Spensa Technologies, a Purdue-affiliated precision agriculture technology company, announces Z-Trap 1, the company's first fully commercial hardware device intended to reduce costly and time-consuming manual crop scouting.
The new commercially available hardware product can seamlessly integrate with the Spensa AP, Spensa's comprehensive agronomic platform, to allow growers and agronomists to record pest data and keep track of lure life from a smartphone or browser. The technology also shows visualization of pest populations geographically so changes can be monitored over time.
"After years of testing and perfecting the Z-Trap 1, we are incredibly proud to introduce the product to the ag industry," said Johnny Park, founder and CEO of Spensa Technologies. "Spensa is on a mission to create novel technologies that will radically revolutionize the industry and foster environmental responsibility. We believe the Z-Trap 1, in addition to other technologies we are developing, represents a giant leap toward achieving this goal."
Z-Trap 1 provides advantages over manual trapping, including reduced labor costs and real-time monitoring for more precise timing of insect flights. In collaboration with agricultural researchers, Spensa began field-testing the trap in 2010, and has tested more than 300 traps in fields across the United States, Brazil, Australia and New Zealand. Z-Trap 1 includes new features such as a cellular modem and changes to the bioimpedance sensor and detection algorithms to improve catch rate and reduce susceptibility to false positives.