To listen to our entire conversation with Gary, click on the player.

Tom:                           We’re talking with one of the 10 finalists in The Pearse Lyons Accelerator program, MagGrow. Gary Wickham is CEO and founding member of the Irish ag-tech startup. We wanted to talk with Gary about the company’s technology, which uses magnetic fields to reduce the waste of water in spraying crops. We thank you for joining us, Gary.

Gary:                           Thank you.

Tom:                           So, tell us about this technology.

Gary:                           MagGrow, as you said, is an Irish-based company. We were set up in University College Dublin in an incubation center to solve this particular problem around pesticide spray drift. It’s a consistent problem worldwide.

                                    Using conventional technology, 70 percent of water sprayed is waste. There’s $60 billion of pesticides sold worldwide, but 70 percent does not reach its target.

                                    The way farmers solved the problem of drift, driven by increased regulation, is to add water to the droplets, and they use coarse nozzles. All that does is create a secondary problem. You get runoff into the soil, rivers and streams, and you get massive contamination. So now, you’re wasting water and you’re creating waste.

                                    So, only 30 percent of what they spray goes to the crop. All farmers are very clever. They know that if you use smaller droplets, you get better efficacy. Conventional technology does not deliver both. Up to now, we didn’t have a solution to control drift and also give you excellent coverage, until MagGrow came along.

Tom:                           So, you’re employing magnetic fields to make this happen. How does that work?

Gary:                           Effectively, electromagnetic fields. So, it’s actually similar to the principles of generating electricity, where you pass currents through magnets.

                                    What we do is use permanent rare-earth magnets, the strongest magnets known to man. We retrofit a tractor boom, and we pass the fluid through that under turbulent flow conditions. That creates a positive-negative charge into the liquid. We basically transform the physical properties of the liquid, making it easier for those droplets to attach to the crop. Then, we can use the off-the-shelf nozzles for smaller droplets that are readily available, but farmers don’t use them because of drift. But, with our technology, you can spray without the drift. In fact, we reduced drift by over 80 percent using small droplets.

Tom:                           I was going to ask you, if you were to do them side by side, conventional versus the MagGrow method, what would you see?

Gary:                           We’ve done that worldwide with the major research centers and our customers worldwide as part of our validation. It’s a patented new technology, so that was vital. But, basically, you’ll just see a massive cloud with conventional technology, and you can hardly see the spray using the MagGrow system. We have a video on our website, which clearly shows that, on maggrow.com.

Tom:                           This sounds like a bonafide agricultural technology disruptor.

Gary:                           Absolutely. Hugely. Because if $60 billion of chemicals have been sold annually and growing…70 percent of that is not needed.

                                    And, of the ingredient they spray, 99 percent of it is water. In California, Africa and Asia, we’re using over 80 percent of the total available water for agriculture right now.

                                    The world needs 70 percent more food. Africa needs 300 percent more food. We need sustainable innovation, using less to grow more, and that’s where MagGrow steps in.

Tom:                           You mentioned that you manufactured a device that’s attached to a tractor boom. What about portability? Backpack sprayers, that kind of thing.

Gary:                           Yeah, we did two water products. One for greenhouses. Backpack for greenhouses. The fluid is piped into the system, and it goes through a MagGrow magnetic manifold. We basically then use the small nozzles again.

                                    We have customers in East Africa who are the fourth- and fifth-biggest flower growers in the world that are using 50 percent less water, 50 percent fewer chemicals. They’re getting uniform coverage under the leaf as well as above the leaf and less disease pressure because there’s less humidity in the room.

                                    And again, they are problems that we can solve.

                                    Finally, we’ve developed a product for the small farm holder, which is 500 million farms worldwide. This is really exciting because they’re the poorest of the poor. We’re using a technology in East Africa right now that’s produced 300 percent higher yields because they’re working off a low base, using the same amount of chemicals they currently use right now because we make the chemical last four times longer with small droplets. Current technology would just waste and blow away. With our system, it’s very efficient, and we allow them to use six-nozzle systems instead of a one-nozzle system. We are trialing that with the World Bank, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and the Dutch government and other interested parties in East Africa right now.

