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WATER SAVER: Water Sensors for Advanced Energy Reduction
MicroCeres was founded in 2019 by two plant eco-physiologists, after successfully demonstrating a new plant health monitoring technology on field grown Sorghum. This technology was developed in partnership with Sandia National Laboratories through funding from the ARPA-E ROOTS program. MicroCeres has established an affiliate relationship with the product development firm Next State Systems to ensure the continued adoption and growth of the technology. This relationship has facilitated the development and sale of the first commercial units. Currently, they are aggressively pursuing additional sales while expanding applications for multiple high-value crops in field, greenhouse, and indoor growth environments.
We have developed a novel “wearable” sensor for plants that uses electrical impedance spectroscopy and microprobes to continuously monitor plant health, including water status. This sensor provides growers and researchers with the data they need to produce crops with less water, less energy, less labor, more flavor, and higher yield. Because our sensor technology is compatible with a wide range of high-value crops, it has the potential to disrupt a large part of the USD 13.8 billion smart agriculture market (USD 22 billion by 2025). We have partnered with Bayer Crop Science LP, Next State Systems, Sandia National Laboratories, and the University of New Mexico, to demonstrate that our system could be miniaturized and deployed as a distributed wireless network suitable for application in large-scale agriculture to enhance the performance and automation of irrigation systems. The ARPA-E SCALEUP opportunity would enable development and manufacture of this distributed system as well as evaluation of its performance in a large-scale deployment.
MicroCeres is looking for commercialization partners with expertise in micro- to nano-scale mechanical fabrication, wireless networking, techno-economic analyses, and marketing. We are also interested in discovering additional end users and application of the technology to other market verticals.
Contact Information:
David Hanson
MicroCeres