[Disclosure: AgFunderNews parent company AgFunder is an investor in Azaneo.]
With chemical herbicideS increasingly controversial (and ineffective), zapping weeds via high-voltage electricity has emerged as one possible alternative. Australian startup Azaneo has put a new twist on this option by leveraging a method more commonly found in medical settings than vegetable fields.
Electroportation, a molecular biology technique found in cancer treatments and food processing, is at the core of Azaneo’s modular tractor implement, which can kill weeds en masse without using enormous amounts of heat and energy.
Azaneo founder and CEO Liam Hescock believes his company has a real shot at competing with chemical herbicides on a per-hectare, per-weed cost basis.
“Reducing herbicide use is a big mission of ours, but we strongly believe you have to have the unit economics to also drive adoption,” he tells AgFunderNews. “The productivity and the economics have to be there, and if we get this right, we can smack herbicide in terms of price.”
Advantages of electroportation
Electroportation uses short, high-voltage electric pulses to create microscopic pores in cell membranes. Reversible electroportation, where pores close after the electric pulse, is commonly found in work like delivering DNA to cells.
Azaneo uses irreversible electroportation, sometimes called IRE. Here, destruction, not delivery, is the goal. An electric field delivers enough volts per centimeter to destabilize the cell membrane entirely, leading to rapid death of the cell.
Tumor ablation is a well-known use case for IRE. In agriculture, Azaneo uses it for targeted weed control across any crop.
Hescock says there are multiple advantages to IRE as a weed management tool, even beyond reducing the need for chemical herbicides on the farm.
Relative to other electric weeding systems, Azaneo’s system produces far less heat due to its non-thermal nature.
“We’ve tested in the lab doing it thermally and non thermally,” says Hescock. “If the plants are 20 degrees [Celsius], we can do a treatment [with the machine], and it’s maybe at 24 when we finish—there’s virtually no rise in temperature.”
A plant’s temperature has to reach between 60 and 70 degrees Celsius (140–158 degrees Fahrenheit) to kill it thermally, he adds.
“This is different than just killing a plant with temperature. There are a number of companies that have done that and it works, but it will use a lot more energy and you’ll have to go slower because of it.”
Faster speeds, lower price tags
Speed is another advantage of Azaneo’s system, says Hescock. The company is now testing its machines at four to six kilometers per hour, which is nearly on par with the average speed range used in herbicide application.
“That’s been huge in terms of getting us ready to commercially launch this.”
And whereas herbicide application is heavily tied to the speed of the wind, Azaneo’s machines could work in a gale if need be, says Hescock.
“We have machines that can run 10 hours a day or 24 hours a day. We don’t have to do all this planning around weather.”
Based on modeling, he believes the machines could get double the productivity of a conventional herbicide unit—and simultaneously address labor challenges, which are a major hurdle for Australian farmers.
Azaneo is currently at work on its first system, designed to plug into a tractor and work on vegetable farms.
Over the next few months, the company will test its machines on its own farm, followed by trials on multiple farms throughout Australia. The aim is to build and sell five to 10 machines this year.
Hescock says the company is actively looking for trial partners, not only in Australia but also the US and Europe.
“We’ve got purchase orders from both quite small farms to large ones. Both have different uses. Because the system is modular, we can sell just a few modules to a small farmer, and that makes it cost effective,” says Hescock.”
This affordability is a critical point for precision weeding, he adds.
“A lot of farmers would love, for example, a Carbon Robotics machine that does that level of precision, but the cost rules it out. We’ll be a fraction of that cost.”