Tom:                           Was it a challenge to make it cost-effective to bring the technology to the point where it’s affordable even to the small farmer?

Gary:                           For the small farmer, basically, they use a simple knapsack, which is $40. The air system is $1,000, but you don’t need one for each farm.

                                    We’re using a pay-per-spray model for those small farm holders to take the (in)affordability away. Basically, what we do is we supply the equipment under license to an agent who is selling the inputs to them. We make sure the input is of the correct quality because you need to have the correct chemicals that are not diluted. Then we train the agent to spray for the farmers. We’re getting 300 percent higher yield for the same money. Africa needs 300 percent more food. And we’re saving 50 percent water.

Tom:                           I’ve read that attracting U.S. investors is a desire of many an Irish startup. What does it take to attract American investment?

Gary:                           We, from the very beginning, were solving a problem, not developing a technology and trying to find a problem. I think that’s a big distinction. We had a problem to solve that was worldwide and universal in a market that’s worth over $8 billion. So, that attracts the big U.S. investors, the size of the market. They also look at the team.

                                    This is my second startup. My previous startup is now a $60 million business that I set up myself. It serves apartment business that’s operating all over Europe. I exited it two years ago to try and set up MagGrow, which is what we’ve done successfully. I brought a team of people that have over 50 years of collective startup experience as well as multinational experience.

                                    You can have a wonderful product, but you need to have a world-class team. Then, you’ll need a business model that makes sense to the investors. So, we were very clear working with large customers, working with the leading research centers to validate our technology, get the patents in place and then start selling direct so that we could control the sales process, to get customers doing the early adapting, doing field demos and then find local distributors to scale and partner.

Tom:                           There were in excess of 180 applicants for The Pearse Lyons Accelerator program. What was it like to get that e-mail, or phone call, or letter in the mail telling you that you were one of the 10?

Gary:                           It was fabulous. It was fantastic because, actually, since we invented this technology, Alltech was on our radar, and we were trying to get to the top people in Alltech because I knew our technology would interest them as they’re in the crop protection space, especially in the biologics space, which is opposite to the petrochemical-based pesticides. With those products, too much of it gets blown away, so it’s not affordable for our farmers. The holy grail is those biologics for use for farms; you don’t even need to wash the crop. MagGrow can solve that problem.

                                    I knew I needed to get in front of them. To be actually selected and now going to the mentorship program, having a very good mentor, getting access to their network, their channel partners, and now we’re working with them all over the world…so we were absolutely delighted and chuffed to achieve that.

Tom:                           For the listener whose focus may be more on the consumer end than on the producer end, how would you say that your technology, MagGrow technology, affects the average consumer’s dinner table?

Gary:                           There’s a number of ways we help the consumer. One, for the people that work in agriculture, we’re making their lives safer. They’re not breathing in these products because it’s going straight to the crop. We’re stopping the 70 percent waste going into our rivers and streams. We’re not contaminating. Pesticides blow into other fields and cross-contaminate. It’s called a minimum residual level problem. So, we’re not cross-contaminating other food with other pesticides. We’re making sure it only goes to the crop and nowhere else. So, water is not contaminated. Water is cleaner and healthier.

                                    And, because you need fewer inputs, we can drive the cost of food down. That’s affecting the consumer in terms of having higher quality food, better use of scarce resources and making it more affordable when the world needs 70 percent more food.

Tom:                           Gary, what would you say you enjoy most about your work?

Gary:                           Myself and the team are very passionate about what we do because the world, as I said at the beginning, needs 70 percent more food, and it’s using 80 percent of all water. There’s a massive challenge over the next 30 years: 2 billion more people on this planet.

                                    We get up every day excited because we know we’re doing our bit to solve some of the biggest food and water challenges this world is going to face, and we’re working with small farm holders. That makes us feel good every day.

Tom:                           Gary Wickham, CEO, founding member of MagGrow. Thank you so much for being with us.

Gary:                           Thank you.

Gary Wickham spoke at ONE: The Alltech Ideas Conference (ONE17). To hear more talks from the conference, sign up for the Alltech Idea Lab. For access, click on the button below.

