Listening to what plants have to say

Nov 14, 2022

Vivent uses technology to understand if plants are under stress

By Diego Flammini
Staff Writer
Farms.com

Though walking through a field or greenhouse may seem like a quiet experience, the plants are actually speaking.

Through electrophysiology, plants can sense and respond to many changes in their environment, both above and below ground.

And Vivent, a Swiss precision ag company, has developed biosensors capable of understanding what messages plants are trying to communicate.

These sensors are installed and remain in place permanently on long life crops. They’re solar powered and can identify multiple pieces of information.

“We have identified various signals, and they are mostly the plant talking to itself about the kind of stresses it’s experiencing,” Norm Janssen, a business development specialist with Vivent, told Farms.com.

This includes instances when a plant may not be showing visible signs of stress.

“A farmer might not be able to see that a plant is lacking moisture, but the plant can give off signals saying that it is,” Janssen said.

Vivent’s biosensors can also identify nutrient deficiencies like calcium and magnesium. In addition, it can differentiate between insects and diseases.

“We can tell the difference between a thrip and a caterpillar,” he said.

One item Janssen stressed is Vivent doesn’t provide recommendations for how the producer manages the plant’s issues.

Those decisions are left to the farmer and his or her crop support system.

“We can send email or text alerts to the growers that their plants are experiencing stress, but how a grower manages that stress is up to them and their agronomists,” Janssen said.

Janssen is one of the more than 30 speakers scheduled to appear at the Precision Agriculture Conference and Ag Tech Showcase in Red Deer, Alta. beginning on Nov. 23.

His presentation will focus on Vivent’s technology, its algorithms, and the return on investment, he said.

The deadline for attendees to register for the conference is Nov. 21.

Video: From Students to Solutions | On The Brink: Season 2, Episode 14

Ask Canada’s most decorated soybean breeder his favourite part of the job and he doesn’t name a single variety. He names the students.

Istvan Rajcan is a professor of soybean breeding and genetics in the Department of Plant Agriculture at the University of Guelph, where he has run the soybean breeding program for 28 and a half years. In that time he has developed 87 soybean cultivars, published 140 refereed papers and trained 51 graduate students. In 2025 he received the Public Sector Impact Award from the National Association for Plant Breeding.

He is also worried. In this episode he says Canada is at a crossroads, pointing to recent government cuts to plant breeding programs and to the facilities that support them. His prescription is structural. "Plant breeding funding formula has to be a long-term one," he says.

The formula he is defending is the public-private matching arrangement his program runs on. Private seed companies fund the work, provincial or federal money matches it, and the combined pool stretches each dollar further than either source could alone. At the National Association for Plant Breeding annual meeting in June, he says American public breeders were often surprised at how well that collaboration works in Canada.

He also describes how the people entering plant breeding have changed. His early graduate students came mostly from farms. More recently they include, in his words, "city kids who just became excited about genetics."

Topics covered:

Why public-private plant breeding funding in Canada needs a long-term

commitment rather than a larger one

How matching private seed company investment with provincial and federal

dollars multiplies research capacity

How the graduate student pipeline into plant breeding has shifted from

farm kids to city kids