The Spornado Sampler is an innovative, easy-to-use crop disease early alert system that changes everything.

Spornado Sampler is an effective, low-cost tool for growers to better predict crop disease, and take preventative action.

For a crop disease to develop there must be a susceptible host crop, an airborne pathogen, and a favourable environment. Together these three elements are known as the Disease Triangle. When the three conditions of the triangle intersect, fungal crop disease may occur—and can have damaging, costly effects on crops and annual yield.

Predicting the onset of these conditions and resulting crop diseases can be inexact – as much an art as science. Environmental data such as weather conditions and predictive models help, but even for the most seasoned grower it is difficult to accurately anticipate the onset of fungal diseases.

The Spornado Sampler is an innovative, easy-to-use early crop disease alert system that identifies crop disease in the air—long before it’s seen on the crops.

The Canadian invention is a highly sensitive airborne detection tool that identifies fungal disease such as late blight, sclerotinia, fusarium head blight, powdery and downy mildews. It uses targeted DNA testing which detects very low levels of pathogens. The rapid and precise data provides a valuable tool for pesticide management, delivering the information growers need to accurately apply fungicides when and where they’re needed.

The Spornado disease alert system isn’t complicated and costly— it doesn’t require training, teaching or licensing. Spornado Sampler is different: it is an affordable, out-of-the box system that ships within a day or two after it is ordered and is as easy to learn as hammering a stake into the ground. Once in the field, the sampler relies on wind power to trap even microscopic-sized fungal-fragments on specialized filters that easily snap out of the sampler. The grower, their agronomist or crop consultant, simply collects and ships the filter to an approved partner lab. It doesn’t rely on visible identification of spores, the highly sensitive DNA analysis can detect very low levels of fungal pathogens that cause crop disease.

In as little as one day, growers receive an email or text message with clear, actionable information about their possible risks of fungal disease: a new and valuable tool in a complicated, unpredictable line of work.

TESTIMONIAL – Matt Tyhurst, Grower, Twin Creeks Greenhouse (2022)

“For the greenhouse, the value of Spornado is identifying the disease before we can see it. I want to be able to detect and treat it Just imagine in a 100 acre greenhouse, how long it could take to see that, compared to if I could catch an air sample.”