WESTERN PRODUCER — Crop traits are being developed that will enable plants to signal when they’re exposed to specific stressors in a way that can be instantly detected by satellite or equipment-based cameras.
Shely Aronov, chief executive officer of InnerPlant, she said this new data layer these crop traits enable will help farmers to become more precise in how they fertilize and treat crops.
“It’s a trait embedded in crops, the first crop is soybean the second will be corn, that can tell us when there’s a fungal infestation. Later on, we’ll do insects and nitrogen deficiency,” Aronov said.
Plants have developed sophisticated systems of signals and responses they use when facing adversity, from insect or fungus attacks to inadequate nitrogen or water.
For instance, when some plants are being eaten by bugs, they produce compounds to make them taste bad. While other plants will put more energy into their root system to better extract nitrogen when they’re deficient in the nutrient.
“These reactions have been developed over millions of years. So, plants have been optimizing this for a long time,” Aronov said.
“What we do is we look at this reaction and we tell the plants, we code them to respond; when you’re protecting yourself from X start producing a new protein in your leaves that they don’t know how to do otherwise, so that’s a new line of code.”
With the use of genetic engineering techniques, InnerPlant codes the plants to emit a fluorescent protein with a specific colour that can be picked up by optical cameras.
Aronov said up to seven different fluorescent proteins will be emitted from a single plant, which will signify seven separate stressors the plants may face.
However, only three of these proteins emitted on the plant’s leaves will be detectable from satellites. The remaining proteins will be developed to be detectable from cameras installed on farm machines.
John Deere recently led a US$16 million funding round for InnerPlant, which gave it a seat at the InnerPlant board.
Aronov said collaborating with Deere will help InnerPlant better understand the traits it needs to develop.
“The nice thing is that we’re doing this together. So, the idea is we are designing plants that signal what they need. They (John Deere) design sensors and cameras that capture the signals and by collaborating we can build a system that’s better,” Aronov said.
“I think one of the things that John Deere is excited about is really integrating the crops into farm management systems because we don’t know how to do that today.”
Than Hartsock is global director of corn and soybean production systems at Deere and his focuses on the front end of the company’s discovery cycle.
He finds new ideas to bring into the Deere’s new product pipeline by working with product development teams.
He said InnerPlant’s technology could take precision agriculture to another level.
“The tech that they’re bringing to fruition is unique signals to specific stresses at a higher resolution, earlier than typically detected. So, there’s the specificity and there’s the timeliness,” he said.
Hartsock first came across InnerPlant on social media, which led him to Aronov’s podcasts.
“I listened to a few podcasts, and it became pretty clear that our visions for the future of crop production are pretty well aligned, and the alignment point is around plant-level management,” Hartsock said.
Traditional ways of identifying plant health issues, from satellite imagery to scouting, often do not identify problems until after irreparable damage is done
“The opportunity with the plants becoming the sensor and, not only becoming the sensor but also making that signal visible sooner and more detectable early at a high resolution, I think that is the key element of what InnerPlant is focused on unlocking,” Hartsock said.
“The best signal for what the plant needs is the plant itself. The plant understands and biologically can detect when there’s a nutrient shortage, or deficiency is starting to appear, or an insect infestation or a fungal disease is starting to become present.”
Deere has already developed the technology required to sense and respond to the plant signals being developed by InnerPlant.
Deere’s See and Spray Ultimate system that it launched in 2022 can identify and treat individual weeds in real time.
“It’s scanning with 36 cameras with a camera every meter (on the boom), and it has the processing power to scan and understand the local environment,” Hartsock said.
“We see a strong alignment between that capability, these cameras, computing, this highly productive machine to come in and then read these stress signals that InnerPlant is working on.”
He said the possibility of integrating plant signals into its precision ag digital systems has opened new possibilities for farmers to become more efficient.
He said John Deere’s Operation Center could alert a grower that satellite images have detected plant signals that indicate spider mites are beginning to show up around the edges of a soybean field, for example
The Operation Center could help a producer decide the kind and volume of material needed to address the infestation and to organize a machine to apply it.
“We can send the machine out there knowing about the scale and the type of the problem. Then we take the scalpel and go in and surgically address this in a quick fashion,” Hartsock said.
“The eyes from the sky can then monitor to see if it’s remedied and that the stress signal has dissipated and the crop is back on track.”
The investment in InnerPlant follows a long pattern of John Deere investments in companies working on technology that align with its vision.
Deere invested in a GPS technology company called NavCom 25 years ago that eventually became the backbone of Deere’s Starfire GPS receiver and correction network.
It also acquired Blue River Technology, a startup that developed artificial intelligence technology that is now integrated in Deere’s See and Spray.
An investment into a biotechnological company strays away from the kinds of companies Deere typically invests in, but Hartsock said InnerPlant technology could become an important technology that Deere wants to help usher to market.
“They (InnerPlant) would continue to evolve over time but probably at a slower pace than what we can do in the collaboration,” Hartsock said.
“So, it’s certainly not a common type of investment and we’re not aspiring to become a seed company, but we think this is a great learning opportunity for us to both help each other move forward.”
