# Hydrobio's pilot moves to AgroParisTech FarmInnLab > Hydrobio's pilot programme is hosted at AgroParisTech's FarmInnLab. Batch consistency, fungal viability and on-site formulation are what a bench cannot test. Canonical: https://www.kuzog.com/blog/agroparistech-farminnlab/ Language: en Published: 2026-06-16 ### Hydrobio's pilot moves to AgroParisTech FarmInnLab - **URL:** https://www.kuzog.com/blog/agroparistech-farminnlab/ - **Published:** 2026-06-16 - **Venture:** hydrobio · **Kind:** news - **Tags:** #hydrobio #agroparistech #farminnlab #soil-amendment #mycorrhizae #scale-up #field-trials #agtech #pilot-programme Hydrobio's pilot programme is hosted at AgroParisTech's FarmInnLab. Batch consistency, fungal viability and on-site formulation are what a bench cannot test. Hydrobio's semi-industrial pilot programme is hosted at FarmInnLab, the AgTech incubator of AgroParisTech. The programme takes the amendment out of laboratory quantities and produces it at the scale a farm actually consumes. #### What FarmInnLab is FarmInnLab was opened by AgroParisTech in 2024 as a space for experimentation on agricultural innovation, sited at the school's experimental farm at Thiverval-Grignon, west of Paris. It selects projects once a year through an open call, screened in two stages by a steering committee. The asset it offers is the farm itself: about 400 hectares, half in arable crops and half in forage, alongside 190 dairy cattle, 650 sheep, a biomethane unit, roof-mounted solar, and a dairy processing workshop. Companies working on equipment, on agricultural inputs, or on decision-support tools get access to that infrastructure, to the school's analytical and metrology capacity, and to its teaching and research staff. - **AgroParisTech experimental farm hosting the FarmInnLab: 400 ha** #### The gap where soil-amendment claims break Most soil amendments do not fail at the bench. They fail between the bench and the spreader. A formulation that behaves perfectly in a 500-gram batch under a fume hood is a different material at 500 kilograms, and different again after a week in a bulk bag, a lorry, and a centrifugal spreader on a windy morning. This is the usual reason a promising amendment produces excellent trial data and disappointing commercial results. The product that reached the field was not the product that was tested. A semi-industrial pilot exists to close that gap before customers do it for you. #### Three things a laboratory cannot answer ##### Batch consistency Hydrobio's mineral component works because micronisation multiplies its specific surface area by roughly 200. That figure is a property of a particle size distribution, not of a recipe. At laboratory scale the distribution is tight because the quantity is small. At production scale it has to stay tight across a full run, and across runs made on different days from different raw material lots. The pilot measures the spread, not the average. ##### Mycorrhizal viability at scale The biological half of the amendment is alive, which makes it the fragile half. A petri dish tells you a consortium is viable. It does not tell you how many propagules survive being blended into a mineral carrier, bagged, handled, transported, and thrown from a spinning disc. Viability has to be counted at the point of application, on material that has been through the whole chain, or the number means nothing. ##### On-site formulation Hydrobio is formulated on site rather than manufactured centrally and stored, specifically so that living mycorrhizae are introduced shortly before they enter the soil. That is a logistics claim as much as an agronomic one, and it has never been tested against a real farm calendar: dry components delivered, assembled locally to a HydrobioFormul recipe, applied within hours, in weather and on a schedule nobody controls. A pilot on a working farm is the only place that question has an answer. #### Why an agronomy school specifically A commercial pilot site gives scale. An agronomy school gives scale plus instrumentation and independence. Replicated plots, characterised soils with a history of measurement, calibrated analytical equipment, and staff whose professional standing does not depend on the result being favourable. When our controlled-trial figures are eventually put to independent field validation, the method has to be defensible to people who read trial protocols for a living. _Note: Hydrobio's published figures — +47% water retention on sandy soils and +18.7% yield against an untreated control — come from controlled trials. They are not yet confirmed in independent field trials. The pilot programme is a step towards that confirmation, not the confirmation itself._ #### What it enables next Three outputs matter. A production protocol with specified tolerances rather than a laboratory method. A viability figure measured at the spreader instead of at the bench. And a dossier of characterised, replicated data of the kind that homologation under EU Regulation 2019/1009 requires — a file that is in preparation, and that a pilot at semi-industrial scale is the fastest legitimate way to fill. --- _Source: https://www.kuzog.com/blog/agroparistech-farminnlab/ · Markdown variant served via Accept: text/markdown · Full brief: https://www.kuzog.com/llms.txt_