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Showing posts from October, 2023

When Certis Biologicals Offers Free Product

My former biopesticide company offered buy five of a specific fungal biopesticide product and you get one specific fungal biopesticide product for free. If a company offers you this deal, stay far, far away from these products and business. Most companies that offer this type of deal are either not doing well and they want to increase sales or they have expired or expiring products either due to the lack of sales or improper storage to give away for free because they don't want to throw it out. It could even be the combination of both reasons. Companies that are doing well and have quality products rarely offer deals or give away stuff for free. I'm talking specifically about small businesses.  The specific fungal product they are giving away for free takes a week to ferment. This fungal product is made through liquid fermentation. Think about it! Why would they give this product away for free? It's labor intensive and time consuming to produce. It doesn't make sense. R

Certis Biologicals Product that Kills Bees

Certis Biologicals has a product that kills bees. It's BmJ ( Bacillus mycoides Jacobsen) which induces the plant's systemic resistance. The supernatant of the product kills bees. Basically, the metabolites that this particular microorganism produces in this product is toxic to bees.  We were not aware of this until the regulatory department sent the product out for various tests on animals and insects. This is to ensure that the product will actually be safe in the environment, and it won't disrupt other organisms. When regulatory received the results, they informed our research and development department that it kills bees and we cannot approve the product through the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The whole year of work on the product was down the drain. We started over with this project. Instead of eliminating the product, we decided to wash the product meaning diluting the supernatant with water so the metabolites will be lower than detectable levels. They hope

Are Biopesticides Effective or NOT?

Biopesticides are effective depending on the microorganism and if the product is on spec. Most of the time products like Bacillus thuringiensis  are effective since they have been studied for years and extensively. Products like this are in spore form. They are less likely to degrade as fast as fungal products. Fungal products have the shortest shelf life even though they are in conidia and blastospore forms. Biologicals DO NOT have a long shelf life compare to chemicals.  For the products that are manufactured from my former company, they may not be effective at all. The products are constantly below spec and contaminated. The manufacturing site is a disaster. They don't do any quality control at the manufacturing site. They always try to send it to headquarters, and have the R&D department test the products for quality control. They also don't clean the fermenters after each run. Since they don't have the capacity to produce all of their products, they use the same fe

Are Biopesticides Safe or NOT?

Biopesticides are considered safer than chemical pesticides. They mainly target the organic farming sector. As a former employee of a biopesticide company who worked in the Research and Development department, I am not sure if biopesticides are safer than chemical pesticides. I used to work for a biopesticide company for years before I decided to quit because of new management who were incompetent. That is besides the point. The point is the company was a mess. We had a sketchy executive vice president, who will always do unethical things to get these biopesticides approve. He didn't care about the consequences or the safety of the employees. We could have gotten in trouble legally! We avoided that by using the executive vice president's name in everything. Hahaha. One example will be testing batches of a biopesticide product for human pathogen contamination. The test results will come back with high levels of human pathogen contamination. These human pathogens we tested for we