Abstract: The world’s population is expected to reach 9 billion by 2050 requiring an unprecedented level of food supply. At the same time, climate change is impacting agricultural productivity and agriculture itself is contributing to about a quarter to greenhouse gas emissions.(Ortiz-Bobea et al., 2021; Vermeulen et al., 2012) This challenging situation requires innovation in agriculture at all ends by means of targeted application to reduce outtake, novel active ingredient design, as well as product technology and in particular crop protection formulations for safe and most efficient use.(Jérôme Cassayre, 2021) In the product technology design of plant protection products, such as herbicides, fungicides, insecticides, seed care, biologicals, crop enhancement and others, care must be taken to meet the farmers demand on efficacy, economic viability, and outmost on human and environmental safety. Since surfactants are an integral part of any crop protection formulations together with related compounds such as adjuvants, there is a continuous interest in surfactants and their mixtures providing concentrated liquids or solids of active ingredients in homogenous or heterogenous forms, which after dissolution in water produce stable emulsions or dispersions. As such, Biosurfactants, are an emerging class of mostly non-ionic surfactants, which benefit from the production of renewable feedstocks and waste streams and often by low carbon footprint processes. Following the classification of (Farias et al., 2021), Biosurfactants can be classified into two generations. Biosurfactants of the first generation which are primarily chemically synthesized from vegetable oils and sugars have been partly investigated and successfully implemented into crop protection products.
In this talk we present on the use scenarios and the associated challenges from an applied product development perspective and focus on recent advances in the application of biosurfactants from the second generation, produced by different microorganisms through a fermentation process such as Sophorolipids and Rhamnolipids.
