NSF TTP-T: Cold Plasma Agriculture Technology Transition to Improve Food Production

This project is funded through the NSF Translation to Practice (TTP) program, which supports efforts to translate research discoveries into innovations that benefit communities, industry, and society. For the TTP program, teams advance research results toward real-world deployment and adoption. By the year 2050, the World’s population is expected to reach 10 billion people. To meet the food demands of the growing population, agriculture production will need to increase by 60-70%. At the same time there are significant challenges for farmers to grow sufficient crops and be profitable. There is a need to reduce food waste and loss from the farm to fork supply chain to satisfy the public’s growing need for food. New technologies and approaches are needed to balance economic viability of farms and food production. The research team will translate cold-plasma agriculture-treatment (CPAT) research and technology from the laboratory environment to larger-scale, commercially useful systems to meet 1) the commercial need to produce safe and high-quality food with reduced resources and 2) the societal need to produce enough food for the growing human population. The results benefit American farmers and enable them to improve crop productivity without additional chemicals, genetic modification, and land or water use. The key innovation is to use room temperature gas plasma generated at regular atmospheric pressures to directly contact and treat living materials (seeds, roots, plant leaves, raw chicken flesh, eggs, etc.). The cold plasma use only electricity and commonly available gases (e.g. air, water vapor, He, Ar) to produce reactive chemical species (O, OH, O3, NOx), charged ions and electrons, and electric fields. The benefit of CPAT for agriculture, compared to other state-of-the art approaches, is the simplicity of a single treatment and the increased yield. It is a chemical free method that provides additional benefits on top of existing practice such as synthetic fertilizers, precision agriculture, automation, and the various anti-microbial treatments to increase crop productivity and reduce spoilage. In partnership with Koyna Ventures, Mayim Farm, 1 DOG Ventures, and Tyson Foods this research scales small laboratory CPAT devices to a larger-scale system suitable for implementation into the agricultural food chain, while also improving our understanding of plasma-biological interactions. The scale-up is a whole-of-systems approach designing both the plasma source as well as the power supply, along with plant and food treatment experiments. The knowledge gained on how to optimize the power for the plasma source design contributes to the field of cold plasma physics and enables others to design efficiency sources for research and applications. The effect of plasma on plants, microorganisms, and food provides new insights on activated biochemical pathways, improving the process and opening the door to better understanding of biochemical processes in living organisms. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.