Healthy Soil
A new technology succeeds when it offers an advantage over an existing technology. AgriTitan™ protects crop yields like widely used agents such as copper salts, but AgriTitan™ also avoids harm to the land that nourishes those yields.
AgriTitan™ has repeatedly demonstrated equivalent efficacy to existing crop protection products in a number of major crop–disease systems. One key additional advantage in agriculture is one of environmental safety.
Importantly, the environmental toxicity profile for AgriTitan™ is much superior to many legacy pesticide products, which generally are soluble copper salts. Copper solubility results in the movement of copper ions into soils and aquifers, where its heavy metal toxicity continues and can harm any number of non-target organisms, including the soil microbiome. This is a long-recognized environmental harm that results in ever-tightening regulatory limits on copper use, and reliance on these compounds as the sole means of disease management poses serious threats to sustainable agricultural production.
In contrast, AgriTitan™ is an inert natural mineral when not illuminated, as in soils. AgriTitan™ is also not soluble, is not absorbed, and is demonstrably non-toxic to a wide range of living organisms.
Our soils—and their microbes—provide humans with most of our food. Soil, especially the microbiome of topsoil, is one of the most diverse microbial ecosystems in the world containing bacteria, fungi, archaea, protists, and viruses. The soil microbiome is critical to plant health and their resistance to stressors, such as drought and heavy metal pollution. However, the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) predicts that due to human activity and climate change, soil degradation could result in between 20-80% losses in agricultural yields, depending on the soil. Moreover, new topsoil, the uppermost organic-rich layer of soil, usually the top 5-10 inches (127-254mm), is generated at the sluggish rate of only 0.01-0.06 inches (0.25-1.5mm) per year. Soil is one of Earth’s precious resources, and its microbial communities sustain its productivity.
Preserving the natural soil microbiome has other benefits. Healthier soils also reduce the amounts of artificial fertilizers farmers must apply to replace the nutrients provided by, for example, nitrogen-fixing microbes in natural soils, and that are depleted by toxic pesticides.
Uniquely to patented AgriTitan™, this advanced photochemistry is both protecting the plant from epiphytic disease and converting atmospheric NOx pollution to nitrates on the plant surfaces. Moisture washes the nitrates into the soil making the captured nitrogen available as a plant nutrient.
Find more details on our unique and cost-effective pollution-to-nutrient cycle in Healthy Planet.
These attributes of AgriTitan™ can reduce crop production costs to the farmer’s wallet and increase yields to feed a hungry planet.
