It was the stem borer, an agricultural pest, that inspired Mukund Chaudhary, a technical engineer, and Maitri Dedhia, a design student, into action that would help farmers save their crops from the relentless bites of the silent invaders. Seeing farmers struggle with it being extremely difficult to detect intruders, the duo put their minds to developing a non-destructive scanning system that outperforms all existing systems in the pest-control field.
About stem borer
Stem borers and termites are known as the most dangerous pests because they work stealthily and delay detection. According to ‘All India Coordinated Rice Project and other Agricultural Studies’, these pests cause huge losses to farmers ranging from 20 to 80%. Sometimes, it can even go up to 100%!
To avoid these invaders on the fields, traditional farming methods include breaking the stem, spraying excessive chemicals and pesticides, burning trees, etc. Although these methods have varying levels of efficacy, they tend to fail when it comes to detecting stem borers.
gap filling
To fill this void, Trebirth Pvt. Ltd. entered the field. Two students from different fields join hands to work together towards a common goal. Mukund Choudhary, who was studying Computer Science Engineering at SRM University, and Maitri Dedhia, who was studying Product Design at the Indian School of Design and Innovation, came together in 2020 when they signed up for their graduate project internship program at Digital Impact Square, run by TCS Foundation, to expose students to farming issues.
Mukund elaborates: “In my final year of college, we got this opportunity where we witnessed first-hand the problems faced by farmers in the grape farms of Nashik. We met farmers and other stakeholders like FPOs (Farmer Producer Organisations) and got a much clearer understanding of the pest issues in the fields.”
Then he came to the decision to solve the problem of stem borer for the farmers.
Mukund added: “These stem borers are like cancer to the plant. Like cancer, it was difficult to detect early, and by the time the farmer realized it, half or more of the plant was destroyed and the fruit yield was reduced by half or more. In severe cases, the farmer had to uproot the plant, often reducing the productive life of 8-10 years to perhaps 4-5 years.”
Covid-19 stall plan
However, within six months of that resolution, COVID-19 arrived and all farm visits stopped. But, there were some farmers who still had hope that someone would look into their problem. “They will bring samples of the cut tree trunks to our homes so that we can study them in our laboratory,” Mukund said.
And, they studied, because the problem stood before them and they both felt there had to be some way to find a solution.
Mukund said, “At Digital Impact Square, we were introduced to the problem at an industrial level. Additionally, we conducted several research meetings with farmers and FPOs to better understand how deep the problem goes. We realized that this problem exists not just in grapes but also in coffee, mango, palm, sugarcane and most cash crops.”
defining the problem
When he studied deeper, he saw that there were solutions available in the market, but these were mostly preventive. But, what about trees that are already infected with borers? How can they be saved? This was the biggest question in his mind.
He found that there were some companies that made chemicals to kill stem borers, but their application was not precise. So, the problem persisted. How to find out in which part of the plant the borer has made its home?
Some farmers used other interventions such as installing solar or light traps. But, again, these were effective in capturing the beetles, but the larvae remained active. These will grow and come out through a small hole in the stem. Or, the beetles will escape from one field to a neighboring field and spread the infestation.
Mukund said, “Some farmers used very crude techniques like making a hole of about 3 to 4 feet and pouring chemicals or petrol into it to kill the larvae. But, this technique further destroyed the plant. Hence, this solution was also ineffective.”
ray of hope
But, the ray of hope was that they had a clear understanding of the problem. And, after some brainstorming, they agreed to develop a detection system that could detect exactly where in the tree the stem borer was breeding.
“We knew we had to first find a way to detect the larvae and then find a way to kill them,” Mukund said.
Therefore, detection became his primary focus. It took them three years from starting the internship program to finally arriving at the solution.
Solution
He turned his attention to other industries. The termite pest control business had similar problems. What were they doing? The nature of termites is similar to that of stem borers. So, this was a great analogy for them to study.
Mukund said, “Like a parking sensor that tracks a wall or barrier backward or a speed gun that senses movement, we felt we needed to create our own sensor that could penetrate wood in a non-destructive manner. A sensor whose frequency could detect motion activity and breathing, as these insects are constantly on the move. Our sensor should be able to penetrate a stem and detect whether there is any living organism in it. It is a hand-held device. It should be something that can be used easily.”
After three years of research, he eventually focused on Doppler-based radar.
overcoming challenges
Now that they had found the solution, there was another hurdle to overcome. Initially, their device would take about a week to scan a few hundred trees. Since it was not necessary to scan all 800-1000 trees in a farmer’s one-acre plot, he would visually scan his trees to check which trees were infected with an infection technically called frass.
“Fros are wood shavings that fall from the trunk of a tree after it is infected. Or, the farmer can detect the infection by the discoloration of the leaves. Based on such visual cues given to us by the farmer, we start scanning those trees with our device.”
The musculature or discoloration does not indicate the exact location of the larva. It can detect it at a distance of, at most, 3 feet. But, this helped limit the area that needed to be treated with chemical or biological pesticides or physically bored holes to remove them.
However, Mukund soon realized that relying only on farmers to provide visual cues was not enough. Plants adjacent to infected plants were susceptible, yet could not be detected.
“Therefore, we decided to seek the help of agronomists to help us deal with this problem more effectively.
We came up with a sampling strategy. We randomly selected trees in the area around the infected trees and scanned and treated them if necessary.
funding project
The duo had to hire a multi-skilled team to create the device. “In the beginning, we had an R&D team comprising experts from the fields of electronics, software, firmware, agronomy, entomology,” Mukund said.
Their equipment will be ready by the end of 2023. They suffered overall loss in this ₹Rs 1.2 crore including equity funding of Rs. ₹30 lakhs and government grant ₹1.2 crores.
pilot studies
After building his instrument, he conducted seasonal pilot studies. “Currently, we have an active pilot study going on in the coffee plantations of Karnataka. This is to study the yield based on the intervention,” Mukund said.
market strategy
He stressed that Treburth will have to carefully consider its approach to new buyers given the markets in which the device will operate. “Everything needs to be translated into numbers. They need to know how much yield they will get if they use our equipment to detect stem borer. Also, there was a problem from our side. The equipment takes 20 minutes to detect the larvae. So, if a farmer has a 100-acre plot, we would need at least 25 people with 25 equipment to detect.”
And the way they decided to solve this problem was to raise funds to develop manufacturing units to produce more devices.
Competition
Mukund said there are a few pest control corporations and a start-up in Israel that work in a similar field. He said, “However, we have an edge over them as their device takes two weeks to detect while our device takes only 20-25 minutes. Moreover, our device is completely non-destructive whereas theirs is not.”
looking ahead
So far, Trebirth has scanned 10,000 trees in Nashik and removed 2,000 trees. 2,000 trees were freed from borer pests by physically removing them after drilling 5-cm holes. “Since our random sampling system is under construction, we did not do any scanning of the neighboring area. Hence, our success was not 100%. Once we get it ready, we can offer 100% removal of stem borer infestation.”
With regard to sales, they are planning to tie up with FPOs and other B2B (Business-to-Business) players. Mukund said, “Instead of selling directly to farmers, we plan to sell through B2B players and FPOs. Involvement of management staff to scan the fields would be an unnecessary waste of our time and effort. Why not instead tie up with people who are already in the business?”
In the meantime, they have plans to raise money. “Apart from stem borers, our device works very well on termites. Therefore, we are also using it to detect termites in commercial areas to enable structural pest control.”
They plan to use 60% of the funds raised on marketing the product. And the remaining amount will be used to refine the device, which will require a random sampling unit, which, according to Mukund, will be ready by June this year.
