Terramera deploys new industry-leading technology to speed discovery of sustainable crop solutions for farmers

Terramera, the global agtech leader fusing science, nature and artificial intelligence to transform how food is grown and the economics of agriculture, recently announced the launch of six custom, state-of-the-art plant growth chambers, showcasing Terramera’s industry-leading technological capabilities and redefining indoor agriculture’s contribution to field-based production.

Many crop protection products fail in the field because labs and greenhouses do not accurately replicate real-world conditions. Each chamber offers 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 and will be outfitted with a Terramera-built automation system for end-to-end integration. Automation will enable experiments to run entirely without human intervention including watering, spraying, nutrient dosing and imaging of the plants throughout their lifecycle, dramatically accelerating data collection for product performance and increasing accuracy with Terramera’s industry-leading Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) platform.

“Customized 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,” said Annett Rozek, Terramera Chief Scientific Officer. “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 new growth chambers bring Terramera’s total to 12 and are part of a larger technological scale-up for the company, which also brought a new best-in-class liquid handling robot on board. Terramera’s own machine learning (ML) model named the robot, “Enzing,” which is integrated into Terramera’s fully automated in-vitro screening and data analysis pipeline. The robot has already enabled Terramera’s largest in-vitro screening project yet, testing the company’s Actigate™ library against numerous plant disease pathogens.

“This marks an exciting milestone for Terramera and a step-change in the industry by adding a new, essential capacity,” said Karn Manhas, Terramera Founder and CEO. “Simulated environment studies are the missing link between controlled environments like the lab or greenhouse and field trials since many products fail because lab and greenhouse conditions are too different from the outside world on a farm. This technology increases our throughput, allowing us to predict outcomes more accurately, allowing us to quickly scale our knowledge and technologies to make farming healthier, more sustainable and productive while turning back the clock on climate change.”