Measuring plant stress through electrical signals with Vivent Biosignals

The Canadian Agri Food Policy Institute is driving bold policy solutions for resilient Canadian agri food system and building a stronger future for Canadian agriculture. Visit capi-icpa.com to discover how. I'm Amber Bell and this is Real agriculture here today in Saskatoon at Canola Week. Getting the chance to talk with Norm Jansen, who's the business development lead for North America with Vivent Bio Signals. Welcome, Norm, it's great to see you. Great, thanks, thanks. It's a pleasure to be here. Nice to be in Saskatoon. So tell me a little bit about Vivent for those that don't know much about them. So Vivant is a Swiss based company that uses plant electrophysiology, measuring electrical signals in plants that go up and down the plant. And those signals are the plant telling us how it's experiencing its environment. What we do is we listen, we measure those signals and we translate those signals into our language. So in a comment earlier, you mentioned the plant's feelings. Now, what exactly are the plants feeling? The plant tells us how it's experiencing its environment, how it's feeling about its environment. So the plant sends signals when it's thirsty, when it's hungry for various nutrients, when insects have invaded various parts of the plant, for instance, we can identify very early a nematode biting at its root system or a disease that has infected various parts of its plant before you see any visual signs of damage on a plant. Now, in all this, we're talking about plant electrophysiology, which is a big word. Tell me exactly what that is. Electrophysiology is signals that move up and down in a plant. It is the exchange primarily of calcium ions in one area of a plant compared to another. So that's how the signals move within a plant. Now, who is the primary user of this device? Is it research facilities, the average grower? Initially, we, of course, it started with research. We're doing quite a bit of work in commercial farms, particularly started in greenhouses, because you can control a number of the factors a little hard if you are in open field. Also being used to groundproof a number of satellite images. What do those different colours mean on a geographic map? And that allows agronomists to come up with better practises to minimise those areas. And particularly now with some of the technology as far as variable, whether it's variable water, whether it's variable fertiliser, variable pesticide application. Another area that has been really new of late is the area of biostimulants and how they can work with plants. How do they work and how do they work better? Developing recipes. So there's many, many applications for the use of this technology commercially and in research. And so more and more commercial applications are being used now. Where can growers and researchers go for more information? Norm? They can go to our website. Our website. If they were to search Vvent biosignals. It's veventbiosignals. Ch. Because it's a Swiss company. There's lots of information, scientific papers are available there, and some basic understanding of the technology can be found there. Wonderful. Well, thank you so much for your time. And that was Norm Jansen on real agriculture. It.