Adaptive Symbiotic Technologies: How Plant Talk Could Produce Stress-Tolerant Crops
Ancient plant intelligence could be the answer to increasing crop yields for small landholders in Africa, even in the face of climate change.
Adaptive Symbiotic Technology’s (AST’s) BioEnsure and BioTango are products which have harnessed the power of plant communication to mitigate the impact of climate stress on crop production and reduce the need for fertilizer.
Plant-microbial interactions have existed for 400 million years since plants first moved onto land. Fungal endophytes are part of an ancient process that allows plants to adapt to harsh environments and use nutrients more efficiently. These fungi reside entirely inside plants and alter plant gene expression patterns, allowing them to thrive in environments they can’t otherwise survive in.
Now BioEnsure has tapped into that power of communication to help crop plants mitigate the impacts of climate change. With BioTango, a microbial fertilizer designed to synergize with it, the twin technologies could be ground-breaking, reducing climate-based crop failures and fertilizer needs while increasing food security and farmer revenue.

Coating the seeds with fungi, the initiative states that BioEnsure helps plants to adapt to water and temperature-related stress and become more resilient to the increasing challenges of climate change, the greatest threat to agricultural sustainability in this century.
Climate-induced drought and temperature stress are already limiting crop production globally. Despite many efforts to counter impacts of climate stress by generating stress-tolerant crops via genetic manipulation in the 1970s, there is still little to show for it.
The company was awarded funding by USAID to develop BioEnsure after successfully increasing yields by an average of 35% in India, according to the initiative. Bio Ensure was applied to seeds of pearl millet, mung bean, guar, sesame, mort and black-eyed peas in hundreds of small holdings in rural villages of Rajasthan.
The data was then shared with government officials, agricultural distributors, seed companies and NGOs which work with small landholders, enabling collaborations and partnerships to build a sustainable network. This could lead to an end to the vicious global cycle that begins with food insecurity and can lead to poverty, gender inequality, illness, political instability, and human migrations.
In 2025, the project is expanding to Africa where shortages of food and agricultural inputs increase the likelihood of mass starvation, and where farmers are already seeing the impacts of climate change. By 2026, the company hopes to expand its reach across more of the most vulnerable farmland in the world.
Learn more about Adaptive Symbiotic Technologies.
Written by Gilly Smith
Photos provided by Adaptive Symbiotic Technologies
