Brown University senior David Katzevich is the creator of FungEye, an image-based software product designed to help indoor farmers detect mold on plants earlier. Katzevich won the annual statewide Elevator Pitch Contest sponsored by the Rhode Island Business Plan Competition, which just marked its 12th year.
PBN: How did you get an understanding from these farmers on the value in detecting mold earlier, rather than later?
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KATZEVICH: Well, if you detect it later, it’s usually too late. Mold spreads quickly and can destroy a crop. You need to find it before it spreads, when it’s just taken hold in one or two plants and get rid of it then. You can do some preventative measures on the rest of the crops after, adjust humidity, light and CO2, but you need to catch it early if you don’t want the whole crop infected.
PBN: Can you briefly explain how the technology works?
KATZEVICH: Through computer vision. Basically, you have a million pictures from every angle of the type of plant with mold in a database, and you take pictures of your plant. If something on your plant matches up with a moldy plant in the database, the technology alerts you.
PBN: How big of a problem is fungi in terms of crop loss here in R.I.?
KATZEVICH: The statistics on this are really difficult to find for some reason, so I can’t honestly say how big the problem is in Rhode Island. Boston Greens lost an entire crop of basil to mold, just because they couldn’t detect it right away. In the Pacific Northwest, mold destroys $176,000 worth of crops annually. It’s a significant problem … Many [farmers] just budget loss of plants to mold as a given, and assume they’ll have to make due with 10 percent to 20 percent of their crop lost.
PBN: What part of this process – product development to business plan creation to the competition – did you find most challenging?
KATZEVICH: Finding the right problem to solve was the most challenging, as there is so much involved in agriculture that zeroing in on mold wasn’t even on our radar when we got started. But we asked around enough and mold appeared to be a common thread. The next part is getting the technology right, which will definitely be the hardest part. I’m not the tech guy on our team, but we have some great computer minds on board and they say it can be done.
PBN: Where do you see the indoor-farming industry going from here in terms of crops produced?
KATZEVICH: Indoor agriculture is only going to grow, if you’ll excuse the pun. It will probably never replace conventional farming, but its market share will only increase. In terms of crops, micro-greens like basil and other herbs are ideal for indoor agriculture, as is cannabis. The latter especially will make up the majority of growth in the future, as cannabis is the fastest-growing industry in the entire country. Not just for agriculture, but for all industries, cannabis is growing at unparalleled rates. As more states legalize and more farmers enter the field, the need for the sort of technology we’re hoping to provide will only increase.
Susan Shalhoub is a PBN contributing writer.
