Striga (witchweed) is the number one pest threat to food security in Africa. The devastating invasive parasitic weed attacks the most important staple crops in Africa, including maize, sorghum, millet, dryland rice, sugar cane and cowpea, and now it has been identified in wheat in Sudan.
Claire Baker, co-founder and director of the Toothpick Project (www.toothpickproject.org) and Toothpick Company Ltd., said that according to papers published over a decade ago, Striga results in USD$9 billion in crop loss per year at the hands of smallholder farmers.
“About 40 million smallholder farms have Striga,” said Baker. “It strangles maize and other crops, attacking at the roots before the plants even come up above ground, resulting in 20 to 100 percent reduction in crop yield.”
Although $30 million has been invested in finding Striga solutions, the damage has been getting worse over the last two decades. Indeed, in a survey in three counties in Kenya, “all maize fields in western Kenya are impacted by Striga to some degree,” noted Baker. “We’ve also heard reports that 50 percent of arable land in Tanzania is impacted by Striga.”
The Toothpick Project has been in the works for over a decade in Africa and is now approaching commercialization. It’s been a long haul, but the team that has brought it this far is dedicated to improving the lot of maize – and other crops – farmers in Africa, 80 percent of whom are women.
The research starts with Dr. David Sands with Montana State University (U.S.) who has been working on biocontrol solutions for years. Sands developed a biocontrol technology that actually flips plant pathology and puts the plant disease to work to kill the targeted weed – in this case, Striga hermonthica.
“Biocontrol of weeds has always been on the mind of plant pathologists for a long, long time,” said Sands, who presented at New Ag International Africa in late September. “We work with fungi, we work with bacteria or viruses, and they all attack weeds. We knew there ought to be some way to use these natural fungi to attack weeds and not have to use chemicals.
“Our strategy was to find Striga attacked by a fungal disease, Fusarium oxysporum. We then selected the most virulent strains of that fungi,” added Sands.
Fusarium oxysporum (f.sp. strigae) – Foxy – is a host-specific plant pathogen with 200 forms, each attacking a different species of plant. The challenge was that in nature, the pathogen seeks a balance with its host and it only wilts about 40 percent of the Striga weed. The team investigating the problem realized they needed a higher success rate than that if they were going to meet Striga head-on.
“So, we selected for Foxy strains excreting higher levels of certain amino acids, such as tyrosine and leucine, plus methionine,” said Sands. “These amino acids harm the Striga, but they don’t harm the crop. And so, the Striga count goes down by about 90 percent, increasing the total crop yield.
“It’s been a really good solution because it’s host-specific which means it won’t hurt other plants, it’s non-GMO for countries that are limiting GMO action, and it’s safe for humans and animals,” added Sands. To confirm the product is safe to humans and the environment, the Foxy strains have been tested by two independent toxicology labs (VA Tech and U of Nairobi) that have identified no known fusaria toxins.
The next challenge for the team was to figure out how to distribute Foxy to the farmers for use. The team worked with agronomist and farmer Florence Oyosi of Maseno, Kenya, and with the Kenya Agricultural and Livestock Research Organization (KALRO). In the early development of the technology, Oyosi helped create the toothpick delivery product for smallholder farmers.
The three strains of Foxy that were isolated off of wilted Striga weeds and then selected for specific excretion of tyrosine, leucine and methionine amino acids, were grown onto a wooden toothpick/dowel, dried, and all three are stored in a sterile, sealed canister (called FoxyT14, trademarked as Kichawi Kill in Kenya) of cooked and cooled rice. The farmer simply shakes the container twice a day for three days, and after the three days, all the rice is inoculated with FoxyT14. The farmer then plants about a teaspoon of inoculated rice with each maize seed. With the virulence enhancement, FoxyT14 kills the parasitic weed, Striga, instead of just wilting it.
With a Gates Foundation grant, the team, led by Henry Sila Nzioki, a plant pathologist with KALRO, did proof of concept trials in Kenya on 500 farmers in 2014 and 2015. The average yield increase of the maize crop? A whopping 56.5 percent. Over the past four years, the team has conducted regulatory trials and is currently awaiting registration of the system.
In 2018, the team launched a social enterprise based in Kakamega, Kenya, called the Toothpick Company Ltd. This organization celebrates public private partnership through its close relationship with KALRO, as well as the German NGO Deutsche Welthungerhilfe e V.
“Manufacturing is at the KALRO-Katumani biocontrol lab, and this is run by Sila Nzioki,” said Baker, who also presented at New Ag International Africa in late September. “This distribution is then passed to the Toothpick Company where we partner with NGOs, community-based organizations, farmer groups and the ministry of agriculture, and through those entities, we deliver to village-based farmers.”
