UV light ‘switches on potential’

A Palmerston North company increasing the yield of agricultural plants is taking the next steps to commercialise its technology.

Biolumic is an agricultural technology company that uses ultraviolet light treatment on seeds and crops to improve the productivity of plants, including soybeans, strawberries and cannabis.

The treatment can lead to better crop yields and protects plants from disease without using chemicals or genetic modification.

The company, which has offices in New Zealand and the United States, recently announced the closing of a $13.5 million Series B funding round that will be used to accelerate commercial growth.

Biolumic’s Palmerston Northbased chief science officer Jason Wargent said the funding allowed it to commercialise its technology and it was a big achievement because it was hard to raise capital in the current climate.

The company’s commercial priority had been its work with cannabis and it was starting to get huge yields in the plant, Wargent said.

There were ‘‘billions’’ of potential light treatment recipes they could do on the plant.

Wargent said the focus was on a few crops and building the biology platform, which would give them the ability to go to almost any plant.

It was about switching on the potential that existed in every crop.

‘‘Our gene is already there. The UV light unlocks it.’’

The treatment could lead to double-digit yields.

The company treated the cannabis with UV light as a plant, but for other plants it treated the seeds.

It recently did amaize trial near Bulls and had been doing soybean trials in the United States in 1700 plots.

It had also been treating other plants like rye grass, wheat and barley.

As well as improving the plant yields, the company was working to discover new information about how yield in crops could be controlled. ‘‘There is a clock ticking. Food security in Ukraine, we’ve got extreme weather’’, Wargent said.

‘‘The world needs more trials to increase yield or buffer crops against pests and climate turbulence.

‘‘Not all the solutions lie with one or two technologies. We’ve got to think about new technologies.’’

Wargent said they could take any plant and a technology like theirs could make it ‘‘more armourplated’’ without needing to be rebred.

‘‘We’re trying to make something that could make an impactful difference on food farming.’’ The company’s work in the US was for recreational cannabis but it had also worked with pharmaceutical cannabis.

In Palmerston North it had been building racks to put trays of cannabis plants on and treat with UV light.

It was shipping the racks, which could treat about 300 plants a week, to the US.

The company’s chief executive, Steve Sibulkin, is in the US and the team there had grown to 20 staff.

Sibulkin said the recipes were clean, scalable and available at a fraction of the time, risk and cost of traditional solutions.

The money from the latest funding would be used to market its technology.

‘‘Not all the solutions lie with one or two technologies. We’ve got to think about new technologies.’’

Jasonwargent