Shifting Perspectives: How Nanotech is Gaining Ground in Farming

Dr. Jason White from the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station explains how nano-scale materials, once seen as potential hazards, are gaining popularity and are now used to boost plant health, increase crop yields, and build climate resilience.  He discusses global collaborations, regulatory landscapes, and promising work using nano-nutrients to prepare crops for future stress. Learn how precision delivery through nanotech could reshape sustainable farming. 

Transcript

Speaker 1:

AgTech360 discusses breakthrough technologies that are impacting growers, businesses, and consumers. Hear from industry and academic experts about what's on the horizon.

Adrian Percy:

Welcome back to AgTech360 as we continue our deep dive into nanotechnology in agriculture. Earlier this month, we heard from Dr. Greer at NC State. Today I'm excited to be joined by Dr. Jason White from the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station. Jason is a leading voice in the field with decades of experience guiding research and global collaborations aimed at harnessing nanotech to improve farming and food systems.

Jason, I'm really looking forward to exploring this topic with you. Thanks so much for being on the pod.

Dr. Jason White:

Well, thanks for an invitation. Looking forward to it.

Adrian Percy:

What I'd like to do is explore a little bit of nanotech first, because some of the listeners may be somewhat unfamiliar with it. Could you give us a nanotech 101, and just explain what nanotechnology is and how broadly it's been applied in the field of agriculture?

Dr. Jason White:

Sure, sure. I think the way to think about this in its simplest sense for nanotechnology is that when something is at the nano scale, it behaves differently, it has different properties. If you have regular copper oxide, it behaves certain ways. But if you have copper oxide that is in the nano scale, it actually has different physical, chemical, and biological properties.

What nanotechnology is really doing is taking advantage of the fact that, when these materials are small, generally, they're much more active and reactive. That can be useful in communications, like our cellphones, in medicine, in health, and a variety of other places. What we've come to learn is that it actually can be really, really useful in agriculture.

The idea here ... Well, the fundamental problem with a lot of conventional agriculture is that it's extremely inefficient. What we know about nanotechnology is that when you work at that nano scale, you can be much more precise about what you're doing. That's how this started. Can we use nanotechnology just to be more precise? In terms of how we deliver nitrogen, or phosphorus, or atrazine, or any of a range of other things that a farmer's going to be putting in their soil and on their plants.

Adrian Percy:

Great. Nanotechnology, like any new technology, there are people that are worried or people who are excited about it, sometimes not without basis for either. What are some of the things that you hear in terms of concerns or optimism about the use of nanotech?

Dr. Jason White:

Yeah. I think that's an excellent point, particularly with agriculture because we don't want to be putting anything on or in our food that's going to create a problem. It's our food. We're ingesting it, our kids are ingesting it. A lot of the concerns that I think I hear most frequently when I'm talking to the lay public have to do with we're putting these strange, small materials in our food. "We don't want that, it's going to cause some sort of toxicity or create some sort of hazard."

I think there are instances of us doing that in the past. DVT was a pesticide that had some really useful insecticidal properties, but it was used far too frequently in far too many applications and it created all sorts of problems. I think that's a legitimate concern that people have.

In terms of the flip side of that, you can think about the fact that we have moving pretty quickly towards 10 billion people on this planet. Conventional agriculture, the way we grow food now which is a direct result of the green revolution, is not sustainable and it will not be able to produce enough food to feed that number of people on the planet. We need to really transform how we grow, distribute, and store food. Nanotechnology, if done appropriately, can actually be a really significant part of that.

Adrian Percy:

Great. Before we get into your current research, let's just talk about your background because I know you've been working in this field for quite a long time. How long is it? How did you get into working in nanotechnology? How has your perception of the technology evolved over time?

Dr. Jason White:

Yeah, it's an interesting story. I was hired here as a staff scientist in 1997, here being the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station. My initial research project was actually based on soil remediation of old pesticides and PCBs because my PhD is in environmental toxicology. Basically, the fate and effects of toxic materials in the environment. Since I was in an ag experiment station, it was in agricultural environments.

On about 2005, 2006, I started reading about engineered nano materials making it into consumer products. Things like textiles, putting nano scale silver into socks and shirts so that you could kill the bacteria that would cause smells. Or into agrochemical formulations. I started reading that and I just thought that was the most terrible idea I've ever heard. I literally went back to the story of DVT, where we found a material that had a core beneficial use and we just went nuts, and we started using it in many, many places we never should have been using it. I just saw this engineered nano materials as that same trend. If you want to flash-forward, it's the PFAS story.