Although they are still awaiting registration – expected within the next three months – the work continues.
“We’re still working in the fields,” noted Baker. “We currently have 42 trained farmers to be village-level inoculum producers, and in September, these farmers prepared and planted over 600 demonstration plots in five counties in western Kenya.
“This is part of an enterprise – each of those farmers will have a micro business, and they will be earning profit off of their sales to their own customer base.”
Baker said there are specific goals the Toothpick Company Ltd. is working towards as the project continues to unfold. 1-Improve crop yields by 25 percent to 85 percent. 2-Make it affordable for farmers by keeping the price at or under $10 per quarter acre. “This is somewhat subsidized by the company until we can reduce the cost of the rice substrate; we are looking at testing other products, such as grated maize cob grits,” said Baker. 3-Drive the local economy through village-level producers, including job creation with a focus on women farmers, and partnering with NGOs and CBOs (community-based organizations. 4-Expand distribution via seed coating. “We’ve been looking at other ways to distribute, and obviously seed coating, working through local agrovet stores, is another path that we’re examining,” said Baker. “We have found that we can coat seed and it can actually come back to life in about 24 hours which is pretty quick. We are hoping we will have good luck with seed treating trials this coming year.”
The Toothpick Project doesn’t stop there. “We are moving forward in Kenya with our goals to scale by 2025,” noted Baker. “However, Striga is across sub-Saharan Africa so it’s really critical that we expand our reach.”
Next steps are to train a science team, to understand regulatory harmonization, to expand distribution methods and to expand to other target weeds.
“In the next year, we anticipate working with each of our scientists, called the Pan-African Biocontrol Science team, to isolate and select their virulence enhanced strains from each country,” said Baker. “We are also going to conduct our second training – which was earlier cancelled because of COVID – and are working on ways to train virtually.”
Promisingly, the team is seeing persistence of the treatment over time.
“In fact, at our original research plots (they've been untreated for years), Striga is no longer present and crops are doing well,” said Baker. “Our scientist couldn't even get Striga to grow there when he planted Striga seeds. We haven't conducted a longitudinal study yet but over the next five years we should have a better understanding of how farmers should schedule their treatments for the greatest benefit at the lowest cost.”
The emergence of wheat as a host for Striga emphasizes the importance of this control method not just in Africa. “As far as we know, only wheat fields in Sudan have Striga – but if it spreads, we’ll have a huge problem on our hands.”
Baker emphasizes “we do have a global goal of shifting weed management from synthetic herbicides to a newly developed bioherbicide market.” She anticipates that success in Africa will lead to game-changing adoption of bioherbicides elsewhere.
Innovator and professor Dr. David Sands, centre, works with Henry Sila Nzioki, left, on the selection of Foxy strains. Photo: Adrian Sanchez-Gonzalez, MSU
Toothpick Company Ltd. in the field training farmers to be village-level inoculum producers. This process has slowed down as COVID safety limits physical distancing, travel, and gathering. But these groups were able to plant over 600 demonstration plots in September 2020. Photo: The Toothpick Company
Field devastated by Striga. Photo: The Toothpick Company
New AG International NOV/DEC 2020
There were a number of firsts for this edition of ABIM. It was the first virtual event, owing to the COVID-19 global pandemic. It was the first time there were joint winners of the Bernard Blum award. The event saw the first speaker from the Forum for the Future in the keynote address by Dr. Sally Uren, and it was the first time a speaker with Canada’s Pest Management Regulatory Agency (PMRA), director Peter Brander, gave a presentation. All in all, there were 500 delegates registered, representing 232 companies or organizations, and attending from 30 countries.
Bernard Blum Award For the first time, there were joint winners of the Bernard Blum Award, announced by the International Biocontrol Manufacturers Association (IBMA) at the opening of the 15th edition of ABIM, the Annual Biocontrol Industry Meeting.
The joint winners from a shortlist of four were Biobest for Eupeodes System – larvae of hoverfly Eupeodes corollae for aphid control, and e-nema with Dianem – an entomopathogenic nematode H. bacteriophora to control larvae of western corn rootworm
Biobest and E-nema were the winners of the 2020 Bernard Blum award.
When announcing the winners, David Cary, member of the ABIM executive board and former executive director of IBMA, said the judging panel found it difficult to separate the two entries, and so for the first time, joint winners were awarded.
Congratulations were also passed to Bio Bee and UV Boosting, which comprised the shortlist and which also made presentations at the morning’s session at ABIM.
The Bernard Blum Award was launched in 2015 by the IBMA to commemorate its founding president. The award goes to the most innovative biocontrol product of the year. The award recipient should have a high impact in the management of pests or diseases whilst having a low impact on human health and the environment, says IBMA.
