Increasing agriculture productivity and sustainability through the use of disruptive sensors and software, to facilitate game changing and cost effective soil-health analysis within agriculture

“FungiAlert正在农业技术领域开发改变游戏规则的技术，通过开发破坏性的现场传感器来提高农业生产力和可持续性。该项目的目标是创造一种新产品，使种植者更容易获得土壤健康分析。新产品最终将使种植者能够做出明智的农艺决策，以减轻作物病害造成的作物损失。这将对英国经济产生巨大影响，因为英国每年因农作物病害造成的损失高达24亿英镑，这突显出需要颠覆性技术来促进土壤健康分析，以提高农作物产量。迄今为止，FungiAlert已经开发出第一个从土壤和水中检测真菌植物病害的早期检测设备。其他土壤健康诊断方法提供了对疾病的症状后识别。这种迟来的诊断并不总是有用的，因为一旦疾病出现症状，治疗就没有效率，作物损失是不可避免的。FungiAlert的技术可以被描述为农民的烟雾探测器，因为它在疾病传播并造成毁灭性损失之前提醒用户感染的风险。FungiAlert目前的技术检测真菌和卵菌病原体，然而，市场也需要一种产品，可以在一个传感器内同时检测多种类型的微生物（即真菌，卵菌和细菌）。这是由于农业中现有的毁灭性细菌疾病，例如Xylella fastidiosa，它正在破坏欧洲的葡萄和橄榄作物，并威胁英国的橡树（Ian考克斯，Innovate UK博客2018）。与个性化药物一样，不同种类的植物病原体对农药的敏感性不同，因此，需要精确识别疾病的种类，以制定害虫管理策略。目前，FungiAlert提供了一种基因组方法来识别传感器检测到的疾病种类。新提出的传感器将具有更宽的检测范围，因此，需要一种具有成本效益的宏基因组方法。这将在田间采样点提供微生物群落的土壤健康分析，这将改变农业的游戏规则，因为它将有助于指导关键的农业决策（轮作决策，品种选择，作物保护策略，收获时间等）。该项目将使FungiAlert能够为土壤健康分析提供改变游戏规则且具有成本效益的技术，彻底改变农业实践，提高作物生产力并促进可持续农业。"

"FungiAlert is developing game changing technology within agritech that will increase agricultural productivity and sustainability through the development of disruptive in-the-field sensors. The objective of this project is to create a new product and make soil-health analysis more accessible to growers. The new offerings would ultimately allow growers to make informed agronomy decisions to mitigate crop loss due to crop disease. This would have a huge impact on the UK economy, as crop diseases within the UK can account for losses of up £2.4bn per year, highlighting the need for disruptive technologies to promote soil-health analysis, for increased crop yields.To date, FungiAlert has developed the first early detection device for fungal plant diseases from soil and water. Other soil-health diagnostic methods offer post-symptomatic identification of the disease. This late diagnosis is not always useful, as once the disease is symptomatic, the treatment is not efficient and crop losses are inevitable. FungiAlert's technology can be described as the smoke detector for farmers, since it alerts the user about the risk of infection before the disease spreads and causes devastating losses. FungiAlert's current technology detects fungal and oomycetal pathogens, however, the market is also demanding a product than can simultaneously detect multiple types of microorganisms within one sensor (i.e. fungi, oomycetes and bacteria). This is due to existing devastating bacterial diseases in agriculture, such as as _Xylella fastidiosa_ which is destroying grape and olive crops in Europe and is threatening the oak trees in the UK (Ian Cox, Innovate UK blog 2018).Like personalised-medicine, different species of plant pathogens have different susceptibility to pesticides, therefore, there is a need to precisely identify the species of disease, in order to tailor pest management strategies. Currently, FungiAlert offers a genomic approach to identify the species of diseases detected by the sensors. The new proposed sensor will have a wider detection scope, therefore, there is a need for a cost efficient metagenomic approach. This would provide soil-health analysis of the microbial community at the point of sampling in the field, this would be game-changing for agriculture, as it would help guide key agricultural decisions (rotational decisions, variety selection, crop protection strategies, harvest time etc.).This project would allow FungiAlert to offer game changing and cost efficient technology for soil-health analysis, revolutionising agricultural practices, and increasing crop productivity and promoting sustainable farming."