Plant protection toolbox enriched through cutting-edge technologies

A range of new technologies, from artificial intelligence to RNA-based innovations, could significantly reduce the amount of chemical pesticides used and yield new crop protection products.

In a proposal to revamp the EU’s pesticide legislative framework, the European Commission has proposed to slash both the use and risk of pesticides in half by 2030.

Existing EU legislation, as well as national laws in many member states, already require farmers to follow the rules of Integrated Pest Management (IPM) – an approach to plant protection in which all other options, such as organic or physical plant protection methods, should be exhausted before resorting to synthetic pesticides.

While IPM means taking a systemic approach to reducing pesticides rather than focusing on a certain individual alternative or technology, a range of new technologies could be integrated into such an approach in the coming years and help achieve ambitious reduction targets.

On the one hand, this includes technologies that provide an alternative to synthetic products by protecting plants in ways that involve fewer risks or unintended side effects.

On the other hand, other technologies could help apply synthetic pesticides in a more targeted or effective way and thereby minimise the amount needed.

AI to help target pesticide use

Among the latter are AI technologies that help target herbicides, pesticides or fungicides to exactly those plants or areas of a field where they are needed.

“For weeds, this is fairly easy,” explained German researcher Ralf Vögele, whose research focuses on new approaches in plant protection.

“If I want to get rid of weeds in a normal arable crop, I only need a high-resolution camera and a proper, fast computer,” he said.

An agricultural machine could then detect whether it has a crop or a weed in front of it and accordingly control a cultivator or hoe to destroy only the weeds.

However, when it comes to protecting plants against pests and diseases, using AI in a similar way is trickier, as they are less clearly visible, the researcher continued.

Commission: Precision agriculture key to farming ‘double challenge’

Digital technologies can help farming tackle the ‘double imperative’ of greening the sector while ensuring food security, according to a European Commission official. But high investment costs and poor connectivity in rural areas might stand in the way.

“We are currently working on large projects with the aim of being able to record the crop through other imaging techniques and then draw conclusions about whether it is healthy or not,” he detailed.

“This is a challenge, to put it mildly.”

Meanwhile, the amounts of data generated this way are so vast that humans cannot process them, according to Vögele.

“This means that we need to use artificial intelligence that we can train to detect which plants are healthy and which ones are diseased,” he added.

While, currently, such applications are prohibitively expensive, according to the expert, this could change in the coming years.

Still, for Vögele, it is unlikely that every farmer could own such an AI-based system in the future. “I could imagine that, ultimately, contractors will offer this service,” he said.

Designing new products

New technologies can also impact the developing phase of new crop protection products, aligning them with higher sustainability standards and levels of effectiveness.

In the past, the discovery process of new plant protection products usually started by testing substances against a leading library of small molecules.

Researchers were then looking for what experience thought they could have some potential for crop protection.

After these initial steps, some substance ‘candidates’ were considered for different use cases and different crops until the best one in terms of effectiveness and safety would have been eventually found.

New products are now designed using computation modelling, proprietary algorithms, and multi-omics techniques to take advantage of massive amounts of data through machine learning.

“These methods simply didn’t exist when I started in crop protection chemistry,” Axel Trautwein, head of regulatory science at Bayer, explained.

According to him, the new technology applied to research can create entirely novel crop protection solutions.

RNA, new genomic techniques: the way forward?

RNA-based technologies were widely used in COVID-19 vaccines and therapeutics, particularly the so-called messenger-RNA, a molecule containing instructions to cells involved in protein synthesis.

Researchers and private companies have started to investigate the full potential of RNA-based technologies to achieve chemical pesticide reduction targets and the protection of pollinators.

According to the annual sustainability report of GreenLight Biosciences, a public benefit corporation working on RNA-based biological alternatives, seven agriculture products of this kind could reach the market by 2026, subject to applicable regulatory approval.

The acceptance of RNA-based alternatives by regulators remains an open question as, for instance, they are still evaluated in the EU with a methodology tailored to chemical substances while being non-chemical.

According to German researcher Vögele, new genomic techniques (NGTs) could also provide a ‘clear opportunity’ for pesticide reduction.

Through NGTs, certain characteristics of a crop, for example, its resistance to drought or disease, can be adjusted by targeting specific parts of its genome.

The researcher’s argument also echoes comments made by several Commission representatives, including Vice-President Frans Timmermans, who suggested that the EU executive’s proposals for pesticide reduction and the liberalisation of NGTs should be a package deal since they are intimately linked.

For the researcher, this provides an opportunity to better protect plants against diseases while minimising risks.

“We can modify things in a controlled way without unintended side effects. I think this is a huge opportunity,” he concluded.

[Edited by Alice Taylor]

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