An example of incredible compression is that a seed is an entire being that we can hold between two fingers. In the same way, nanotechnology takes what we have historically used as our greatest tools for farming i.e. fertilizers, pesticides, crop sensor technologies, etc. and compresses them to such small sizes that they can pass through the cell wall of a plant and communicate with it at the molecular level.
The question isn’t if this will change how we grow food, but rather if we are ready to have that conversation?
Take a look at the problem which made nanotechnology necessary?
Statistic regarding the application of fertilizer is that only approximately 30%-50% of fertilizer that is applied to a particular field is actually available for crop uptake. The lost materials include a mixture of loss from leaching, loss of volatized material into the atmosphere, and runoff to an area that has not been planted. When pesticides are applied to a field in bulk, on average 20% of those pesticides that are available for pest control will come in contact with the actual pest that was targeted. The remaining 80% will be either lost due to drift onto soil, groundwater, or will end up in unintended organisms such as beneficial insects.
The precision of farming operations has been achieved at an extraordinarily low level compared to where it needs to be, “we’ve been using long pipes to water our trees when what we really needed was to use a syringe.” It appears from the data that has been published in peer-reviewed journals for 2024 and 2025 that nanotechnology (engineering of matter in the nanometer scale 1-100 nm) is close to being introduced at the agricultural facility level from laboratory studies to the field.
Four Tools That Are Working
Agricultural nanotechnology isn’t a single technology. It’s a family of tools, each working on a different point in how we grow food.
Tool 1: Nanofertilizers
Zinc, nitrogen, and phosphorus are wrapped in nano-shells that respond to soil temperature, pH, and root signals. They don’t dump all the nutrients at once, they release in sync with what the plant actually needs. A 2025 PMC review confirmed that nanofertilizers significantly boost nitrogen use efficiency, reducing both input waste and soil acidification without sacrificing yield. India’s IFFCO now has government-approved nano-zinc and nano-copper formulations commercially available to farmers.
Tool 2: Nanopesticides
A 2025 SpringerLink review described how nanopesticide nanoparticles can locate and disrupt fungal cell walls like those causing sorghum anthracnose without even touching the beneficial soil organisms nearby. The nano-encapsulation protects the active ingredient from UV degradation and heat, meaning the effective dose is far lower. A 2025 Journal of Basic and Applied Zoology review highlighted nano-RNAi and hormone-blended nanoparticles as entirely new mechanisms for pest control that have no equivalent in conventional chemistry.
Tool 3: Nanosensors
Embedded nanosensors are built from gold, carbon nanotubes, and iron-based electroactive surfaces. Moisture, pH, nitrogen, heavy metal contamination, early fungal infection are all detected continuously, automatically, without pulling samples or waiting for lab results. A 2025 Frontiers in Plant Science bibliometric study confirmed that rapid disease detection via nanosensors has been one of the fastest-growing research areas in agri-nano since 2017.
Tool 4: Nano Seed Priming
Coating seeds with nanoparticles before sowing helps to deliver nutrients, hormones, and pathogen-protection directly to the germination zone has shown germination rate improvements of up to 30% in controlled trials. A 2025 Springer Nature review documented that nano-primed seeds also show extended shelf life and better resistance to early-season abiotic stress like drought and temperature extremes. For farmers in semi-arid regions of Maharashtra and Rajasthan, that head-start isn’t a luxury, it can be the difference between a crop and a loss.
Nanosensors for real-time monitoring, nanofertilizers for efficient nutrient delivery, and nanopesticides for targeted pest control altogether, they represent the most significant convergence of tools available to sustainable farming since the Green Revolution.
~ PMC / Advances in Agricultural Nanotechnology, September 2025
The Challenges
People are trying to use nanotechnology for farming and agriculture, but if anyone says that they have solved all of the issues related to that then they are trying to sell you something. Not only is there a lot of excitement about the science but there are equally as many problems to be solved. Currently the research community is trying to grapple with four major challenges related to this area of research:
- Long-Term Soil Microbiome Unknowns
Laboratory studies using extremely high concentrations of metal nanoparticles can disrupt ecological relationships between soil microorganisms and earthworms. However, using field-relevant dosing appears safer; however, we still lack 15 years of longitudinal data to support this assertion, as highlighted in the 2025 ScienceDirect GHG Review’s abstract. It is clear that microbial health in soils is an area of ongoing uncertainty.
