The team from Brown University is a finalist in the 2018 Collegiate Inventors Competition
By Diego Flammini
Staff Writer
Farms.com
A small team from Brown University in Providence, R.I., hopes to win an inventor’s competition with their crop-related technology.
Jack Roswell, co-founder of Cloud Agronomics, which helps create customizable field maps for farmers, hopes CropDoc will earn his team first prize at the 2018 Collegiate Inventors Competition in November in the undergraduate division. The team includes three other students, as well as an advisor.
CropDoc uses state-of-the-art technology to help farmers identify potential crop issues before they arise and project how severe a pest or disease outbreak could be.
Jack Roswell
“We’re trying to solve the problem of disease identification on farms,” he told Farms.com. “We’re using spectroscopy (the study of the interaction between matter and electromagnetic radiation) methods from aircrafts flying at about 6,000 feet with a resolution of about one meter on the ground.
“With that resolution, we can identify specific diseases that are infecting a row crop or an orchard. We can identify diseases like citrus greening before any visible symptoms manifest. So, diseases without any cure can be identified and surgically removed before they spread.”
The CropDoc team estimates that pests and crop diseases kill about 20 percent of all crops before harvest.
That figure could decrease if producers can get ahead of crop protection decisions, Roswell said.
“Right now, farmers send crop scouts out which are around 60 percent accurate,” he said. “Then they collect samples and send them to a lab for processing. With this current method, once crop diseases are identified, it’s almost already too late to act.”
Four other teams from U.S. universities will compete against CropDoc in November.
The other projects are a tool for administering epidurals, a battery-free inventory tag, a method of allowing brain surgeons to access the brain through small entries, and a masonry tool.
Gray leaf spot on corn/University of Nebraska photo