Prof. Dr. Ralf-Udo Ehlers from e-nema commented: “The award is a recognition of our six years breeding programme, many years of field work and a continuous scaling-up of production capacity at e-nema. Dianem is another milestone for biocontrol targeting arable crops. The award will support our efforts to translate the biocontrol technology into agricultural practice,” Prof Ehlers told the ABIM daily blog, which was produced by New Ag International, the media partner for the event.
Biobest’s new addition to its aphid control strategy – Eupeodes-System – was the other joint winner of this year’s Bernard Blum Award. “A naturally occurring hoverfly, Eupeodes corollae, is indigenous throughout Europe and further afield,” said Apostolos Pekas, R&D senior scientist and Biobest´s team leader for beneficials in Belgium.
“While the larvae are voracious aphid predators, Biobest has shown the adults simultaneously aid crop pollination, making it the first proven case of a beneficial insect providing two ecosystem services. This puts Eupeodes-System in a category of its own,” stated Biobest in its statement acknowledging the award.
Keynote address After the welcome address by Christoph Brutschin, head of the department of economic, social and environmental affairs, Basel, the opening session moved to the two opening presentations. Lucius Tamm (CEO ABIM AG and FiBL director) spoke about the importance of the biocontrol industry to solve major agricultural challenges.
“The biocontrol industry is needed to facilitate transition of agriculture towards sustainability. New biocontrol products need to be rapidly developed and brought to the market but current registration processes in Europe are slow. However, the urgent need for COVID-9 vaccines shows that if necessary, even strict and complex registration procedures can be accelerated to facilitate rapid approval of much needed innovations. If we succeed in transferring this approach to PPP registration, then the COVID-9 challenge also offers opportunities to biocontrol.”
Tamm also spoke about the importance of promoting functional biodiversity, which is a strategy to strengthen pre-existing populations of beneficials.
Jennifer Lewis, IBMA executive director and member of the ABIM executive board, spoke about positioning the biocontrol industry in its core role within a sustainable food production chain. She stressed the time is now for biologicals.
The title for this year’s keynote address was: The role of biocontrol in delivering sustainable development and food system transformation. Dr. Sally Uren highlighted how the biocontrol industry was already making a significant contribution to sustainability by, for example, promoting biodiversity, promoting quality nutritious food production and minimizing freshwater consumption, and she urged the biocontrol industry to put more back into the environment and society than it takes out with shared goals on productive, viable and profitable food safety.
Questions from the floor, included: “If you were sitting in our industry, what would be your first step?” Uren answered that in many ways the industry should carry on doing what is doing, while encouraging it to learn from other industries.
A number of case studies were also presented during the session that reflected current pest control issues in the world, such as fall armyworm (FAW) and locust outbreaks.
Market update Dr. Mark Trimmer of DunhamTrimmer provided market insights, sharing the results of an informal qualitative survey to see how biological companies have coped in 2020 with the COVID-19 pandemic. While many companies noted the move to teleconferencing was fine for established relationships, Trimmer said companies were finding it harder to establish new relationships using this tool. He also added that for some companies, the pandemic would be transformative with many looking to maintain some of the new ways of working.
From a market perspective, Trimmer said DunhamTrimmer had estimated the global biocontrol market for 2019 at $4.5 billion, with North America and Europe being the largest markets. The annual growth rate was a healthy 16 percent year-over-year, with some of that being attributed to Latin America in 2019. It’s too early to predict what 2020 will look like, said Trimmer, but he tentatively proposed a lower growth rate for 2020, down by three to six percentage points.
On the side of mergers and acquisitions, Trimmer said he expects to see more consolidation in the biologicals space. There was the recent acquisition by Syngenta of Valagro, and of Omnia selling Oro Agri to Rovensa.
After his talk, Trimmer told us that as a result of slowed growth in 2020-21, the forecasted revenue for 2025 will not be achieved. DunhamTrimmer will revise the forecast revenue following a quantitative study in an updated biocontrol market report to be released in 2021.
Panel discussions In the global regulatory harmonization session-European and global focus, Roma Gwynn (vice president IBMA) noted that regulation still represents the greatest financial and time burden for companies trying to get products into the hands of farmers.
“Companies recognize the importance of good regulation but maintain that it should be proportional to the risks of the biocontrol technology; at present there are few examples where this is so. Plus, across the world there are different approaches, standards and expertise in regulation of and for biocontrol technologies, each country being slightly different in their requirements,” she said. “This means companies have to prepare new studies and dossier in each country; this adds to the burden for companies. By having dialogue between countries for regulations and working towards harmonization, this will reduce the burden for companies (many of who are micro and small companies) and result in many more biocontrol technology products to get into the hands of farmers and in less time. Farmers need ‘biocontrol first’ IPM solutions now to allow them to meet the challenges of growing food in resilient agriculture systems.”
