest pressure, and operational constraints that no laboratory simulation can fully replicate.
We don’t work in controlled systems. We work in environments where pest pressure can double or disappear in a week, where a rain event or a shift in humidity can change absorption dynamics completely. That’s why any evaluation of efficacy must start — and end — with reality.
A formulation that can provide a consistent few percent gain across such conditions is not a marginal improvement — it’s a real achievement. And if it does so while maintaining environmental stability and supporting resistance management, it’s an advance worth paying attention to. The only thing that truly counts in this equation is what reaches the crop, survives the conditions, and secures the yield.
A VISION FOR FORMULATION R&D IN CROP PROTECTION.
The future of crop protection depends on the ability to turn scientific insight into practical formulations that meet real agricultural needs — reliably, efficiently, and sustainably. As challenges grow more complex — from pest resistance to environmental restrictions to climate variability — the demand for high-performance formulations has never been greater.
This is the role of formulation R&D today: to create systems that work under field variability, that retain activity despite environmental stress, and that respond to the biological and physical barriers of the target organisms. It is a field where progress comes from precise tuning of surfactants, solvents, dispersants, stabilizers, and co-formulants — and from applying that chemistry with full understanding of agronomic context.
Formulation innovation means using everything we know — and everything new that fits. It means integrating truly appropriate technologies into agrochemical systems because they solve specific, field-defined problems. Whether it’s improving uptake, increasing persistence, or enhancing rain fastness, the goal remains the same: to translate scientific capability into measurable, on-field efficacy and crop productivity.
The most effective R&D begins with one question: what does it take to do this work in the field? From there, everything else follows — chemistry, process, application, and performance. This is how meaningful progress in pesticide formulation happens. It begins with the field. And it ends with results.