I actually set up a research program looking at the toxicity of nano materials, the field that was developing then was called nano toxicology. But basically, what were all of the potential negative impacts that engineered nano materials could have in agriculture and food? I submitted some grants, got some funding, got some post docs and we really set up this program trying to look at the toxicity of engineered nano materials, because that's what my training was in. I published my first paper in 2009 on that topic. Between I'd say 2009 and maybe 2015, we probably published 40 or 45 papers just looking at how these materials could negatively impact agricultural systems.

Basically, the short story is that what we discovered was that, under certain circumstances, not only were some of these nano materials not toxic, but they actually could convey significant benefit to a plant. They could increase growth, vegetative growth. They could increase yield. They could increase photosynthetic output. Given what we were starting to see with global food insecurity and the climate change change making agriculture more difficult, we flipped the coin, turned it on its head and started thinking about, "Well, how can we use these nano materials for something really positive? How could we use them to address this growing food insecurity crisis?"

It's not that we gave up the nano toxicology part. In fact, it's a core part of everything we do because if we can't use a nano material to safely increase food production, then we shouldn't be doing it. That's how that turned. Now we've got these parallel lines of investigation running that aren't really parallel, they're intermingled all along.

Adrian Percy:

One of the things that you bring to my mind is, from a regulatory perspective, how these products are being regulated. Because I'm assuming that, as the science has evolved, as per usual, the regulations will evolve following the science. Where are we in terms of regulation right now?

Dr. Jason White:

Yeah, that's a complex question, not surprisingly. I guess maybe the first thing to think about is where's the US relative to other countries. You have countries like China, and India, and Pakistan, where these materials, agrochemical formulations that include nanotechnology, are in significant use. Then you have instances in the US where there is some penetration of the market. There are some nano scale agrochemicals out there. It's probably one or two percent of the market share if you looked at it, but it's handled on a case-by-case basis by EPA. Then you have places like the EU, where there's still significantly more skepticism. That's the broad picture.

In the US, there's two ways to consider it. Nanotechnology in food is going to be regulated by EPA, if you're talking about pesticides, fertilizers, and stimulants. But if you're talking about nanotechnology in pharmaceuticals, that's regulated by the FDA. One of the things that we know is that nano medicine, for example nanotechnology in pharmaceuticals, is a huge area of research, development, and actual use right now. There's a lot of us actually who view nano medicine as a template for what we're doing in agriculture. Because when you use nanotechnology in medicine, what you're trying to do is use nanotechnology to more precisely deliver a cargo, pharmaceutical, in a complex system to a very specific place, like a cancer cell in somebody's lungs, or something like that.

A lot of us looked at that and looked at what we're doing in agriculture, and looked at it as a similar problem. What we're trying to do in agriculture is more precisely deliver our cargo in a highly complex system. Now, it's not a perfect comparison, but it's a place to start. Given what we knew about being able to safely use nanotechnology, a lot of us have really started moving in this direction.

Speaker 1:

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Adrian Percy:

Jason, you've hinted a couple of times at some of the uses of nanotechnology in agriculture. I'd love to hear in a little bit more detail about either your research or what you've seen others do in terms of using this as some kind of delivery device and the benefits that you're seeing? For instance, towards crop productivity or resilience to climate change, or these types of very important areas of agricultural research.

Dr. Jason White:

Yeah. Our work actually started in disease systems. Farmers have to spray a significant amount of different types of pesticides because you pick a crop and there's 30 pests and pathogens that will attack it. We started working in disease systems. Fungal disease, bacterial diseases, nematode diseases. But what we decided to do was not necessarily use nanotechnology to go after the pest or the pathogen. What we decided to do was to go after plant health because plants are like people. If that plant is not getting sufficient nutrients, then that plant is not going to be able to defend itself against disease.

You and I, it's relatively easy to get the nutrients we need, we just take a multivitamin. But plants can't do that. They're in the soil and the availability of nutrients in soil is very limited. Particularly if you need nutrients in the roots, you can't do foliar applications because all those nutrients stay in the chutes. What we tried to do was to use nanotechnology to enhance plant nutrition. It could be used, nano scale forms of things like copper, and selenium, and boron, and zinc, and iron, magnesium, manganese. All of these micronutrients that plants have trouble getting enough of, could we use those in nano scale form? To be more available, more active.

