For more than 70 years, The Aquatrols Company has engineered high-performing, research-backed solutions designed to solve your toughest challenges. But before our products ever reach you, they undergo rigorous, multi-stage testing: starting at our internal R&D facility, Aura Farm, moving through our trusted network of university cooperators, and finishing with large-scale evaluations in our PROVE field program. It’s a comprehensive research pipeline built to find novel chemistries and ensure they perform where it matters most: on your turf, under real-world pressure.
Stage One – Aura Farm: Where Innovations First Get Tested
In 2017, Aquatrols became the first soil surfactant company to establish a state-of-the-art internal research facility called Aura Farm, located just outside Philadelphia. This serves as our primary proving ground, where experimental formulations are rigorously screened, refined, and narrowed down before advancing to the next stage. It gives our team a dedicated space to test novel soil surfactants, fertilizer technologies, adjuvants, pigments, and spray tank management solutions, providing vital early insights into real-world field performance.
Spanning over 10 acres, Aura Farm is designed to reflect the diverse environments our customers manage around the world. Maintained by Mike Willadsen, a Golf Course Superintendent with more than 17 years of industry experience, the facility is kept to the same rigorous standards our customers face every day. Our research plots feature USGA greens and fairway complexes planted with creeping bentgrass, bermudagrass, or zoysia, alongside a traditional perennial ryegrass and Kentucky bluegrass mix tailored for our sports turf customers.
At Aura Farm, our R&D team can test multiple formulations and variations side by side, adjusting rates and practices in real time to generate the early performance data needed to separate promising candidates. Not every formulation tested at Aura Farm survives the process, and that’s the point. By the time a formulation moves past Aura Farm, it has already demonstrated clear performance under extreme growing conditions, ensuring our university partners only validate the absolute best formulations.
Stage Two – University Validation: Independent Eyes, Expanded Conditions
Once formulations clear Aura Farm, they move to our network of trusted university researchers across the globe. This stage allows us to validate our internal findings across diverse soil types, climates, and growing conditions. Data generated by independent researchers provides a level of objective validation we cannot achieve internally, ensuring that every new formulation delivers consistent performance across a wide range of turf species, soil types and growing conditions.
Stage Three – PROVE: Validation in the Real World
Small plot work is necessary in early screening and large-scale field validation is vital to confirming a products performance. Once a formulation has cleared internal and university testing, it enters the final stage: the PROVE Program which brings a professional approach to a real-world product evaluation.
The PROVE name reflects the program’s structure and intent:
- Partner — We collaborate with facilities and turf managers interested in evaluating new technologies that will shape the future of the industry.
- Research — Efforts include large-scale, real-world applications alongside small-plot experiments that allow close examination of product performance.
- Observe — Trial observations let us demonstrate that our products are innovative, sensible, and effective for the end users who’ll rely on them.
- Validate — Our Technical Services and Marketing teams work closely with PROVE partners to validate performance, fit, and return on investment.
- Experience — The program gives our team first-hand exposure to new products in the field, building confidence in and excitement for our latest innovations.
PROVE builds upon years of informal collaboration between Aquatrols and turf managers, formalizing that into large-scale field validation. Trusted PROVE Partners test our latest innovations in a wide array of tank mixes to ensure the performance carries over into large scale applications.
Why the Pipeline Matters
Each stage of our research pipeline is designed with one goal in mind: bringing industry-leading solutions to our customers that make a tangible difference in their day-to-day work. Aura Farm answers does this chemistry work? Our university partners answer does this formulation hold up across different conditions and validate our findings? And our PROVE program answers does this product perform for the people using it at scale? By the time a new solution reaches the market, its performance has been stress-tested and validated across the country.
This approach is what separates a lab-tested product from a field-proven one. It’s the difference between a formulation that performs well under ideal conditions compared to one that is proven to perform under the wide range of conditions a turf manager actually faces. This is the foundation of how Aquatrols has and will continue to bring industry leading and field-validated novel soil surfactants and tax mix adjuvants formulations to the turfgrass industry.