As planting begins, or continues, across various regions in North America, we should all be preparing to do the one thing that can have a significant impact on making or breaking our crops: scouting. Crop scouting is important for numerous reasons, but most importantly, it gives insight on the next steps you need to take to ensure you get the most out of your crops.

Three ways to tell if your crops need a boost:

1. Plant health

Overall plant health can be difficult to identify. The main indicators to look for include plant growth uniformity, patches of discoloration across the field and any signs of lodging. If observed, the crop may not be as healthy as it needs to be to thrive.

Soil and plant testing can identify nutrient deficiencies and other causes of decreased plant health.

2. Disease pressure

There are two key indicators of the level of disease pressure you may be dealing with: the crop’s leaves and the roots.

If the leaves are discolored and the bottom ones are beginning to wilt, you may need to speak to your agronomist about what your crop needs to get back on the path to high yields and overall crop quality.

After digging up a plant, examine the roots and look for consistent color. Also, if you have been experiencing wet weather conditions, the roots may give off a foul odor. Root rot can be caused by fungi attacking the root system, poor drainage, lack of oxygen to the root system, and phytotoxicity.  Treatment will depend on the cause, ranging from the use of fungicides to aeration, but if left untreated, root rot will eventually kill the plant. 

Increasing nutrient availability to the plants and improving plant health can  improve their ability to resist disease pressure.  Healthy plants are more likely to reach their full genetic potential of productivity.

3. Soil health

Your soil is a great storyteller. If it begins to get too dry, it will begin to crack. If it gets too wet, it turns to muck.

When you are out scouting your crops, remember to check your soil. If it is showing the indicators mentioned above, or if it lacks soil structure when you pick it up, you may want to give your agronomist a call.

If your crop scouting brings to light any of the issues listed above, ask your local trusted agronomist to thoroughly scout your field. By catching problems early, you may be able to get your crop back on the right track to achieve its full potential.

Have a question or comment?

During mid-February in many areas of the United States, children could be heard laughing and playing outside, but instead of sledding down hills and building snowmen, they were playing baseball. Cherry trees and dogwoods were beginning to bud, and the grass would soon need to be mowed.    

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has decreed this winter (December 2016–February 2017) as the sixth warmest on record. While the conditions have been warm and dry in the Midwest, California and the western part of the U.S. have experienced a very wet winter that has resulted in widespread flooding, a mixed blessing for an area that has been under drought conditions for several years.    

What does this wild weather mean for growers? 

Early warm weather can increase pressure from various sources:

• Diseases that may survive the season if the ground does not freeze
• Insects that can find a ready food source in early emerging crops
• Early weed growth that could mean an increase in weed population, decreasing the ability of the crop to establish itself
• Cool, wet soil that can hinder seed germination and increase the probability of mold
• Soil compaction caused by machinery being used on wet soils during early planting can decrease nutrient availability and reduce drainage and the ability for adequate rooting
• Possibilities of late-season freezes that can damage new planting and early growth

What should growers do in early warm weather conditions?

Increasing the organic matter and availability of nutrients can help decrease the effects of soil compaction and help the soil bounce back more quickly. Healthier soil will provide a solid foundation for improved plant health, enabling the crop to better resist damage from frost and disease. Frequent scouting and prompt field testing will allow the grower to more effectively manage weed, insect and disease pressure and prevent any issues from becoming widespread.

Have a question or comment?

[LEXINGTON, Ky.] – Alltech Crop Science, the agronomic division of Alltech, has attained its first product registration in the Indian state of Karnataka. The company has registered Grain-SetTM IN, a micronutrient fertilizer based on amino acid and fermentation technology, for use on grain crops in the region.

Aman Sayed, Alltech’s director of India and South Asia, expects Grain-SetTM IN to be welcomed as a natural alternative to traditional fertilizers. Grain-SetTM IN will support Karnataka growers in the challenges they face with soil fertility and micronutrient depletion.

