Finding and removing troublesome bugs in your home can be a challenge. On large farms, this task is even more difficult and expensive.
Many farmers turn to pesticides to eliminate bugs and prevent crop damage. The USDA predicts farmers will spend $18.1 billion on pesticides this year. Monique Rivera, assistant professor of tree fruit entomology at Cornell Agritech, said these chemicals are not only expensive for farmers, but repeated exposures can be harmful to field workers.
This makes insect monitoring and early detection particularly important. “If you missed that first generation sign, you're essentially wasting insecticides,” Rivera said.
To help farmers stay one step ahead of these bugs, Spotta, a UK-based high-tech startup, has developed an Internet-of-Thing sensor and AI program that can automate insect surveillance.
“If your pet becomes a flea, do you want to know when they got one flea, or when they exist in your entire home?” said Robert Fryers, CEO and co-founder of Spotta.
Spotta's sensors use traditional trapping mechanisms such as pheromones to attract specific species. However, instead of checking the traps and performing time-consuming, labor-intensive manual workpiece inspections, farmers can leave these sensors in the field and forget about them until problems arise. Real-time surveillance data from sensors makes farmers smarter about where they use pesticides.
“The way that exposure can be refined and the amount of spray can be reduced is not only cheap for growers, but it's better for everyone who works at Orchard, to everyone who is harvesting fruit at some point,” Rivera told Business Insider.
Robert Flyers is the CEO and co-founder of Spotta. Courtesy of Spotta
Smarter Agricultural IoT Sensor Adaptation
In 2020, Spotta launched its first insect surveillance product. This is a sensor for bed bugs at hotels. However, the flyer said this was a “relatively simple problem” given that it was dry indoors and there was no need to interact with many different bugs.
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Adapting this product to the red palm that damages the palm tree on the date was another challenge. Spotta is working with dating palm plantation farmers in the Middle East. Flyers require different types of bugs to distinguish existing sensors, which can reach 194 degrees Fahrenheit, making them difficult to access regularly.
To explain this dynamic environment, sensors help to detect presence and timing responses. The sensor first uses image-based AI algorithms to identify target insects. Flyer said this is particularly powerful for customers as the technology can detect bugs around the clock.
“For many insects, they only find the problem after the damage occurs,” Flyer said. “It's really important that you can really distinguish between different insects at a very early stage in that life cycle, in fact, of a handful of life cycles.”
IoT technology, a system of devices that can connect and share data, continuously transmits insect activity data to centralized, AI-powered platforms. This tool can give farmers instructions on when and how to respond to invasions.
The platform uses AI to sift through insect activity data from field sensors, attracting external information such as weather patterns, agricultural history, and crop knowledge, and creating predictive models of infection. This knowledge helps farmers improve their pesticide use and prevent overspreading.
Flyers said Spotta's early warning system for dated Palm Farms in Qatar and the United Arab Emirates allowed farmers to detect intrusions on an average of three months ago.
Spotta's IoT sensors remain on site to collect insect activity data. This helps farmers prevent invasions. Courtesy of Spotta
Modernizing pest management
Other pest management companies, such as FarmSense and Trapview, have developed similar AIL and IoT-based products, but the development and adoption of this agricultural technology has slowed down. The Flyer said When he started Spotta, he was surprised at how little investment in technology was.
“I was hoping that all the big players, farm machinery companies, pesticide companies, pesticide companies, pest control companies would find something really, really busy in this area,” Flyer said. “To me, it seems very clear that the writing is on the wall because of the old ways to do this.
Rivera said there is room for innovation in the industry, but said tech companies entering the space need to require a lot of “early investments” to find the right audience, including educating their clients about technology. Understanding the community can help these startups thrive and become more integrated with growers.
“Agriculture reviews are major,” Rivera said. “If someone on the street is using something and they think it's great and they have an impact within that community, that's one way these technologies can easily spread across the entire production system.”
