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CHAP Launches CropMonitor Pro – A New Digital Service For Predicting Crop Pest and Disease Risks
CHAP is delighted to announce the launch of a new digital service – Crop Monitor Pro. It is designed to help growers and agronomists predict the likelihood of pest and disease outbreaks on their farm
CHAP is delighted to announce the launch of a new digital service – Crop Monitor Pro. It is designed to help growers and agronomists predict the likelihood of pest and disease outbreaks on their farm.
CropMonitor Pro extends the DEFRA funded, long-standing regional risk evaluation service (Crop Monitor) which was first launched in 2003 by Fera Science Limited (Fera). CropMonitor Pro is a significant advancement on that service by providing field-level risk prediction for a range of pests and diseases affecting winter wheat, winter oilseed rape, and potatoes.
The CropMonitor Pro decision support service is a collaboration between CHAP and Fera and has been in development since 2017. It has been funded by IUK as part of the UK Agri-tech Strategy.
Analytical tools are becoming increasingly popular for growers. Retailers, agrochemical companies, and government are all looking to better predict the risk of pest and disease outbreaks to mitigate against supply chain shortages, predict sales, and encourage environmental stewardship. For the grower, a better understanding of the level of pest and disease risk can ensure pesticides are only applied when required. This will not only offer immediate savings on both chemical applications and operational expenditure but will also reduce the threat of resistance against an increasingly limited arsenal of available crop protection products.
CropMonitor Pro estimates infection risk by analyzing the complex relationship between weather, crop growth stage, management practices, and disease or pest characteristics. It uses a simple traffic light system to show crop susceptibility and suggests optimum times to spray – and when to avoid spraying – for up to four days ahead with up to 85% accuracy.
The system benefits from almost 20 years of historical winter wheat disease data: models which could be validated against this dataset were shown to have a false negative rate of less than 15%. CHAP CEO Fraser Black said: “Developing tools to support the sustainable use of pesticides is critical not only to improve the bottom line of our growers but also to protect our environment and halt the rapid rise of pesticide resistance emerging in the UK. CropMonitor Pro will deliver real financial benefits to growers and agronomists while also protecting the environment.”
Fera CEO Dr. Andrew Swift said: “After several years of development work, we are excited to launch the CropMonitor Pro service with CHAP. It is our hope that CropMonitor Pro becomes a vital tool for the industry to improve profitability while helping to protect our natural ecosystems.”
The system launched on 14th September for growers and agronomists and will be available directly through www.cropmonitor.co.uk on a subscription basis.*
About Crop Health and Protection (CHAP)
Crop Health and Protection (CHAP), funded by Innovate UK, is one of four UK Agri-Tech Centres. CHAP’s vision is for the UK to be a global leader in the development of applied Agri-Technologies, to help secure our future by nourishing a growing population sustainably while delivering economic, environmental, and health benefits to society.
CHAP acts as a unique, independent nexus between the UK government, researchers, and industry, building innovation networks to identify and accelerate the development of cutting-edge solutions to drive incremental, transformative, and disruptive changes in sustainable crop productivity.
Website: chap-solutions.co.uk/
For further information about the project contact:
Chris Delf: chris.delf@chap-solutions.co.uk
Tel: +44 (0)7732 684 786
Twitter: @CHAP_Enquiries
Fera Science Limited, formerly the Food and Environment Research Agency, is a joint private/public sector venture between Capita plc and Defra. Using original thinking applied to support sustainable global food security our vision is to support our partners to respond to the challenges ahead through original thinking and world-class science. Fera is a leading supplier of scientific solutions, evidence, and advice across the agri-food supply chain. Employing more than 350 scientists, Fera analyses over 90,000 samples and publishes over 100 peer-reviewed scientific papers per year. It turns expertise and innovation into ways to support and develop a sustainable food chain, a healthy natural environment, and to protect the global community from biological and chemical risks.
Website: fera.co.uk
For further information about the project contact:
Judith Turner: Judith.turner@fera.co.uk
Tel: +44 (0)1904 462200
Preventing Diseases Coming Into Your Fresh Produce
“If people don’t make the investment to understand water quality, once they realize the damage to their produce, it might be too late
Sankaran:
“The first thing is to understand the controlling factors. How do you make sure of the soil and the water quality health. Our job is the water quality.” Outside of heavy metals, some micro-nutrients are toxic to plants in moderate concentrations or specific conditions. KETOS looks at water quality as the first aspect in food safety because elements or toxins in water are often filtered and held by soil.
“If people don’t make the investment to understand water quality, once they realize the damage to their produce, it might be too late. One of the most common things, which we haven’t measured yet but actively looking into it, is how we can understand e-coli. We always end up having e-coli outbreaks and product recalls because of e-coli. We need to get ahead of that because there’s millions of dollars of losses and food waste.”
Safety issues
Kris Nightengale, VP Agricultural Sales notes: “If you look at the US data regarding food safety issues and over 80% of the cases had livestock grazing in proximity or higher in the watershed in relation to the produce field. Indoor and vertical agriculture seeks to solve the problem by taking the food out of the open and into a highly controlled enclosed environment.” Some pathogens are known to translocate in plants and become a part of the cell structure. This means that no amount of washing is going to disinfect the produce.
The KETOS shield continuously monitors the pH, ORP, and chlorine, which ensures chlorine can be maintained at the proper level to ensure effective sanitization. Even though indoor production facilities go to great lengths to filter and treat influent and circulating water, pathogens can still be introduced through fertilizer, worker, and pests.
“Healthy plants are not the hosts for pathogens that unhealthy plants are. Because indoor production works on a circulating loop system, nutrient imbalances can move very quickly through a facility. It’s not uncommon for indoor growers to watch a perfectly healthy crop start exhibiting symptoms of changing vigor in a matter of hours. Water tests are generally infrequent and there is a significant lag time from the lab. KETOS is filling in the massive data gap that growers can directly and immediately tie to crop health”, Nightengale affirms.
Keeping the water nutritious
One of the biggest issues that the US is dealing with right now, not necessarily how good the water treatment plants are, but how good the piping across the distribution network. Those pipes could have been laid out 100 years ago and could be contaminated with toxins. Knowing the water quality, both at the source and the destination is very important.
“KETOS is deploying systems to help with irrigation as well as help implement a broader distribution network for leak detection, understanding lead contamination in pipes, so that repairs can be conducted proactively vs. an expensive infrastructure replacement”, Sankaran says. “You cannot act upon what you don’t measure.”
“Agriculture has successfully implemented technology across many facets of its operations and its time for water management to be a more important discussion as this is a precious asset that can impact not just the farmers but of all of the consumers at large .”
Nightengale adds: “KETOS is able to address the gaps in the marketplace today for water intelligence in-depth, and the right kind of data can provide you insights for what’s actually occurring at your fingertips.”
For more information:
KETOS
Meena Sankaran, Founder, and CEO
meena@KETOS.co
Kris Nightengale
kris.nightengale@KETOS.co
www.KETOS.co
Publication date: Tue 15 Sep 2020
Author: Rebekka Boekhout
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