We published our first paper on that in 2016 and it turns out, it works really, really well. In this case, the nano particle is actually the nutrient itself. It's a nano scale metal oxide, or mesoporous silica, or something like that. We've been doing a lot of work in that space with different crops, and different disease systems, and different nano materials.

Adrian Percy:

You're looking to the future now, and maybe also talking about partnerships. I believe that you've been involved in a lot of national, international partnerships. You mentioned phosphorous. Of course here at NC State, we have our STEP Center that is focused of the sustainability of phosphorous. Where are you seeing these kind of relationships across the world driving things forward? Have you seen interesting collaborative activity that's led to new discoveries, for instance?

Dr. Jason White:

Yeah, absolutely. Maybe the easiest way to see the growth in the field is to look at the number of papers published each year. I created this graph at one point last year and it's an exponential growth curve in terms of the number of papers published in this. Most of the growth is from areas outside of the US. There's certainly robust interest in research right now in the US, but I would say the bulk of my collaborations are overseas. Collaborating with well over a dozen groups in China, four or five groups in India, there's a collaboration with Singapore. We're initiating a number of collaborations with groups in Africa.

What we're seeing is that the areas with the greatest interest in pursuing this research, and everybody does want to pursue it safely and sustainability, but the areas with the greatest interest are the areas that have the most people to feed, the areas that are having the most significant difficulty with food insecurity. Then the other way to think about it is in terms of climate change. Right here in the US, climate change is making agriculture more difficult. But there are certainly areas of the world where the change in climate and everything that goes with that is making food production far, far more difficult.

It's those areas that I think that are being impacted most by those two factors. That more rapidly changing climate than predicted, and just a lot of people to feed. Those are the areas that I think have recognized we need to be doing something completely different with agriculture.

Adrian Percy:

Yeah. From what you've said, it sounds to me like we're at a relatively early stage in the exploitation of this technology in agriculture, but also in other fields like medicine. If you fast-forward 10, 20 years from now, where do you see us being? What do you believe the impact of the technology's likely to be? What things should we be looking out for as we move forward in that direction?

Dr. Jason White:

Yeah. There's a lot of us who are completely convinced that we really need to, as I keep saying, transform the way we do agriculture. Nanotechnology I think will be a significant part of that. It's not the only part, though. There are other ways to increase food production that have nothing to do with nanotechnology. One of the most exciting areas now is seeing the interplay between gene editing and nanotechnology, and how those two techniques can be used to enhance the activity of either one.

Some of the most exciting work we're doing right now is around climate resilience. The fact that you can ... A lot of it's around what we call ROS, or reactive oxygen species homeostasis. When an organism is stressed, including you, and me, and a corn plant, and everything else on the planet, that stress produces reactive oxygen species, oxidated radicals. We have defense systems that deactivate those molecules before they cause damage, but if it's a lot of stress, those systems can't keep up.

What we've discovered, and we've been working with a couple of groups in the UK and China on this, is that you can actually stimulate a small amount of stress in a seed or a seedling. You can do that by an exposure to nano scale iron, or manganese, or copper, or anything else. But at the right dose, that little bit of stress actually serves as a signal. It's a signal that says to the plant, "We need to up-regulate all of our defense pathways. We need to be ready for stress that's happening." But what you're really doing is you're preparing that seed or seedling for a stress that's going to occur later.

What we've shown, we've done this with rice and rice blast, you can treat these seeds with nano scale iron for example is what we did, just a low concentration to up-regulate all these pathways. We've done all the holmic, metabolomic, proteolomic work to monitor the pathways. Then what you see is when you plant that rice seed and then grow it out for its lifecycle, you can expose it to rice blast, you can expose it to high temperature and cold temperature literally months later and those primed seeds, those ones that were stimulated early on, they're much better able to handle the stress so they have much greater resilience. When you think about the stress, those are the stresses of climate change.

We're looking at this as a strategy to really generate some climate resilience that can help not necessarily the 5000-acre corn farm in Iowa, but what about the person who's got a quarter-of-an-acre in Central India or in Malaysia somewhere? Because the materials that do this are nutrients, they're things that the grower has to give to the crop already. It's all just a matter of timing of exposure, and concentration, and the form. You can really control what we call this ROS homeostasis to generate these resilient properties.

Adrian Percy:

Exciting thoughts for the future. I really appreciate you sharing some of your research, but some of your perspectives on this really exciting technology. Thank you, Jason.

Speaker 1:

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