Cost & ROI
The economics already work at the farm gate.
At today’s highest-ever prices, treating an acre is modest — and because a yield gain rides on costs you’ve already paid, most of it falls straight to profit. Here’s the honest arithmetic.
What it costs per acre
Modest — and it depends on one thing.
The cost splits along a single line: whether the crop is fed through its leaves, or needs the ground charged first.
Foliar crops · e.g. corn
A few tens of dollars an acre.
About what you’d pay for a fertilizer pass — and it front-loads. A one-time soil conditioning in year one, then repeated only once every four or five years, so most seasons cost far less. Much of the labor is already spent in a spray pass you’re making anyway.
Soil- or paddy-worked · e.g. rice, long-season vegetables
Several times more.
A single heavy soil loading dominates the bill and barely eases when the foliar dose is lightened. This is the case where price still bites — most of all when you’re conditioning a large volume of irrigation water rather than misting a leaf.
The pre-season soil charge that dominates that second case runs roughly $315–375 an acre today — and that’s the highest it will ever be. Why, and where it goes from here, is the last section on this page.
Why the math favors the grower
A yield gain is almost all profit.
A farm’s biggest costs — land, rent, machinery, most labor — are already paid whether an acre yields 180 bushels or 220. So a gain in yield rides on top of costs you’ve already covered, and almost the whole value of the added bushels falls to profit rather than being eaten by new expense.
Where the effect appeared, the trials reported 20–40% gains. On an acre grossing near $1,000, that’s roughly $200 to $400 of added revenue — against an input cost of a few tens of dollars. On a farm scraping break-even, that’s the difference between a losing year and a paying one.
Beyond yield
The bigger offsets — sometimes larger than the yield itself.
A bushel is only part of what a grower is paid for. On some crops, these are worth more than the yield gain.
Quality & shelf life
On fresh produce, the largest uncounted value. Treated fruit in the reports kept longer, held color, and softened more slowly. Post-harvest spoilage takes a fifth to a third of perishables between field and market — a few extra days of shelf life can cover the treatment before a single bushel of yield is counted.
Grade premium
The fall from premium to cull is a cliff — a berry that misses fresh-market grade sells for less than half. The reports described straighter roots, less deformed fruit, better color, and higher Brix. It costs the same to raise a berry that makes grade as one that’s culled, so when more of the crop clears the standard, nearly all of that gain is profit.
Lodging resistance
In grains, a collapsed crop charges you four ways at once: lost yield, downgraded grain, a slower harvest, and wetter grain to dry. Treated plants had thicker stems and deeper roots — and a stronger stem lets you push for yield without buying the lodging risk that heavy nitrogen usually brings.
Input savings
A stronger, better-fed plant carries less disease and pest pressure — fewer sprays and fungicide passes. In one cannabis study, pesticide accumulating in treated plant tissue fell roughly 50%. And consistently better mineral uptake may mean fewer separate micronutrient applications.
Where the price goes from here
Unlike an ordinary input, it gets cheaper as it scales.
Today’s price is the highest it will ever be — and almost none of it is the rock.
Biotite is one of the most abundant minerals in the earth’s crust. And Primora Bio’s concentrate doesn’t even begin from rock quarried for the purpose — it begins from vermiculite mine tailings, the fine refuse a mine would otherwise throw away. The raw material has never been the constraint, and it never will be.
So why does charging an acre of ground run over $300? Almost none of it is the mineral. It’s freight, customs, hazardous-material handling, prepaid inventory, and the plain inefficiency of small-batch production from one modest operation. The price reflects the scarcity of production, not of materials — and a shortage of producers is the most solvable problem there is. At genuine industrial scale, the cost of the concentrate falls toward that of an ordinary industrial mineral.
We’re not promising those costs. The effect still has to be real, and the capacity still has to be built. But this one property — modest at the ceiling, cheaper with scale, built on a material that is everywhere and largely discarded — is what could let it reach the field rather than stay trapped in specialty markets.
Affordable now. Cheaper later.
Supply is limited today and expanding — the economics on this page are exactly why we’re scaling. Start where it already pays.