Sometimes green can be gruesome…
Sometimes green can be gruesome…
Ford placed ads in magazines essentially saying, ‘Send me dead bugs’. He was looking for critters that had died without being sprayed, and he got an unprecedented response – thousands upon thousands of insects received in the post or delivered personally to the lab.
Stephen Ford has spearheaded, sometimes single-handedly with his own savings, the development of a range of pesticides based on tiny natural fungal spores. In the carefully controlled conditions of a modern greenhouse these spores bore through the skin of the target insect pest species, grow a network of root-like structures through their internal organs, and kill them within 48 hours by sucking out their insides. In the lab, one of these spores is enough to kill a target insect. When used as a spray, millions upon millions are released.
It sounds scary, but Stephen says these pesticides have absolutely no toxicity for mammals, including humans, or plants. They have been naturally occurring in the environment for billions of years and have specifically evolved to terminate pest insects without any collateral damage to anything else. In fact, the numbers of insects that prey on the fungus’ target species actually seem to increase as the product takes hold.
According to Biotelliga, the product is so safe you can even spray it over your plants while your staff are harvesting a crop, and, since the fungi are incapable of activity at body temperature, the worst thing that will happen to your people is that they might get wet. Stephen is so confident about all this that he eats some of his product off his own finger in one of the company’s promotional videos.
Chemical poisoning in agriculture is a huge and hairy problem – and one reason why some of the world’s largest representatives of the $40 billion dollar pesticide and fungicide market, including Dow, Monsanto, Dupont and Bayer, are beating a path to Stephen’s door.
Whether the company sells out or goes it alone it will probably make him a very rich man – either way, this innovative Kiwi company should play a big part in removing a significant amount of pesticides from the world’s greenhouses.
The original version of this story first featured in Idealog
(issue #36). For more on Stephen Ford and Biotelliga go here
