An incredible new technology could revolutionize the fight against plant-borne disease and help farmers drastically reduce their loss of crops each year.
According to Phys.org, scientists from the Natural History Museum and the Earlham Institute have discovered a way to analyze the air around planted crops to test for the DNA of potential diseases and fungal infections that could cause widespread loss of crops.
The new technology, known as AirSeq, pulls in particles from the air and analyzes them, allowing farmers to know when they need to apply fungicides and other disease-mitigating procedures when the percentages detected grow higher.
With the rise of monocultural farming — planting massive swathes of the same plant across a space — the risk of massive losses due to fungal infection or disease grew exponentially. With our climate shifting and changing due to the heating of our planet, the risk of fungal loss to crops will only increase, but AirSeq could give farmers a better chance to head those infections off early.
"At the moment, farmers spray their crops with fungicides to make their plants inhospitable to possible fungal infections," Dr. Matt Clark, who spearheaded the project, said, per Phys.org. "But as different crops are resistant to different pathogen strains, this isn't always necessary.
"AirSeq can detect which spores are present and how abundant they are, which would allow farmers to see whether or not they need to use fungicides. This means farmers can spray their crops more efficiently, saving them money and promoting more sustainable farming."
The ability to protect crops more efficiently and save them from fungal infection will go a long way to reducing the billions of dollars of crop loss that could both save farmers money and help them to make more while also combatting global hunger issues.
When coupled with things like the AI algorithm that analyzes crop growth, and the ability to grow plants in soil previously thought unusable, it's clear that we're making unprecedented strides toward improving our farming practices.
While AirSeq isn't ready to be rolled out on a large scale at this point, the hope is to have it ready for a more significant launch soon.
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