SBIR-STTR Award

As the global demand for food increases farmers continue to rely on agrochemicals to protect their crops against pathogens. While conventional fungicides are relatively effective in protecting against fungal pathogens they come with a range of problems. Firstly many fungicides have stability issues and degrade prematurely upon environmental stresses. Fungicide formulations also have public health and ecological risks due to their unmitigated off-target drift. While emulsified concentrates or plastic microcapsules can overcome many of these issues these technologies come with their own limitations and risks. Therefore there is dire need for a biologically-derived microencapsulation technology that is able to improve fungicide efficacy and enhance crop production while also reducing the ecological footprint of agriculture. With this proposal AgroSpheres aims to utilize their novel scalable bioencapsulation technology the AgriCell to improve the efficacy of a common fungicide Prothioconazole. The research efforts of this project will focus on encapsulating stabilizing and achieving controlled release of Prothioconazole in lab and greenhouse conditions. With greenhouse trials AgroSpheres plans to demonstrate that the AgriCell-Prothioconazole product can achieve equalor improved efficacy as the current commercial standard for Prothioconazole. AgroSpheres anticipates that in Phase I it will demonstrate that the AgriCell is an advantageous chemical application technology for agriculture because it enhances the application of Prothioconazole without relying on formulation ingredients that are known pollutants. Thus the AgriCell would become a commercially feasibly encapsulation technology for agrochemicals and a viable alternative for formulations that currently rely on emulsification or microcapsules.