Low-Cost Olive Pest Control Solution in Development

A new Spanish con­sor­tium has been formed to develop an auto­mated, easy-to-use, reli­able and low-cost sys­tem for detect­ing and iden­ti­fy­ing pests in olive groves.

With regional, national and European gov­ern­ment back­ing, the oliVAr Operational Group aims to cre­ate this sys­tem by com­bin­ing exist­ing hard­ware with recent advances in arti­fi­cial vision and data mod­el­ing.

The con­sor­tium com­prises Loyola University Andalucía, the Ayesa Foundation, Opracol Seville and Cooperativas Agro-ali­men­ta­rias de Andalucía, which accounts for over €11 bil­lion in annual turnover.

The con­sor­tium aims to develop an inte­grated plat­form to locate the pres­ence, move­ments and num­bers of pests via a net­work of remote nodes deployed through­out the olive grove, includ­ing tem­per­a­ture, humid­ity, infrared and vis­i­ble-spec­trum sen­sors, all con­nected wire­lessly.

The sys­tem will detect four of the most con­se­quen­tial olive pests: olive fruit fly, olive moth, olive psyl­lid and jas­mine moth.

“The health of olive groves and their prod­ucts is cur­rently a fun­da­men­tal ele­ment in the field of agri­cul­tural pro­duc­tion; the pests and dis­eases that affect them can cause seri­ous pro­duc­tion losses and, there­fore, reduce the com­pet­i­tive­ness of the olive sec­tor,” the con­sor­tium said in a press state­ment.

Pest activ­ity and threat data will be stored in the platform’s data­bases. This infor­ma­tion will be avail­able in real-time via the graph­i­cal user inter­face (includ­ing mobile inter­faces) and serve as the basis for ana­lyt­i­cal func­tions within the soft­ware.

These func­tions include cre­at­ing a flight curve for each tar­get insect and the eco­nomic thresh­old at which the con­trol point is located.

The eco­nomic thresh­old indi­cates the oppor­tune time to decide upon and imple­ment pre­ven­ta­tive mea­sures to avoid a reduc­tion in crop value greater than the cost of the con­trol treat­ment, which trans­lates into eco­nomic dam­age: the eco­nomic injury level.

The eco­nomic thresh­old and injury level are cen­tral to the Integrated Pest Management (IPM) pro­gram, upon which the oliVAr sys­tem is founded.

IPM was devel­oped dur­ing the decades fol­low­ing World War II in response to steadily increas­ing pes­ti­cide use, which resulted in pest con­trol crises due to grow­ing pes­ti­cide resis­tance and increas­ing evi­dence and aware­ness of the neg­a­tive impacts on human health and the envi­ron­ment of inten­sive pes­ti­cide use.

The con­sor­tium noted that although the sys­tem will be designed to counter cur­rently promi­nent pests such as the olive moth and olive fruit fly, the tech­nol­ogy could be extended to mon­i­tor addi­tional organ­isms in the future, espe­cially inva­sive or exotic species.

This is seen as increas­ingly likely due to cli­mate change and the glob­al­ized nature of mod­ern agri­cul­ture and trade. For exam­ple, the brown mar­morated stink bug has now been detected in olive groves in Italy and Greece after over a decade of caus­ing sig­nif­i­cant eco­nomic dam­age to var­i­ous crops in North America.

The oliVAr project, funded through the European Agricultural Funds for Rural Development (EAFRD) and co-financed by the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries, Water and Rural Development of the Andalusian regional gov­ern­ment, is one of sev­eral intended to improve the sus­tain­abil­ity and via­bil­ity of European agri­cul­tural food pro­duc­tion through inno­va­tion in tech­no­log­i­cal solu­tions.

• University of Loyola
• EFE