Description

Background

As a primary production, agriculture is one of the most important human economical activity. The history of farming can be traced back to the thousands of years ago, and its origin played an important role in human civilization birth and development.

Nowadays, the objects and patterns of agriculture production have been greatly changed. Modern commercial farming has gradually replaced the traditional subsistence farming. Apart from the food crops, fiber crops and other cash crops constantly sprung up and took a big proportion in today’s agriculture. In China,cash crops generally present a regional distribution. For instance, teas are cultivated mainly in south and southwestern China,or adjacent to the Yangtse River. These intensive cultivations aim to be easy to manage, concentrate advantages and reduce the cost.

However, such farming pattern exists some drawbacks. A huge local ecological loss will be caused because of the exploration of crop diseases. In order to lower the exploration possibility, many new technologies had been applied in agriculture.Biocontrol is a new method for agriculture control. Compared to general methods like spraying pesticide in traditional agriculture, biocontrol has certain advantages. Firstly, the economic cost reduces since spraying pesticide needs more human and material resources, moreover, just like some enteric microorganism help improve the gut environment of their host, the self-coordination ability of the soil environment itself improves after inoculating bio-agents.Theoretically,appropriate biocontrol methods can achieve sustainable green environmental effect, however, the reality often fails to see this.

Fig1: The picture shows the parallel roles played by enteric microorganism and endophytes

Problem

As mentioned above, the cash crops beseem to large-scale intensive cultivation, and because of that, technologies of modern agriculture including automatic irrigation and unscrewed aerial vehicle remote sensing (UAVRS) are always applied in cultivating such crops to increase their productions. However, the current method to apply biocontrol in the farm is not consistent with the concept of modern agriculture, mainly showing at the following aspects.

The key point is the unknowable for applying biocontrol. People can’t know whether and when the diseases intruded, meanwhile, the resistance actions of bio-agents were totally out of control, People can do nothing but get the final result from the production variety of crops. Besides, the effects actually are limited. Taking Paecilomyces lilacinus as an example, it only inhabits some kinds of nematodes by secreting specific protease. And also it’s difficult to composite various bio-agents when preserve their respective advantages at the same time. We think applying biocontrol in such a blind way is very passive.

Our Aims

ZJU-China 2017 aims to establish a system and the corresponding workflow for applying biocontrol in a more wide and controlled way, and the disease information can also be reported to the human at the same time, which means people can know the situation more accurately and timely. We decided to choose Trichoderma atroviride as the chassis for its widely used in present biocontrol menthods (See our decision-making process in HP Silver page). And we chose tobaccos as our testing plants for its high status in cash crops(See our decision-making process in HP Gold page). Combined with the automation concept pursued by modern agriculture, our design is suitable for large-scale cultivation of crops. And we made a hardware to build a information communication between humans, hardware and bio-agents, which create a new direction in applying biocontrol. We believe it has very broad application prospects in the unceasing developmental modern agriculture.

See how we build up this system in the Demonstrate page.

Reference

[1] Brand D, Roussos S, Pandey A, et al. Development of a bionematicide with Paecilomyces lilacinus to control Meloidogyne incognita.[J]. Applied Biochemistry & Biotechnology, 2004, 118(1-3):81-88.