Apr 12, 2016

Company seeks to break rootstock bottleneck

Tapping into customized tissue culture, combined with precise greenhouse production, can speed the rootstock process. It’s a prospect that is perking the interest of fruit tree growers seeking to move forward in an era of high-stakes precision agriculture.

Phytelligence is a biotech and micropropagation company spurred by grower interest and financial support as it emerged from the horticulture department at Washington State University (WSU).

Founder Amit Dhingra is a WSU professor who, after several conversations with local growers, started to do research for them, from mapping genomes of apple varieties to multiplying new genetic material through micropropagation. Phytelligence was incorporated to allow for its mushrooming growth, leading to the formation of an experienced team of agriculture professionals to take the company to its next stage of development.

In March, the biotechnology company, which intends to revolutionize the way crops are grown, announced the appointment of three executive team members.

Ken Hunt, chief executive officer, Tyler Spurgeon, chief operations officer, and Tim O’Brien, chief revenue officer, bring a combined 50 years of leadership experience to the company, and are key players in an aggressive plan to increase plant production in 2016 and beyond.

Dhingra founded Phytelligence in 2012, and is now its chief science officer. The company’s ability to help farmers grow crops faster using fewer resources was spearheaded by Dhingra, who said the project solved a long-standing plant mortality problem for farmers and developed a genetic testing process that allows them to obtain plants that are 100 percent genetically certified.

In 2015, Phytelligence reported a five-fold increase in plant orders over the previous period, and plans to produce more than 9 million plants in the next two years.

Dhingra said Phytelligence is likely – at least initially – to put only a small dent in the tree fruit industry’s demand, which he placed at about 550,000 plants per year.

“Phytelligence enables higher grower profit by increasing speed to harvest and reducing input costs,” Dhingra said. “Phytelligence provides additional value to food crop growers and plant breeders through the application of advanced genetics enabling 100 percent guaranteed delivery of accurate plants, disease screening, plant repository services, securing of intellectual property and the ability to co-develop new varieties of food crops.

“In addition,” Dhingra said, “Phytelligence has a growing pipeline of biological and compound solutions aimed at improving returns throughout the food crop value chain.

“Whenever you want to bring a new variety to market, you have enough budwood sometimes but you don’t have enough rootstock,” Dhingra told Fruit Growers News. “You need one rootstock per tree, of course. Today, those rootstocks are not available because of the fact that nurseries have been growing them in soil. Once you have something in soil, the rates of multiplication are very low. It takes about four to five years to get enough rootstocks, but it’s limited by land – then you have events like weather events. You also have issues with mix- ups. So it’s kind of a complex problem that feeds into that bottleneck. That’s kind of an existing problem.

“We’ve done this in the past for a very long time,” Dhingra said. “But some of the chemicals are being phased out that you use as fungicides or pesticides. You can’t use them anymore. So that plant material that’s growing in the soil is continually being exposed to the elements of nature that kind of depletes the quality that finally gets to a finished tree nursery.

“That’s sort of the complex problem of bottlenecks in rootstocks, but the other part of the problem is if you have new rootstocks coming in, how do you plant them?” he said. “Where do you plant them? Nurseries are not buying more land to grow these things, so everybody has limited land capacity.”

The solution offered by Phytelligence:

“So what we have done is basically taken away our process from soils
so it’s a soil-free process done under controlled environments, which kind of frees it from the attacks of the season as well.”

Tissue culture manipulation is a key part of the process, Dhingra said.

“It’s basically a technique to grow plant material under aseptic conditions with artificial nutrition that you provide through having a gel with macro- and micro-nutrients and phytohormones that are available just in soil. This process involves growing and multiplying these things in a box and then moving it to a greenhouse.

“When a plant is growing in the soil, it’s trying to do multiple things at a time,” he said. “It’s trying to grow its roots, shoots and face the environment. So from a workflow perspective, if you break it down so that you just allow the plant to multiply, it’s not making any roots, it’s not making too many shoots, but just enough so each bud can make four or five nodes every four weeks. And after four weeks, you take that bunch out, chop it up, create single plantlets and start all over again.

“So what you have done is you have streamlined the process, or paralyzed the process for just multiplication, and then have enough numbers that you’ve taken out the risk of pathogens in soil,” Dhingra said. “You’ve taken out the risk of season in the process, so the farmer or the finished tree nursery can get all the plants it needs at one go.

“I think this is the future: we need efficiency, we need to reduce risk, so combine these processes. The other thing we do is make sure that each and every plant is genetically certified to be the same kind. You have heard stories in the past that rootstocks have been mixed up, apple rootstocks have been mixed up and gone unnoticed.

“If a farmer or a tree nursery knows that it’s working with the right rootstock, in the end the farmer’s happy, the consumer’s happy, the nursery’s happy – so they’re not wasting anything and we’re reducing the risk in the process.”

When Dhingra spoke recently at the International Fruit Tree Association’s annual conference, he followed the conference theme by saying that as the industry is moving forward, precision farming is going to be a big deal.

“Precision is time and money. We need more rootstocks – more of the right kind. But biology takes time. New genetics are becoming available at a much faster rate. But land is tied up with prior inventory.

“Customized tissue culture – plus greenhouse production – can speed the rootstock process. The technology is there to read every point of DNA.

“Precision is time and money,” he said. “We want to look at beautiful orchards. Before we can get to that, we need to transfer over to new architectures.”

Dhingra cited USDA statistics that show that 97 percent of U.S. pear, 75 percent of sweet cherry and 50 percent of apple orchards need to transition to better architecture – or higher-density plantings.

“That will get you to make money faster,” he said.

— Gary Pullano, associate editor