
Precision Agriculture to Improve Crop Health
Using computer power to prevent pests and protect food crops.
Project Overview
Updated March 31, 2023.
The Problem
The global population is rising, generating a need to produce more food to feed the world.
The food crops of Canada and the world are facing growing challenges from climate change in addition to pests, pathogens and viruses that attack and destroy crops.
The threats are large. For example, Canada exports more than $7 billion worth of wheat every year. As the climate warms, diseases such as wheat rust spread further north and create an increasing threat to production. At the same time, increasing the use of pesticides brings risks to the environment.
How We Are Solving It
The Result
• Developed a computational biochemistry machine learning platform to inform agricultural product development.
• Created a computational algorithm that generates predictions for agricultural formulation development.
• Established an automated growth chamber for formulation testing and data collection.
• Identified wheat and fungal rust genomes and transcriptomes for rust infected wheat plants.
• Developed potential new commercial products for agricultural fungicides. Several leads for fungicidal formulations containing Actigate were identified during the course of this project. These are currently undergoing field trials and may lead to future licensing deals with agricultural companies for the reformulation of fungicides with Actigate.
Project Lead
Project Partners
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“Terramera is committed to reducing or eliminating 80% of the synthetic pesticide load in agriculture globally by 2030, and this project helps advance our goal. By working together, we benefit from expertise developed in other sectors to grow and accelerate our mission to transform how food is grown and the economics of agriculture. It’s a novel approach that draws from many different fields that will impact genomics and digital technology in multiple ways, and can set the stage for other companies to solve problems unique to their fields, impacting Canada’s digital economy, our agriculture economy and the health of Canadians across the country.”
Watch the Video Founder & CEO, Terramera -
“We are thrilled with what our consortium has been able to accomplish over the past two years. We have made incredible progress towards treating a critical plant disease that threatens Canada’s $7 billion/year wheat industry, delivering on the project and in the process building the foundation of our next generation of technology and partnerships that will extend beyond this project.”
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"The Computational Biochemistry project was instrumental in kickstarting Metaspectral's foray into infrared imaging. Metaspectral's technology now allows users to train, deploy and derive insights from machine learning models using hyperspectral data in real-time, which was made possible in part through data compression technology developed during the project."
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“Collaborating in this consortium has been very educative and rewarding, with a major aspect focused on elucidating the molecular genetic background of the leaf rust fungus/wheat interaction. Combined with the other aspects in the overall project such as the digitalization of this interaction coupled with machine vision, a solid scientific basis has been laid for understanding this crop disease and future experimentation to manage it better.”