PHOTO: SMARF
PHOTO: YANMAR PHOTO: MIT
EDITOR’S PICKS ▶▶▶
Nanosensor alerts smartphone farmers when their plants are stressed
NORTH AMERICA BY HUGO CLAVER
U
sing sensors made of carbon nano- tubes, engineers have developed a way to closely track how plants re- spond to stresses such as injury, in-
fection and light damage. These sensors can be embedded in plant leaves, where they re- port on hydrogen peroxide signalling waves.
Plants use hydrogen peroxide to communicate within their leaves, sending out a distress signal that stimulates leaf cells to produce compounds that helps them repair damage or fend off pred- ators such as insects. The new sensors can use these signals to distinguish between different types of stress, as well as between different spe- cies of plants. “Plants have a very sophisticated form of internal communication, which we can now observe for the first time. This means that in real-time we can see a living plant’s response,
Irrigation automation market worth US$ 6.7 bil.
WORLD Growing awareness about the benefits of irri- gation automation is fuelling the growth of this market. According to a report by Market- sandMarkets, the current value (US$ 2.8 billion) is projected to grow to US$ 6.7 billion by 2025. Increased mechanisation and adoption of smart technologies for agricultural activities, government initiatives to promote water con- servation, and growing awareness among farmers about the benefits of irrigation auto- mation are the key drivers of this growth. The report states that most developing countries make use of irrigation technologies, such as sprinklers and drip irrigation. “The automation of drip irrigation has become increasingly pop- ular due to higher consistency in yields, re- duced power consumption compared to sprin- kler irrigation, the fact that it can be used in smaller plots, and higher efficiency in the use
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communicating the specific type of stress that it’s experiencing,” says Michael Strano, Professor of Chemical Engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
New strategies This can potentially help agricultural scientists develop new strategies to improve crop yields. The researchers demonstrated their approach in eight different plant species and believe it could work in many more. They found that dif- ferent plants appear to produce different waveforms – the distinctive shape produced by mapping the concentration of hydrogen peroxide over time. They hypothesise that each plant’s response is related to its ability to counteract the damage. Each species also ap- pears to respond differently to different types of stress, including mechanical injury, infec- tion, and heat or light damage. “This waveform holds a lot of information for each species, and even more exciting is the fact that the type of
stress on a given plant is encoded in this wave- form,” Strano says. “You can look at the real time response that a plant experiences in almost any new environment.”
The near-infrared fluorescence produced by the sensors can be imaged using a small infrared camera connected to a Raspberry Pi, a $ 35 cred- it-card-sized computer similar to the computer inside a smartphone. “Very inexpensive instru- mentation can be used to capture the signal,” Strano says. Applications for this technology in- clude screening different species of plants for their ability to resist mechanical damage, light, heat, and other forms of stress. It could also be used to study how different species respond to pathogens, such as the bacteria that cause citrus greening and the fungus that causes coffee rust. “One of the things I’m interested in doing is un- derstanding why some types of plants exhibit a certain degree of immunity to these pathogens and others don’t,” the professor says.
of fertilisers,” say the researchers. Semi-auto- matic systems are relatively cost-effective and hence are being adopted in countries such as India, China, and Brazil.
Yanmar makes modular robotic platform
EUROPE Yanmar R&D Europe (YRE, based in Florence, It- aly) runs the two-year, € 4 million SMASH pro- ject in cooperation with ten technology part- ners. The acronym stands for Smart Machine for Agricultural Solutions Hightech. It is
▶ FUTURE FARMING | 22 May 2020
engaged in developing a modular robotic plat- form that employs the latest information com- munications technology to examine crops and soils, to analyse gathered information and pro- vide clear, actionable information to farmers to support crop management. There are currently two working prototypes – one for grapevines and the other for spinach – to cover the two different types of crops that were originally slated for research. The former has already undergone significant testing at a vineyard. A farmer can programme the task that he wants SMASH to carry out and, while he is in- volved in other activities, a machine could
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