“It is great to have the first registration for Alltech Crop Science in India,” said Sayed. “This is just the beginning for Alltech and for our plans to support the increasing sustainability of Indian agronomy. We look forward to helping the farming community in achieving the targeted growth rate set forth by the Ministry of Agriculture, by enhancing agriculture production and productivity.”

The Grain-SetTM IN registration comes in the wake of government programs, such as the Soil Health Mission, that incentivize growers to use management practices that include soil testing and to use the results from testing to treat their crops more efficiently.

Alltech has provided solutions for India’s livestock sector since 1990. Contact the Alltech India team at india@alltech.com to learn more about how Grain-Set INTM might benefit your grain crops.

Aman Sayed, Alltech’s director of India and South Asia

In a country of over 1.2 billion people, agriculture is the backbone of the Indian economy. It contributes to the overall economic growth of the country and determines the standard of living for over half of the population of India.   

The state of Karnataka, an agrarian area in the southwest region where much of the state is still dependent on the monsoon season, has experienced substantial growth in food and grain production through the introduction of improved seed varieties, fertilizer applications and the implementation of irrigation practices. However, these advancements have also resulted in depletion of nutrients and a decrease in organic matter in the soil. In order to overcome these challenges, the local government has implemented measures that include soil fertility status reports and then use the results of these tests to advise growers on more sustainable crop management practices.   

Karnataka’s growers face several challenges in terms of maintaining their economic viability:

• Land holdings: Nearly 80 percent of farming families own less than 2 acres of land.
• Irrigation: 70 percent of the arable land is rainfed.
• Crop technology: There is limited distribution of seeds and other primary inputs available to average growers, who find cost to be the most prohibitive factor in attaining new technology.  
• Soil erosion and depletion: Large areas of land are susceptible to soil erosion from wind and water. Soils have also historically been overused and overworked, resulting in deteriorated soil health. 

“The registration of Alltech Crop Science [in Karnataka] is just the beginning,” says Aman Sayed, Alltech’s director of India and South Asia, who is looking forward to giving growers in the region a natural alternative to the traditional fertilizers available.

The use of natural-based fertilizers can help increase nutrient availability in the soil and improve plant defenses to stressors, such as those caused by lack of irrigation, and help plants reach their full genetic potential.  

Have a question or comment?

An interview with David Hunt

The following is an edited transcript of our interview with David Hunt, CEO and co-founder of Cainthus. Cainthus is a machine-vision company specializing in health analytics for crop and livestock.

Tell us a little bit about why digitizing agriculture is important and what the potential is.

How we got into all of this is, we looked at what was going on in the agriculture world. My brother and I got extremely concerned about how, if we keep on farming in our “green revolution” style agriculture of monocultures plus chemical input, we are effectively going to kill our planet. We realized that we need to make things far more efficient, and farm in more environmentally friendly ways, in order to stave off what currently looks like an inevitability at the moment.

We then said, “What’s the best way to go about doing this?” Despite coming from an agriculture background, I didn’t realize the sheer absence of measurement that was at the commercial field or commercial livestock level. We realized if you want to improve agriculture, first of all you need to start measuring things. Then, once you can measure things, you can work out how to improve them and then ultimately that will hopefully lead to a better system.

I am very much a science fiction fan, and one of the things that always excited me as a child was the concept of robots working in farms and fields. When we started out on this journey, it was all toward the view of what we needed to do to get robots into our fields. One of the things we found out was, a robot is actually only as good as the data that feeds it. If you have an absence of data and an absence of measurement in agriculture, then the robots are never going to be there.

My personal opinion is, we will never be able to move away from monocultures until we have on-demand precision harvesting, which probably needs to be performed by robots, given the cost in increased human labor. When we went looking at what was the best way to systematically capture commercial field scale data in a manner that would be affordable to the farmer, we couldn’t get beyond the fact that digital imaging was going to be the way to do it. Camera technology is increasing at an exponential level at the moment. We only just got HD TVs and they are talking about 4K TVs, ultra HD, 8K TVs, etc. It’s that technology, and how cheap it is becoming, that’s enabling us to use drones to get highly precise images of what’s going on in our fields, far beyond the capability of what we can see with the human eye. One of the big concepts that I think people on farms need to understand, particularly crop farms, when it comes to drones: The drone is incidental and is simply the best current delivery device we have for getting one centimeter per pixel resolution, which is the minimum requirement in my opinion to spot what’s going on in a farm.

