Clinton-based agtech company SolaRid AR has received a $225,000 grant through the National Science Foundation’s Small Business Innovation Research program to develop a “smart” agricultural insect control system.
The system will use artificial intelligence to automate the process of counting and identify insects, process this data in real time, and send that information to handheld devices.
Challenges
The farming industry is becoming more consolidated, acreage per farm is increasing, and profit margins are decreasing. Farmers are turning to smart farming, which involves advanced sensor and communication technology to better manage their crops and reduce costs.
By 2025, smart farming is expected to be a $22 billion market.
An estimated 37% of all crops produced in the U.S. each year are destroyed by agricultural pests, resulting in an economic loss of around $122 billion a year.
“To properly manage their crops, farmers must carefully control the soil chemistry, water, plant spacing, weeds and insect pests. One of the most manually intensive aspects of crop management, the monitoring and control of insect pests, is largely lagging behind in the smart farming agricultural revolution,” said Donald Richardson, managing member of SolaRid AR and project principal investigator.
“Integrated pest management professionals (IPMs) hired by farmers spend 5-6 hours each day walking and monitoring fields every week. Insect monitoring involves placing and servicing traps and counting and identifying captured insects, all of which ultimately leads to management decisions based upon the contents of the traps. With many farms consisting of thousands of acres, adequate field sampling on a regular basis is not feasible. Despite the many advances in smart farming, this is one area still largely reliant on manual labor.”
Evidence in recent years has shown that changing climate is quickly altering the pest landscape through expanding pest ranges and the emergence of new pests and infectious diseases. “Being able to simultaneously attract and monitor existing and new pest species in an area or a crop will become a necessity for successful IPM practices as temperatures increase and weather patterns become more extreme and unpredictable,” said Richardson.
The SolaRid Solution
The company’s current insect trap prototype, SolaRid™, uses an array of technologies that have never been simultaneously deployed to monitor fields.
Richardson shared, “SolaRid is unique in its ability to ‘mix and match’ attractants and optimize them for specific crop protection, insect species or regions. Attractants include light-emitting diodes of varying frequency to harvest solar energy and insect-specific pheromones and kairomones which are food triggers.”
For the SBIR project, SolaRid will be optimized to be a data-intensive, 24/7 insect control device (ICD) along with associated management strategies.
“Our solution will give farmers and other IPM professionals a precision agriculture tool, bringing automatic, data-intensive leverage to their tasks. Producers will be able to see reports on their handheld devices,” said Richardson.
Artificial intelligence (AI) technology will be developed to allow SolaRid to scale and identify different species of insects with high accuracy.
Richardson explained, “In contrast to traditional ways of identifying insects, AI technology for insect identification provides a solution for processing many insects in real-time. Data generated from our proprietary sensors, degree day temperature algorithm, and AI-based identification of insects will be displayed on an IIoT control /visualization platform for iPads in the field.”
Producers can then use this data to more efficiently treat for insects in their fields. “Early detection of insects’ infestations and precise responses can reduce potential crop loss from 35% loss to 5%,” said SolaRid AR’s administrative officer, Randy Sasaki.
SolaRid could be a game-changing technology for agriculture, orchards, and forestry industries. “No existing products can compete with SolaRid in terms of the types of insects it can monitor, adaptability to different crops and different regions around the world, and accuracy of identification and quantification of insects entering the trap. Additionally, this technology will optimize the attractants used in different crop systems, giving us another major advantage over the competition,” Richardson said.
This project team is taking proactive measures to ensure that SolaRid will be able to address likely changes in the pest landscape associated with climate change. Richardson noted, “Through AI, SolaRid will build capacity to continually and quickly learn new insects and refine the character systems used to identify known species.”
SolaRid AR will manage the direction of this research project in the field. The company was inspired to develop this device after learning about Japanese and Chinese traditional lamp/traps that attract and kill insects affecting crops.
ASBTDC Assistance
The SolaRid AR team engaged the Arkansas Small Business and Technology Development Center for SBIR proposal development services.
“Rebecca Todd of the ASBTDC was the essential catalyst that propelled us to the winning proposal. She always had quick and insightful information and answers to our questions. She had helpful edits to our writing and great suggestions about what was relevant and what was not. Nothing lays on her desk! We could always count on Rebecca to have her tasks done with unbelievable immediacy. If we were to vote for an MVP on our team Rebecca would be a unanimous choice. At SolaRid AR, we are eternally grateful for the ASBTDC and Rebecca Todd,” said Richardson.
SolaRid AR also received market research services from ASBTDC.
“The market research was very helpful and was woven into the narrative of our pitch to NSF. We were also able to use it for help in redesigning our website. Our experience in becoming a client of ASBTDC has been one of the best things to happen to our company,” Richardson said.
The SolaRid AR Team
SolaRid AR’s internal team is multidisciplinary, with electrical engineers, crop scientists, software engineers, and business professionals. All of SolaRid AR’s professionals have been deeply involved in delivering information to farmers, to agricultural service providers, to rural-focused goods and service providers, and to the education of agriculturalists at all levels.
- Richardson has spent his 40-plus-year career in on-the-ground conservation and agriculture policy, environmental advocacy, and politics.
- Dr. Corbet Lamkin will also serve in a lead project role. Previously, Lamkin was chancellor of Southern Arkansas University Tech in Camden and both professor of agricultural economics and vice president of academic affairs at SAU in Magnolia.
- Sasaki has over 18 years of experience as a managing partner in an investment fund conducting due diligence, financing R&D, commercialization, and global distribution of several commercial products. SolaRid™ was the result of Sasaki’s inspiration to combine five insect attractants together with a proprietary, printed killing grid system in the same ICD.
- Philip Serafini, liaison to the University of Arkansas, served as principal scientist for the International Crops Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics in West Africa for 11 years. Serafini also developed and managed land for commercial agriculture in Bolivia.
University Collaborators
SolaRid AR is leveraging AI expertise from the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville. The University of Arkansas at Little Rock continues to develop the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) for the SolaRid system.
- Dr. Ashley Dowling is a professor in the Department of Entomology and Plant Pathology at UA, Fayetteville. His lab will provide expertise in insect biodiversity and identification. Dr. Dowling and his lab will conduct insect capturing, handling, and identification. He will also participate in the intellectual development and training of the artificial intelligence system and design of the data collection system. Dr. Dowling has extensive experience with imaging insects and will help develop the image capture system on the trap and assist with the integration of these components into field-ready traps.
- Dr. Khoa Luu of UA’s Computer Science and Computer Engineering department will supervise the technical artificial intelligence solution in this project. Luu will be responsible for computer vision and machine learning algorithm development, and data exchange to the learning systems.
- Dr. Jan Springer, director of UA Little Rock’s Emerging Analytics Center and associate professor of computer science, is developing the IIoT for the SolaRid Control/Visualization platform.