CelluDot has won a $959,510 Small Business Innovation Research Phase II award from the National Science Foundation.
The Fayetteville-based agri-science company will use the funding to commercialize its eco-friendly, efficient, and cost-effective solution for herbicide drift.
An Answer for Herbicide Drift
An estimated 70 million pounds of agrichemicals – especially volatile herbicides like dicamba – pollute unintended areas due to drift each year, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.
Chemical & Engineering News reported that the EPA received 3,500 complaints about dicamba misuse in 2021. The associated damage extended from crops like rice, peanuts, and sweet potatoes to nearby nonagricultural plants and trees.
Apart from its widespread environmental impact, herbicide drift burdens farmers with potential financial losses if their own crops are damaged and the risk of legal ramifications if chemicals leach into surrounding fields.
CelluDot’s solution: a biopolymer adjuvant technology that keeps herbicides at the site of their intended use, allowing farmers to effectively control weeds without spreading potent chemicals beyond the intended target.
“The proposed innovation is an all-in-one bio-based adjuvant, derived from forestry and agricultural waste, with the combined functionality of a volatility reducing agent, drift reducing agent, and surfactant,” said CelluDot CEO and commercialization lead Joseph Batta-Mpouma.
The CelluDot team tested the adjuvant’s feasibility and further quantified the scope of herbicide drift with Phase I funding from both NSF and the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
“During Phase I, key findings validated technical feasibility of CelluDot’s core technology and demonstrated its vapor and particle drift reducing ability,” said company CTO Gurshagan Kandhola.
CelluDot also conducted over 300 interviews with stakeholders throughout the industry, including farmers, applicators, weed scientists, and agribusiness brand managers.
On the Market in 2 Years
Equipped with its Phase I findings, CelluDot developed a robust plan for Phase II, with the goal of fully commercializing its adjuvant technology.
“Our aim is to focus on needle-moving activities, such as field trials, pilot testing, regulatory approvals, manufacturing scale-up, and the establishment of commercial partnerships that will enable us to bring this technology to market in the next two years,” said Batta-Mpouma.
CelluDot believes its technology has a competitive edge over commercially available adjuvants, both in efficiency and environmental impact.
“CelluDot’s product will enable farmers to control weeds more effectively and safely while allowing agrochemical manufacturers and distributors of volatile herbicides to abide by EPA rules and improve their sales,” Kandhola said.
ASBTDC Assistance
Since 2020, CelluDot has engaged the Arkansas Small Business and Technology Development Center for SBIR/STTR application development services.
“ASBTDC has been a huge resource for CelluDot since Phase I,” said Batta-Mpouma. “The organization assisted us with market research, which helped us identify some key industry trends in the agrochemical adjuvant space. Additionally, the ASBTDC has provided the kind of support we needed for proposal planning and review.”
Before clinching its USDA Phase I award last year, CelluDot participated in the center’s Lab2Launch Accelerator program. Batta-Mpouma said the accelerator “was extremely valuable in learning the details of the SBIR application process and simply keeping us on track.”
CelluDot also received a Small Business Technology Transfer grant from NSF in 2021.
