Syngenta and Vivent Biosignals are working on a new way to help farmers catch crop problems earlier—by listening directly to the plants themselves. While the concept may sound hokey, it is grounded in well-established plant physiology.
Plants don’t have nerves like animals, but they do use electrical signals to move information internally. Every plant cell maintains a small voltage difference across its membrane, driven by the movement of ions like calcium, potassium, and chloride. When a crop faces stress – whether from drought, disease, or nutrient issues – those signals change almost immediately, often well before anything is visible in the field. The challenge has been finding a way to measure and interpret those signals in real time.
Vivent Biosignals, a Swiss agtech company, has developed sensor technology capable of measuring these subtle electrical changes as they happen. By placing small, minimally invasive sensors on plants, the company can capture voltage fluctuations that reflect how a plant is responding to its environment. These signals shift when a plant experiences stress.
On its own, that signal looks noisy and hard to interpret. A plant’s electrical activity changes throughout the day depending on light, temperature, and growth cycles. The key is pattern recognition. By running these signals through machine learning models, researchers can start to identify specific “signatures” linked to different types of stress.
Syngenta’s collaboration with Vivent focuses on translating this data into actionable insights for farmers. In controlled trials, the combined system has demonstrated the ability to detect stress signals well before visible symptoms appear.
A team of scientists, led by Syngenta Fellow Dr Anke Buchholz and Dr Andrzej Kurenda of Vivent Biosignals, recently published results from one such trial. This one involved stink bugs in soybeans and evaluated crop infestation scenarios with the insecticide Verdavis. The model identified distinct spikes in stress signals within the first day of infestation: infested plants with visual damage after 7 days generated significantly more stress signals compared to non-infested controls. Conversely, treated plants generated similar spike patterns as non-infested plants, indicating effective plant protection. The full study is HERE.
There are still challenges. Electrical signals vary by crop type, growth stage, and environment, so models need to be trained carefully for different conditions. And scaling the technology beyond small test plots means figuring out how many sensors are needed to represent a whole field accurately.
But the science is solid: plants are constantly sensing their environment and responding through electrical changes. Now that researchers are finally learning to interpret and use those signals in real time, farmers may be able to do the same in the not so distant future. (Sources: AgTechNavigator, Shoots by Syngenta, AgFunder)