When asked what her summary message for the session is, she told the ABIM blog: “Biocontrol technologies need to have good, proportional and harmonized regulations to reduce the time to market and financial burden on biocontrol companies, and so get products into the hands of farmers and other users quickly. The environment and society are best served if regulators work together to have a proportional and harmonized regulatory system for biocontrol technologies.”
Rick Melnick, of DunhamTrimmer and 2BMonthly, chaired the session on “Update on B. thuringiensis: A valuable biocontrol agent caught in the B. cereus debate.”
The ABIM daily blog contacted Melnick and asked him to put the discussion in context. “Many consider Bacillus thuringiensis to be the cornerstone of the biocontrol industry. With nearly 50 years of commercial use, the importance of the commercial strains of Bt is twofold: one, its powerful and highly specific insecticidal activity; and two, its veritable lack of activity against non-target organisms (beneficials, birds, bees, fish, mammals),” he said. “The technology is so safe, in fact, that Bti – a species of Bt used for mosquito control and vector management in the public health sphere – is approved for applications directly into drinking water. The challenges for the biocontrol and food industries are that Bt is closely related to Bacillus cereus, a known human pathogen, so much so that produce samples treated with Bt close to harvest are known to trigger false positives for Bc in the food lab. This creates a dilemma – particularly when growers and food companies, collectively, are progressing ever faster toward integrated production systems using both conventional and biological controls. The good news, as we learned from our panel of expert speakers today, is that steady progress is being made to develop new laboratory testing methods that will help us differentiate between Bt and Bc. We also learned that regulators and policy makers are active and collaborative in helping us find solutions.”
Botanical Solution Inc (BSI) is looking to take its biofungicide product Botristop to other Latin American markets and to the U.S.
BSI has had Botristop on the market in Chile since 2016, and through a partnership between BSI and Syngenta since 2019.
According to CEO Gaston Salinas, the company is well advanced with its registration application to Peru and is beginning efficacy trials in Mexico as part of its registration process in that country. The company is also in the process of submitting its registration documents for the EPA in the U.S.
Botristop is primarily used against the fungal disease Botrytis cinerea. The product, which is supplied in liquid formulation, is based on botanical extract from a plant that is native to Chile: Quillaja saponaria Molina.
The plant has been traditionally harvested from the wild for many decades and has not so far been cultivated. In contrast, BSI grows this plant in the laboratory, turning it into a dry biomass. The active compounds are extracted from the dry biomass and then incorporated into the formulation. The end product can be tank mixed with conventional pesticides.
Salinas, who is Chilean, is one of the co-founders of the company, the other being fellow Chilean Gustavo Zuñiga, who led the research work on extracting the botanical compounds from the Quillaja saponaria plant. Founded in 2013, BSI’s main production facilities are in Santiago, Chile.
“In our 500 square metre laboratory we can produce enough material to service the new markets,” said Salinas.
The plant is used as a raw material by other industries. Salinas explained this can be an exploitative use of the raw material. He said their process means the plant can harvested in the laboratory, rather than depleting the native habitat. Other botanical compounds, such as QS-21, are found in this plant, and in the highest quantities in the bark of 15-year-old mature trees, so these tend to be harvested.
“We’re raising the bar on botanicals,” said Salinas, highlighting the problem of making botanical products scalable. “It doesn’t make sense to have a raw material that requires harvesting part from the wild.”
BSI is backed by venture capital and shares the same backer as a Chilean table grape exporter who was an early adopter of Botristop. The registration process for Botristop in Chile took four years. There is no separate registration process for biocontrol over conventional pesticides.
“For a mono-product company, that’s quite a challenge,” said Salinas. “Today we are generating revenue, but we still need resources from venture capital.”
The company is nearing registration in Peru and is aiming to launch Botristop there in the second quarter of 2021. After the U.S., Salinas said the company is eyeing Europe as an opportunity.
The company is also developing new products. Using extracts from the same raw material, the company has a nematicide and herbicide in the early stages of development.
Another possible end use is the production of QS-21 compound, which is used by the pharmaceutical industry to make an adjuvant for vaccines. In a similar way to adjuvants in crop protection, adjuvants help the effectiveness of the active in a vaccine. Salinas said the QS-21 is beneficial to the action of the antigens in a vaccine. The in vitro plants that BSI cultivate in the laboratory also produce QS-21 and in quantities that could be of interest to the pharmaceutical industry.
Salinas said there have been attempts to produce QS-21 synthetically, but so far nobody has achieved a low-cost process.
“We’re in the process of packaging the information to show that our extracted QS-21 is equivalent, and we’re confident we will begin production very soon.”