Tell me about some of the ways that you want to take that visual information. What would be the practical application? What are some of the things you have in mind?

Stand counts are something very useful we can do today. One of the biggest decisions a farmer makes every year is when they plant a field and the crops start emerging. If areas in the field do not emerge, well, what do I do about it? When you can count every individual plant in a field, you can make a data-driven decision as to whether it makes financial sense to re-sow or simply do nothing. I know enough farmers to know how difficult it is for a farmer to sit on their hands and do nothing when they are looking at a big bare patch in the middle of their field. Financially speaking, when it comes to your profit margin, it may actually be the best decision to simply do nothing. Introducing data-driven decision to agriculture, via increased digital measurement, is what enables you to do things like that.

Another application we have: Crop maturity analytics is something we can do today. The whole point of that is, when you ask farmers when they harvest their fields, it is generally they are afraid of bad weather coming, so they are going to harvest before the bad weather. If they see the neighbor out or the local agronomist tells them to do it, very little of it is based on data. I heard Aidan Connolly make a great point that today we farm based on what we see happening in our fields or what we see happening with our animals. Increasingly, as agriculture becomes more digitized, we are going to start farming data. We will look at what the data feedback is coming off our farm, and we will be making decisions on our farming activity based on that.

You talked about the importance of getting to a sustainable form of agriculture. What are some of the problems that we have, the way we are farming currently? What’s the potential risk for not dealing with it?

The potential risk of not dealing with it is our planet dies. That doesn’t mean humans will go extinct or anything like that; it just means that this planet won’t be a very nice place to live. Elon Musk is doing everything he can to get to Mars, but I’m not sure that’s going to be much nicer.

When we look at the principal risks that can be dealt with by using digital technologies, number one is our out-of-control nitrogen cycle. Currently, we are spending $140 billion dollars annually on nitrogen fertilizer. Depending on the target plant, 17 to 26 percent of that is being used by the target plant and the rest is being taken up by weeds, getting locked into the soil, or going as runoff into our waterways. We have an inefficiency loop in terms of our nitrogen fertilizer. The difficulty with that in terms of an environmental perspective is, unfortunately, nitrogen fertilizer does a lot of damage to our soil. We are in a situation where we’re putting in more and more fertilizer to get the same results. The only way we are going to break out of that vicious cycle is by getting technology that allows us to apply fertilizer and other chemical inputs on-demand when appropriate to do so, as opposed to just doing blanket hit-and-hope spraying as we do today.

Will the application in the future be more directly just to the plant’s root system, or do you think there will be more ways to deliver it more efficiently so it’s not covering the whole field?

I really can’t see beyond using robotic applications. DJI Drones has already released a robotic sprayer that can spray sixty acres per hour at $15,000. One of the things we can do is spot very early where there is a problem in your field. Then you identify the problem, and you can send in your precision sprayer to spray the area in the field when it is only impacting a couple of square meters, as opposed to having to spray the entire field when you see it with your own eyes.

How do you visually, with a camera, determine where you need nitrogen? I would assume that’s based on plant growth or color?

Nitrogen application is not something we can do with visual technology today in a manner that is affordable to a farmer. The best sort of sensor tech to use, to identify where you need nitrogen, is hyperspectral. That is way too expensive to be using at farm level currently. The other thing is, if you do decide to spend the money on something like hyperspectral and look at it at the start of the year, that is only so useful, because your requirements are going to change throughout the growing season. For technology to actually make a meaningful impact, it needs to be cheap enough that you can use it consistently throughout the growing season so you can apply inputs as and when needed by the plant.

How will you make It cheaper?