- Regulatory Frameworks
All nanomaterial regulation within the United States, India, and European Union is performed based upon existing regulatory collections developed for bulk chemicals, which do not consider that smaller particle size fundamentally changes the manner in which each material can behave. Therefore, there are considerable disagreements on the level of regulatory control these materials deserve. The 2025 JSFA review documents this uncertainty as a significant impediment to responsible commercialisation of nanomaterials. Even though legislation specific to nanoscale materials has been in demand for many years, there has not yet been sufficient progress and time to develop such legislation.
- Cost and Accessibility for Smallholder
While the costs of most premium nano-formulations are designed for use at commercial scale, IFFCO nano-urea in India is an intentional outlier as its price is designed with marginally-farming economic considerations in mind. However, a majority of current nano inputs will incur a 40-60% price premium over their equivalent conventional input. The only way to bridge the price gap is through scaling production.
- Synthetic Shells vs. Biodegradable Carriers
Most of the early CRF and nano-delivery technologies fabricated their shells using polyurethane or polyolefin-based materials. These materials can persist as microplastics in the soil medium over an extended period of time. The 2025 Springer Discovery Biotechnology paper provides an emphatic position that the movement toward biologically synthesizing “green route” nanoparticles from plant-derived substances and/or microbial metabolites will be essential for sustaining ecological compatibility over the long-term.
Biopolymers in Picture
At this point in time, the most crucial question regarding the design of nanotechnology in agriculture would be not so much what is able to be delivered rather than what will it be delivered in?
The use of synthetic polymer materials to cover nanoparticles delivered via nanotechnology is an effective way to protect them from degradation but does leave behind residue and also has the potential for accumulation in the environment. Biopolymer materials, such as PHA (polyhydroxyalkanoate), chitosan and lignin matrices, provide the same level of precision delivery while providing one key benefit: they are 100% biodegradable within a single growing season thanks to the action of soil microbes resulting in no residual material or microplastics being introduced into the environment.
The article published in Science Direct in 2025 which reviewed studies on green nano-pesticides makes this point quite clearly. Biologically synthesized nanoformulations are “generally safer for non-target organisms as well as having better alignment with the principles of sustainable agriculture” than their chemically synthesized counterparts.
This is exactly what TerraPHA does, develop bio-based PHA materials so that they can be used as the intelligent, biodegradable structural chassis of next generation nano-agricultural products.
Frequently Asked Questions
- Q) Is nano-urea really as effective as conventional urea for Indian farmers?
Yes, but under certain circumstances. Nano-urea produced by IFFCO passed all the multi-location tests conducted by the government for its effectiveness compared to conventional urea in terms of giving equal yields as urea by just using half the quantity (500ml liquid form compared to 1 bag weighing 50kgs). There is a basic difference in the method used. While urea requires the involvement of nitrogen through the soil which leads to loss of more than 50%, nano-urea is sprayed on the leaves through stomata and hence enters directly into the system.
- Q) Do nanopesticides create new forms of pest resistance?
Yes, there are many studies being conducted about this very topic. Pesticide resistance typically arises due to continuous exposure to the same mechanism by which the pesticides work on the pests. In case of many nanopesticides, especially where physical disruption of cell membranes is used instead of chemical disruption, there is a lesser chance for development of resistance in the pests since the latter cannot build any resistance against the physical mechanism. However, in cases where nano-carrier is carrying a chemical active ingredient, there is no difference from non-nano carriers.
- Q) Can nanotechnology help crops survive climate stress like drought, heat, flooding?
Yes, increasingly so. In a 2025 review by BioScience Nanotechnology, it was found that the use of certain nanoparticles, including titanium dioxide and silicon-based nanoparticles, activated natural antioxidant defense mechanisms in plants, resulting in increased heat and drought tolerance. The use of nanoparticle-mediated seed priming resulted in up to 30% higher germination rate tolerance to temperature stresses. Moreover, nano-based gene transfer technologies were being explored for speeding up crop breeding for climate adaptability, where plant breeding would not be done through full genetic modification but by screening climate resistance qualities in shortened timelines.
