Dubliner Eamonn Keogh was inspired by tech straight out of a spy novel to set up a company in California.
His start-up serves the Golden State’s high-value almond industry by alerting growers to the presence of their leading insect foe – the navel orangeworm moth.
Keogh designed a smart trap that taps a barely believable phenomenon, seen in a Mission Impossible film, that allows window vibrations to be converted into sound.
“As a kid, I remember reading about how spies could use laser beams to reflect vibrations in the window glass of an embassy and listen in,” recalls Keogh. “I wondered if a mosquito flew past the beam, would you hear the mosquito instead of the ambassador?”
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In California, his company FarmSense created a sensor that identifies an insect as it flies through a beam of light. Information is transmitted to farmers to tell them what insects are flying among their almond or pistachio trees.
The farmers are especially interested in the navel orangeworm. Knowing when males and females of this moth will start cavorting among the trees allows growers to deploy a chemical distraction – harmless to other insects – to reduce moth larvae numbers.
Keogh grew up in Kimmage, “the youngest and best-looking of nine children”, with his father working in the Guinness brewery. “I left school at 15 and worked at painting cars. I hated it. I came to America on a green card,” he recalls.
After working in various mechanical jobs and returning to school, he worked his way up to become professor of computer science at the University of California, Riverside. He loves academic life, but later made the hard decision to take a break.
“I’m not an entrepreneur at heart. It’s not in my DNA – but I thought this was such an important problem, and we had an answer,” says Keogh.
With a lifelong interest in nature, Keogh hopes he can reduce pesticide use in orchards. The number-one foe of almond harvests is the navel orangeworm, whose caterpillars munch through almonds and also leave them vulnerable to a fungal infection.
Buzz sensor
The new sensor relies on the telltale buzz of insects. Compare, for instance, the high-pitched whine of an annoying mosquito to the low buzz of a summer bumblebee. “There’s a kind of uniqueness to the sound that a given species makes,” says Keogh.
This discovery was made fortuitously when a student said she could tell mosquitoes apart by their buzz. “We thought that was impossible, so we blind tested and found out she could.” It helped that she was a Thai national piano champion with perfect pitch.
‘The walking around looking at sticky traps is very, very time consuming and inaccurate. Now a grower can sit at his morning coffee and see on his phone that he has a problem in his north field’
— Eamonn Keogh, FarmSense
The sensor identifies insects through their wing beats. The algorithm is simple enough, according to Keogh. The secret sauce is the millions of lab measurements he has recorded of insects with the sensor.
The measurements were taken under various wind, pressure and temperature conditions, because a mosquito might fly at 600 Hertz (frequency of wing beats, per second) one day but at perhaps 610 Hertz on another, when it’s warmer. Data collection was the hard part. The company collected insects, brought them to the lab and recorded 100 million different interactions with the sensor, with lots of different insect species.
There are more than one million acres of almond trees in California’s Central Valley region and about 800,000 acres combined of pistachio trees and walnut trees potentially available to the moths. The total area of almond trees in the state is equal to the combined size of Dublin, Wicklow and Wexford.
“It is just a buffet for these guys. Their population, starting in July, can exponentially increase,” says Dr Houston Wilson, an entomologist at the University of California, Riverside, who offers advice about this pest to growers. The sensor also acts as a mini-weather station and is recharged by attached solar panels.
Almond grower Ryan Payne, in a testimonial on the company’s website, said his leading pest of concern was the navel orangeworm which, if left untreated, could cause damage to up to 30 per cent of the crop. He said no farmer wanted to spray a pesticide over 100 per cent of a field, and that more targeted treatment with less volume was always attractive.
The old-fashioned way of tracking this moth-nemesis of a multibillion-dollar industry is for growers to place an alluring scent in a sticky trap.
“Growers can spend the day driving around looking at traps and taking notes,” says Wilson. Female moths send out a special chemical compound (a pheromone) to help males find them, and farmers can flood their orchards with synthetic versions of this pheromone to disrupt moth mating – if they know when the time is right to do so.
Keogh believes his sensor offers an answer. “This is an information problem – the information is, which insects are active, and in which part of your field,” he says.
“The walking around looking at sticky traps is very, very time consuming and inaccurate. Now a grower can sit at his morning coffee and see on his phone that he has a problem in his north field.”
Moth alert
If one farm fails to act, the problem can spill over to their neighbours, since the moths are strong flyers. Wilson wants to introduce a regional alert to advise growers.
“There’s a pretty strong argument to manage this insect across an entire region, instead of a bunch of individuals managing it alone on their farm,” he says.
He plans to evaluate smart traps that relay real-time information to growers. The FarmSense sensor stands out, he adds: “It is a unique trap because it looks at wing beats – all the other ones are using a camera to take a photo of a sticky trap.”
The issue is not just about moth damage. The caterpillars bore into the almonds and allow a fungus, Aspergillus, to gain entry. This fungus can create aflatoxins, cancer-causing compounds that are heavily regulated in key export markets in Asia and Europe. Growers get payment bonuses or penalties depending on the level of damage to their harvest from the moth larvae.
There’s been further bad news for Californian tree nut farmers in recent years also. Heavy rains have made collecting nuts on the ground difficult, allowing more moths to overwinter on them. “The past two years we’ve seen some of the heaviest crop damage on record for navel orangeworm,” says Wilson.
Keogh, meanwhile, hopes his new sensor, inspired by spyware, can give growers the information they need for more environmentally benign and efficient pest control.