If you look at RGB cameras, which are like the cameras in your smartphone or a normal camera, they are getting incredibly cheap, incredibly quickly. Again, so cheap that you have a camera included in your smartphone for free that a professional photographer would have killed for ten years ago. Hyperspectral is the same; the underlying drivers of the cost of that technology are the same for RGB. The reason hyperspectral is so expensive is that an RGB camera looks at three spectra, red, green and blue, and hyperspectral looks at two hundred spectra. Your underlying data cost is obviously a large multiple of the cost associated with an RGB camera, not to mention the cost of the sensor itself.

I think you mentioned, aside from the nitrogen cycle, two other big issues with agriculture. Can you talk about those a little bit?

Number one, we really need to stop using pesticides as much as we do, because obviously that indiscriminately kills all sorts of things, not just the target pest species. Also, we need to stop farming in monocultures. As I said, one of the technologies we have already developed is precision. We can spot on a grain-by-grain basis when a crop is mature and ready to be harvested. When you can do precision on-demand harvesting, that will enable you to get away from your combine harvester green revolution paradigm, where you have to harvest an entire field in a couple of hours. If you can plant many different species of plants in one field and harvest them on demand when appropriate, that’s a far more environmentally friendly way to farm. In theory, it should also be a more profitable way for a farmer to farm. They are not beholden to the commodity markets in an individual crop. They have greater resilience to commodity markets, certainly, because they have many different crops.

One of the other things farmers should also be aware of in the future is there is a big trend creeping in that bio-suitability is arguably the best way to grow things. What I mean by that is, what did nature intend to grow in the area where your farm happens to be? The more you try to force something to grow where nature didn’t intend it to grow, the more chemical inputs and artificial methodologies you are going to need to make that happen. One of the things I think that farmers need to consider in the future is, what should we actually be farming here? What nature intended for us to farm here is going to minimize how many inputs we need to make it happen.

There are also going to be more exotic types of farming available to us in the near future. Solar panels are a great example. How many farmers in semi-arid regions would actually be better off having solar farms rather than crop or livestock farms? Similarly, there is a chance we are going to see algae farming developing, so you know if you have a high level of solar activity, you are going to be better off farming algae than farming crops or livestock. I don’t know the answers to these questions, but I do know we are going to have far more options as to what we do with our land as we move further into the future.

You mentioned alternative ways to manufacture commodities like milk.

Yeah. If you look on a long enough time horizon, we can already see emerging trends. We are starting to create agents of nutritional complexity, as opposed to biological agents of nutritional complexity. What I mean by a biological agent of nutritional complexity is, well, an example of one is a cow. You feed a cow grass, you get milk and beef from that animal when you have just fed it grass. That’s what I mean by an agent of nutritional complexity.

We are already starting to see the emergence of synthetic meat. There is synthetic milk, which is a bio-fermentation process including a type of genetically modified yeast that, when you feed it sugars, it excretes something that is molecularly identical to milk rather than excreting alcohol.

The other big one is algae. Alltech’s heterotrophic algae facility never ceases to amaze me. I just think it’s one of the most wonderful things I’ve seen. On the best land in the world, if you get 4.5 tons of wheat out of it a year, you are doing well. If you put a heterotrophic algae plant on the worst land in the world, you can get 60 tons of that stuff every nineteen days. The parallel I draw to this is, it’s not dissimilar to where we were in the energy market in the ‘70s. We could see that the future of energy was more than likely going to be nuclear plus solar plus batteries, but we had to make our fossil fuels system more efficient and less environmentally harmful in order to buy us time to get there. We are just about there in the energy market now. When I look at agriculture, I think there is no doubt that if we want to feed 10 billion people by 2050 without destroying our planet, we are going to need stuff like nuclear and solar that give us what we need without depleting our natural resources. I would be arguing that what we are currently trying to do is make a green revolution and agriculture more efficient and more environmentally friendly until we get to such a point that we can actually create edible, tasty and nutritious food that comes out of processes like bio-fermentation, such as synthetic milk and algae.

The other big outlier in that, as well, is insect meal. There is a big question of whether synthetic meat will ever be viable for reasons that are quite long so I’m not going to go into them here. But the other big issue with synthetic meat is, insects are able to convert base nutrients into more complex proteins at an eighty percent efficiency level. So any synthetic meat is going to have to beat how efficient insects are already. I get a little frustrated by the lack of adoption of insects in our industry, because they are such a suitable food for chickens and fish as well as humans. The thing I like to say is, when we eat insects from the sea, they command a price premium and are considered a delicacy. Insects that are found on land are considered disgusting, which I really don’t get.

