Deployability of biotechnologies for environmentally resilient agriculture.

A Balanced Readiness Level review of 77 agricultural biotechnologies finds market viability and social acceptance are the primary constraints, not technological readiness.

• Why it matters: Early-stage biotech options could reduce agriculture’s environmental harm, but without a systematic deployability check, promising tools may be misprioritized.
• What they did: The authors scored 77 biotechnologies across eight domains using a Balanced Readiness Level framework covering technological, market, regulatory, acceptance, and organizational dimensions, and added a Fermi analysis for microbial fertilizers.
• The result: High-readiness options are typically “drop-in,” contained, transient, and viewed as natural, implying deployability strategies like improving genetically modified organism containment and motivating further quantitative scalability and environmental-impact analysis.

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