The new six custom plant growth chambers reduce the trial time from weeks to days and strengthen the connection between the lab and the farm

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Terramera introduces new technology for sustainable crop protection. (Credit: Pete Linforth from Pixabay.)

Canadian agritech company Terramera has launched a new technology to fast-track the discovery of sustainable crop solutions for farmers.

According to the company, most of the crop protection products fail in the field as the labs and greenhouses do not accurately replicate real-world conditions.

Terramera’s new six custom, plant growth chambers reduce the trial time from weeks to days and strengthen the connection between the lab and the farm while paving the way for the future of food.

Each chamber provides precise control over temperature (ranging from 5 to 40 degrees Celsius), humidity and light to simulate many possible field conditions, from cool nights and morning mists to desert and subtropical conditions.

This technology is equipped with a Terramera-built automation system for end-to-end integration.

The company said that automation enables experiments to run completely without human intervention.

This included watering, spraying, nutrient dosing and imaging of the plants throughout their lifecycle while accelerating data collection for product performance and increasing accuracy with Terramera’s Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) platform.

Terramera Chief Scientific Officer Annett Rozek said: “Customised growth chambers allow us to simulate weather to study disease and insect infestations with integrated treatment and imaging systems in one automated system — replicated six times for parallel studies.

“This is as close as we can get to real-world conditions in a research environment and will deliver solutions as rapidly and efficiently as possible.”

The company said that the new chambers are part of a large technological scale-up for it, who has also launched a new best-in-class liquid handling robot.

The ML model named the robot, “Enzing,” is integrated into Terramera’s fully automated in-vitro screening and data analysis pipeline.

Recently, Terramera unveiled plans to build a C$730m Global Centre for Regenerative Agriculture (Global Centre) in Canada.