- Dr Apostolos Papadopoulos, a crop and soil scientist with a wealth of expertise and experience in sustainable crop production has met with Bill Gates and Rishi Sunak at Imperial College London during a launch of a £4B fund “Cleantech for UK”
Crop Intellect is an R&D company based at Lincoln University developing disruptive technologies to increase crop production sustainably. In the last six years R-Leaf® technology has been developed and tested as a unique solution to enable farmers reduce their synthetic nitrogen inputs. R-Leaf is based on photocatalysis, capturing air pollution, and turning it into nitrogen fertiliser for plants.
The technology has won several local and global awards including the Lincolnshire Technology and Innovation awards under “Tech for Good”, TESCO Agri T-Jam award for innovation, In-VIVO and others, and has been supported financially by Climate-KIC, InnovateUK, Lincolnshire Council, the University of Lincoln and the European Innovation Council.
R-Leaf has been prepared in a simple to use formulation that farmers simply add to the spraying tank. When on the plant foliage, it works by using daylight to enable breakdown of nitrous oxides to nitrate that plants use as feed. This is the first technology that enables production of green nitrogen while reducing air pollution which is used as substrate.
R-Leaf is a solution that TESCO is currently trialling as part of the largest effort in the UK to reduce nitrogen fertiliser usage in farming. Synthetic nitrogen is a major culprit for producing greenhouse gas emissions and in particular nitrous oxide (265 times worse than CO2) contributing significantly to climate change.
Crop Intellect has recently received substantial funding from Breakthrough Energy (Bill Gates fund) and InnovateUK (through the EIC Accelerator) to develop R-Leaf into a global solution where it will be tested on new crops than those major UK ones and test the scale-up ability to serve a global market.
Dr Papadopoulos added “although we are working globally, it is great to be based in Lincolnshire, surrounded by an open-minded farming community and many distributors and manufacturers serving farmers. R-Leaf will enable farmers to reduce nitrogen fertiliser, increase farm profitability and prolong soil health to retain crop productivity”.
Whilst the technology supplies nitrogen to the crop daily, it also removes air pollution associated with premature deaths reaching 26,000 yearly in the UK alone. The potential of R-Leaf to contribute towards reducing climate change has been validated at 5.4 tones of CO2 equivalent per hectare when used at a total of 2lt/ha.
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