The challenge
Crop diseases are a major challenge for farmers in the UK and globally resulting in reduced crop yield and quality. In the UK, fungicides are the principal tool used to prevent or treat early infection from principally air-borne spores. However, increasingly there is pressure to use these products less, due to concerns over their use. Resulting in an increased need for new precision application approaches to improve the detection and application of products at a sub-field level. This is where the SprayBot project comes in.
Richard Glass, Innovation Lead – Arable at the UK Agri-Tech Centre said:
“Plant protection products remain an important input for growers, ensuring they can reliably produce crops to feed the world’s rapidly expanding population.
But their risk-based, cautionary use and application could be improved, helping promote the sector’s sustainability and environmental credentials, while helping to protect the future of the effective chemistry that remains.
Thanks to significant advances within the world of agri-tech, it’s now possible to use targeted ‘variable rate’ applications of other inputs such as nutrients.
SprayBot aims to investigate a system that can do the same for traditional fungicides and emerging biopesticides: detecting and mapping crop disease and then applying product at a variable rate to small areas of the crop. In the future, this could also extend to an individual plant or even leaf.”
The innovation
The University of Newcastle has been investigating the use of spore traps to detect early air-borne spore ingress into the crops, utilising DNA diagnostic tools to confirm the identity and quantity of individual diseases present in the environment and young crop.
This early warning system then alerts farmers to utilise a new technology, multispectral imaging, to detect individually infected plants within the field. The technology has been tested in the UK Agri-Tech Centre’s Digital Phenotyping Laboratory using project lead Fotenix’s cutting-edge cameras and disease models. They were then mounted to a boom system for use with tractors, ATVs and potentially robotics or drones in the future.
To build upon this success, a new precision application sprayer was developed with Silsoe Spray Applications Unit capable of spraying small areas to a near individual plant level (25x25cm). Working together the consortium then validated this concept through field trials conducted at the University of Newcastle’s Cockle Park Farm site.
The solution
The project has shown how multiple new approaches and innovations could be used in the future to improve the detection and treatment of crop diseases. Together these form a pipeline of diagnostic tools for farmers from early warning systems such as spore traps and DNA diagnostics, through to in-field scouting for infection using multispectral imaging, from which sprayer maps and a new precision sprayer system can then target individual plants.