That’s a really interesting point, because if you take a really good close look at a shrimp or a crayfish, they are very much like an insect or closely related. Do you eat any land-based insects?

I have. They are not that widely available in Ireland or the United States. I have no issue eating them whatsoever.

This is where stuff gets a little bit disgusting, but one of the other big things that’s important about heterotrophic algae and insect meal is, you can actually use human faeces to fuel those technologies. Scientifically speaking, there is no problem with that whatsoever, but when people think about that, even though it makes tremendous environmental and ecological sense, that really turns people’s stomachs. If we want to have 10 billion people on this planet, these are the types of solutions we need to think about. We need to make better use of our waste. If we can use our waste to make food with it, I can’t think of a better use case than that.

Maybe a starting point is to feed animals with insect protein.

I wouldn’t expect us to feed human waste to insects, then eat the insects. When I’m talking about doing that, I mean feed the insects to chickens; then we will eat the chickens. Even feed one group of insects the human waste and feed those insects to other insects, and then we can process those insects with a lot of flavorings and hopefully people will eat them then. It’s very difficult to predict the way these things will go when it’s something quite so disgusting.

One last question: How did you name your company, and what does the name mean?

We completely over-thought the name, as is our habit. I did Latin for six years, and canthus is the Latin word for the corner of your eye. In Caesar’s propaganda that he used to send back to Rome, he was always winning battles that no one else could win, because he saw things out of the corner of his eye that no one else saw. Then there is a huge artificial intelligence (AI) component to what we do as well, so Cainthus is part canthus and AI.

David Hunt spoke at ONE: The Alltech Ideas Conference. Audio recordings of most talks, including David's, are now available on the Alltech Idea Lab. For access, click on the button below.

The sun is shining and the skies are blue, but there is a palpable anxiety in the Florida orange groves.

A menace is lurking, evading citrus growers’ best attempts to keep it at bay and preserve their livelihood and the world’s favorite breakfast beverage.

The perpetrators are small, no bigger than an eighth of an inch, but they are mighty. The Asian citrus psyllid is responsible for transmitting a bacterial disease called Huanglongbing, better known as citrus greening.                                                                                                                   

What is citrus greening?

As the Asian citrus psyllid feeds on the phloem sap of the citrus trees, the Huanglongbing (HLB) bacteria can be injected. Phloem cells are responsible for transporting nutrients, sugars and metabolites throughout the plant, thus providing the bacteria with a carbon-rich food source.  

Typical citrus greening symptoms include blotchy mottle characterized by random patterns of asymmetrical yellowing on the leaves. In addition, the fruit are often reduced in size, fail to color properly, are misshapen, abscise from the tree prematurely and are bitter in taste. As the disease progresses, root growth is suppressed, there is twig dieback and, eventually, tree mortality occurs. 

Although some varieties of citrus show tolerance to the disease, there is no real resistance. Mature trees that become infected can take years to show symptoms, adding to the complexity of disease management. 

Citrus greening is one of the oldest and most serious citrus diseases. While the disease was first reported in China in 1919, it did not appear in Florida until 2005. 

Why should citrus greening concern you?

All commercial citrus species are susceptible to greening, and it has been reported that over 80 percent of citrus in Florida is infected.

Florida accounts for over 49 percent of citrus production in the U.S. and is one of the world’s largest contributors to the citrus juice industry. As the top agricultural sector for the state, Florida’s citrus industry provides over 76,000 full- and part-time jobs.  

The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) reports that citrus production in Florida decreased by 16 percent during the 2015–2016 season over the previous year. This is in addition to the continual decline in year-over-year production, with decreases ranging from 4–16 percent on any given year, that the state has been seeing since 2005. 

With the decrease in citrus acreage and the loss in number of production trees, Florida’s economy is being threatened. This decline could mean more sparse grocery shelves for orange juice and higher prices for consumers. 

