Agricultural productivity needs to rise by 70% by 2050 to feed a fast-growing population. This challenge is made difficult by the onset of insect pesticide resistance, increased regulatory pressure on crop protection chemicals, and consumer-driven demand for clean nutritious and healthy products. Pheromone insect control is a safe, effective, affordable, and sustainable alternative to traditional chemical pesticides. The concept of "mating disruption" consist in dispensing an insect pest's own sex pheromones into a field to disrupt the insects' ability to attract or find mating partners, keeping the pest population numbers low and crops safe. Crops protected with pheromones have a better residue profile and the natural biodiversity of fields and orchards is preserved.
Although the science of mating disruption has been understood and proven for some 20 years, the cost of pheromone production has been a barrier to the broader application of the concept. However, research into pheromone production via fermentation methods has been under development for around ten years. Fermentation technology can enable pheromone production at a lower cost than the synthetic production routes used so far. The improved cost and availability of pheromones will allow mating disruption for pest protection to move out of its current high-value crop niche and make it affordable and accessible for large-scale row crops.
PHERA brings together the required expertise in production and formulation to move pheromones toward more wide-spread use. The Bio-Based Industries Joint Undertaking awarded the PHERA grant for the 2020-2023 period to a consortium of companies with the aim to scale up pheromone production and application technology and to drive commercialization into major row crops. The PHERA consortium consists of companies specialized in pheromone application: SEDQ Healthy Crops (Spain), ISCA Europe (France), Russell IPM (UK), and Novagrica (Greece), as well as in bio-based pheromone production: BioPhero (Denmark). The consortium also included scale-up expertise from BPF (no longer operating), and life-cycle assessment capabilities from Fraunhofer (Germany).
The pheromones used in PHERA are produced by fermentation using renewable raw materials. The project thereby directly supports BBI/CBE JU’s strategic objectives by establishing a new bio-based business for pheromone-based pest control in row crops, while helping to solve the major societal issue of achieving sustainable agricultural productivity growth.
The PHERA grant was used directly towards two critical steps required for large scale implementation: Scaling up the production of pheromones to production in 100 cubic meter fermentation tanks, and conducting large-scale mating disruption field experiments in row-crops to prove the efficacy of the pheromone formulations offered by the pheromone application companies.
The PHERA technologies have a potential to transform the pest control in agriculture.
- From an environmental perspective, using a pheromone-based approach to pest control has lower impact than existing pesticides. The production method – using yeast fermentation – is also environmentally friendly, as it mainly uses renewable raw materials.
- The PHERA technology makes pheromones an affordable form of pest control for row crops. This will help to increase food production to meet the demands of a growing population while at the same time considerably reducing long-term impacts on the environment.
- This will also create a new industrial sector, dedicated to the production of sustainable pest control approaches. Thus, by 2027 PHERA will help establish a new agriculture technology industry for mating disruption products for row crop production worth more than €600 million, creating approximately 300 new jobs.
