105020Increasing agriculture productivity and sustainability through the use of disruptive sensors and software, to facilitate game changing and cost effective soil-health analysis within agricultureClosedFeasibility StudiesInnovate UK"FungiAlert is developing game changing technology within agritech that will increase agricultural productivity and sustainability through the development of disruptive in-the-field sensors. The objective of this project is to create a new product and make soil-health analysis more accessible to growers. The new offerings would ultimately allow growers to make informed agronomy decisions to mitigate crop loss due to crop disease. This would have a huge impact on the UK economy, as crop diseases within the UK can account for losses of up £2.4bn per year, highlighting the need for disruptive technologies to promote soil-health analysis, for increased crop yields. To date, FungiAlert has developed the first early detection device for fungal plant diseases from soil and water. Other soil-health diagnostic methods offer post-symptomatic identification of the disease. This late diagnosis is not always useful, as once the disease is symptomatic, the treatment is not efficient and crop losses are inevitable. FungiAlert's technology can be described as the smoke detector for farmers, since it alerts the user about the risk of infection before the disease spreads and causes devastating losses. FungiAlert's current technology detects fungal and oomycetal pathogens, however, the market is also demanding a product than can simultaneously detect multiple types of microorganisms within one sensor (i.e. fungi, oomycetes and bacteria). This is due to existing devastating bacterial diseases in agriculture, such as as _Xylella fastidiosa_ which is destroying grape and olive crops in Europe and is threatening the oak trees in the UK (Ian Cox, Innovate UK blog 2018). Like personalised-medicine, different species of plant pathogens have different susceptibility to pesticides, therefore, there is a need to precisely identify the species of disease, in order to tailor pest management strategies. Currently, FungiAlert offers a genomic approach to identify the species of diseases detected by the sensors. The new proposed sensor will have a wider detection scope, therefore, there is a need for a cost efficient metagenomic approach. This would provide soil-health analysis of the microbial community at the point of sampling in the field, this would be game-changing for agriculture, as it would help guide key agricultural decisions (rotational decisions, variety selection, crop protection strategies, harvest time etc.). This project would allow FungiAlert to offer game changing and cost efficient technology for soil-health analysis, revolutionising agricultural practices, and increasing crop productivity and promoting sustainable farming."