Around 20 per cent of the world's crops are lost to fungal diseases every year, and that is at the root of the problem Bioscout set out to tackle. The firm's Chief Sales & Revenue Officer, Charles Simons, says the scale of the losses is enormous.

"That 20 per cent that we lose to fungal diseases, on a dollar value, that's about a trillion US dollars out of the economy globally every year," he says.

Despite that, growers still rely heavily on routine fungicide applications. "The current status quo is to blanket spray every 10 to 14 days to protect your crop against fungal diseases," Simons says.

The problem is that the spraying often comes without enough information about whether disease pressure is actually present.

"We are still seeing the losses of 20%," he says. "Which means there's either wrong timing on the applications of those agrochemicals, or there's resistance happening to certain agrochemicals, or fundamentally what we are doing is not working."

That creates a major cost burden, often without the desired effect. "There's no better time than currently to realise how much money the industry and farming are wasting on spraying of certain chemical groups that might be the right chemical group, but the timing is wrong," Simons says.

"And therefore you look at soil compaction, diesel, labour, machinery maintenance, parts. You add all these things up, and it's an enormous amount of money that's just not correctly allocated."

His analogy is blunt. "If you don't know what's out there, it's like you going to bed tonight thinking I'm going to have a headache on Friday, I'm going to take Panadol now — that's not how it works."

Bioscout's answer is to measure what is actually in the air before disease becomes visible in the crop. "In a nutshell, we take air samples on a daily basis through our devices that are placed on farms in their natural environment," Simons says.

Those spores are captured, photographed, and analysed by artificial intelligence.

"With AI, we analyse it, we count the spores, and we transfer the data to an easy-to-read dashboard where farmers and industry can see in near real time the actual spore loads on the farm."

That matters because it gives growers a chance to act earlier — and more precisely.

"Unless you know what the fungal spore loads are and you can visually see that on a daily basis, there is no way that you can react proactively, because you're being reactive," he says.

The technology can also distinguish between different fungal threats. "It can detect different species," Simons says. "Whether it's anthracnose, whether it's sclerotinia, whether it's botrytis."

That means growers can better match chemistry to the actual disease pressure instead of relying on routine broad-spectrum applications. "What we are looking at is exactly what you want. It really allows us to be much more precise," he says.

One of the strongest signs of promise has come from potato trials in New Zealand. "They saw that our device at the end of the year consistently gave them between 10 and 14 days' warning before they visually saw the signs on the crop," Simons says. "So we could consistently say to them, 10 to 14 days, there's disease load coming, we need to act now."

For Simons, that is the real shift. "'Spraying for the sake of spraying', those days are gone," he says. "We need to be more proactive, and that's by understanding what's going on around your farm instead of being reactive.

"Let's start seeing the unseen and challenge the status quo."
 

Source: www.floraldaily.com