Professor Linda Kinkel has been selected as a Top Agri-Food Pioneer (TAP) for 2025 by the World Food Prize Foundation for her work as Founder and Chief Science Offer of Jord Bioscience.
As a TAP awardee, Kinkel is part of a cohort of 39 recipients from across the globe who have demonstrated excellence and innovation in work to improve agriculture and food systems. Kinkel’s work at Jord BioScience harnesses the natural power of diverse microbial communities to enhance the plant disease-suppressing and growth-promoting functions of indigenous soil microbiomes and commercial inoculants, which together allow farms to produce higher yields while offering pathways to reduce reliance on synthetic inputs.
To create Jord, Kinkel’s boundless curiosity about the nuances and complexities of soil microbiomes combined with her goal of contributing practical solutions to real-world farms. Decades of research experience had shown her that a diverse microbiome incorporating key microbial partnerships can greatly benefit plant health, but looking out to the market, she primarily saw commercial inoculants not channeling biodiversity’s benefits, hence the need for a new approach. As Kinkel told Aurora Sporealis in 2024,
“We [at Jord] use microbials the way microbes actually work in nature—they interact. Bacteria are single-celled organisms, but they never exist as individuals or a pure culture in nature, they’re in communities. The soil microbiome is extremely diverse, it has the greatest diversity of any habitat in the world, but you don’t need to recreate all that diversity. You just need to recreate the right suite of organisms to interact, in the habitat where they need to intervene.”