A device that helps alert growers to the presence of airborne pathogens has been popping up in some Alberta cereal and canola fields in the last couple of years.

It was more than five years ago that Kristine White, co-founder and President of Spornado, was approached by a large company to source a passive air sampler to detect fungal disease in crops.

It’s a no-brainer that people in agriculture — growers especially — need to be able to make decisions fast. Mother Nature waits for nobody, and anything that can give a grower a better idea of what they’re dealing with becomes a valuable tool in the toolbox.

A great example is the Spornado, which I will have the pleasure of working with again in 2019. An exciting new technology that we launched in 2018, the Spornado is a passive spore catcher, first successfully deployed by potato growers in Ontario to detect late blight spores.

Hold on to your hats — the Spornado is coming.

“(The Spornado) is a really good tool that’s been developed over the last couple of years,” said Trevor Blois, disease diagnostician for 20/20 Seed Labs.

“It’s just a passive spore catcher that has been used by potato growers in Ontario to detect late blight spores, and that’s really helped them with timing their fungicide applications.”

Developed by Sporometrics and used primarily thus far in potato and tomato crops in Central Canada, the Spornado is a low-tech way to collect disease-causing spores from the air and water. The cone-shaped tool is placed in the field during the growing season, and then traps spores in specialized filters. These filters are then sent to a lab for testing, with a two- to three-day turnaround time (although, for a price, one-day rush jobs are possible).

Late blight is a never-ending potato disease challenge for growers. A preventative fungicide program that includes broad-spectrum fungicides combined with timely sprays of late blight-specific products greatly reduces the chances of late blight epidemics.                                               

A two-year research project (2016-17) was conducted in Ontario to determine if passive spore traps would provide an early warning of late blight to better time late blight-specific fungicides.

The results indicated that passive spore traps placed in commercial potato fields proved to be a reliable method for detecting spores of the late blight pathogen (Phytophthora infestans) at least 15 days before lesions were detected in the field. The traps do not need a source of energy; they are activated by the wind. Filters held in the spore traps retain spores blowing in the air. The filters are changed twice a week and sent to a laboratory where a PCR-based test is used to detect P. infestans DNA. A positive PCR test indicates the presence of spores in the area. This information alerts growers of the increased risk of late blight and the need to tank-mix late blight-specific fungicides with broad-spectrum fungicides.