ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Plant Sci.
Sec. Plant Biotechnology
This article is part of the Research TopicNew Biotechnological Advances for Optimizing Plant-Soil Relationships in Sustainable AgricultureView all articles
Humic field biostimulation as a sustainable agricultural practice to increase yield of main grains: Evidence from on-farm trials
Provisionally accepted
Juan Izquierdo1
Osvin Arriagada2
Gustavo García-Pintos3Martín García-Pintos3Marcelo García-Pintos4
Rodomiro Ortiz5*- 1Servicios para el Desarrollo Rural Integral y la Agricultura (SEDRA), Punta del Este, Uruguay
- 2Centro de Estudios en Alimentos Procesados, Talca, Chile
- 3BIOCIS, Paysandú, Uruguay
- 4BIOCIS, Montevideo, Uruguay
- 5Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Uppsala, Sweden
Select one of your emails
You have multiple emails registered with Frontiers:
Notify me on publication
Please enter your email address:
If you already have an account, please login
You don't have a Frontiers account ? You can register here
Conventional agriculture relies heavily on synthetic fertilizers and pesticides, raising questions about its long-term sustainability. The use of biostimulants is an environmentally friendly approach to improve crop yields. However, most results have been obtained under controlled conditions, making it necessary to evaluate them under commercial production. Therefore, the objective of this study was to assess the effect of a single foliar spray of a humic biostimulant (HB), at a critical stage of the growth cycle, on the yield and profitability of soybeans (R3-R4), rice (V5-V9), maize (V6), wheat (Z1.6), and barley (Z1.6), as measured by yield responses and net economic returns. For this purpose, on-farm strip trials (OFT) (n=448) were installed on commercial farms from 2014 to 2024 in the main production zones of Uruguay. The HB increased the average yield in all five crops. The overall mean yield response was significant, ranging from 7.6% to 15.7% in rice and maize, respectively. In barley, HB showed greater effectiveness in lower-yielding sites, reaching ~4 t ha-1. In rice, a tendency towards a greater impact in low and high-yield OFTs was observed. While in maize, wheat, and soybeans, HB had a relatively constant effect. The net economic returns were 68 and 164 US$ ha-1 for wheat and rice, respectively. Similarly, the probability of exceeding the break-even cost ranged from 79.7 % for wheat to 87.5% for rice. To our knowledge, this is the first study to demonstrate that a single foliar application of an HB at a critical stage of development increases crop yield and profitability for farmers under OFT conditions over several years and multiple sites. Therefore, this practice can be applied by Uruguayan farmers to increase yields and economic profits sustainably.
Keywords: barley, Economic profitability, humic biostimulant, Maize, rice, Soybean, sustainable agriculture, wheat
Received: 21 Sep 2025; Accepted: 17 Nov 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Izquierdo, Arriagada, García-Pintos, García-Pintos, García-Pintos and Ortiz. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Rodomiro Ortiz, rodomiro.ortiz@slu.se
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.