How is the citrus industry fighting citrus greening?

In an attempt to prevent the spread of the disease, the U.S. government has placed a federal order on the quarantine of citrus plants and plant parts, excluding fruit, from leaving Florida without specific approval and proof of treatment against the Asian citrus psyllid.   

The USDA is also investing millions of dollars into research against the disease. The research spans several studies, including those that look into possible bactericides and finding resistant citrus varieties.

Currently, growers are using scouting, tree removal, nutrition and pesticidal programs to manage the disease. 

Alltech Crop Science is working with growers in Florida, investigating possible ways of combating citrus greening. Research is being conducted to investigate the impact of nutritional inputs as well as to identify how this disease impacts defense genes within infected trees.     

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Advanced Agricultural Leadership Program (AALP). In a region where farmland is measured in square feet, fried crickets are a delicacy and roadside markets are more common than supermarkets, we experienced many firsts, and our eyes were opened to the differences in agriculture between Canada and Southeast Asia.

We arrived in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, ironically on the inaugural Canada’s Agriculture Day, and so we shared our #AgMoreThanEver pride from the other side of the world.

Over the next few days, we toured around rural areas, visiting a rubber tree plantation, an agriculture research park where they were growing cabbage, melons and peppers, an earthworm farm and a dairy.

After an eye-opening experience traveling through Vietnam, we flew to Thailand to finish our study tour. We visited the Baan Susan Chamchoen Farm, owned by Mr. Somsak, outside of Bangkok. He toured us through his mixed fruit farm, which he built for agri-tourism, with lodging, a restaurant and a store to purchase many value-added products, including syrups and jams. He grows bananas, coconuts and mangos and raises ducks, chickens and goats. We thanked Mr. Somsak for his hospitality with an Ag More Than Ever t-shirt and a Canadian flag.

Jenn Norrie is the on-farm communications manager for Alltech, based in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. You can follow her on Twitter @jennorrie. You can also view posts from the AALP International Study Tour with the hashtag #AALP16.

A few weeks after harvest is over, Ray Tucker studies the yield reports on his corn and soybeans and begins the task of planning for the following year. As a sixth-generation farmer, this is a well-practiced ritual for Tucker.

“We go back about five years in the records,” says Tucker, who uses this data not only to keep track of how his fields have been producing throughout the years, but also to plan what varieties of corn, soybean, wheat and tobacco he will plant the following year.

“We normally don’t plant one variety for more than two years,” he explains.

He notes that available seed varieties tend to change every few years, which he enjoys because “it keeps you on top of your varieties and what each of them will do.”

Farm management pragmatism

Tucker is very pragmatic in his approach to his farm management. 

“My income depends on the weather,” he says. “It depends on the rain and depends on the sunshine, and it doesn’t make a difference what crop you’re talking about.”

Even so, Tucker never lets his crops want for anything that is within his control. He makes his decisions on crop inputs based on his expectations for the year. For example, if it is expected to be a rainy year, he knows that the disease potential will be high and adjustments will need to be made to better prepare the crop to fight against those diseases. 

Balancing technological investment with the bottom line

Keeping up with technology is another important factor for Tucker. 

“We’ve adapted to the technology,” says Tucker. “We are a very open-minded farm and are willing to give new products a try. We have to be in order to be profitable and sustainable for the future.” 

While he extols the virtues of being progressive, Tucker cautions that “you have to draw a line between how much money you’re going to spend to keep up with the times and still be able to feed your family.” 

For the love of the farm

When asked what stands out to him after his many years of farming, Tucker smiles as he says, “You have to want it. You have to want to spend 20 hours in the tractor, or the combine, or the sprayer. You have to want to do everything you can to have your crop do well.” 

Those long hours and hard work have a very rewarding outcome.

“My most favorite thing is to be able to raise a family on the farm,” says Tucker, recalling picnic lunches and suppers on the field. “You work hard, and when the work is done, you can play hard.”

Tucker’s matter-of-fact tone belies his passion for his vocation.

“It’s our livelihood; it’s what we do.”  

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