Award

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) seeks to address concerns about foodborne illness outbreaks linked to untreated open source irrigation water via a proposed revision to the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) Produce Safety Rule. The rule change addresses the threat to public health from the foodborne illness outbreaks that continue to occur with high frequency in certain produce commodities. It is widely believed that the root cause of the outbreaks is the proximity of animal feed lots to open source irrigation supplies, necessitating the sanitization of irrigation water to ensure delivery of pathogen-free water to crops. Growers, however, currently lack viable mitigation tools to comply with the impending regulatory change. The primary solution today is to use furrow growing to avoid contact between water and plant leaves during irrigation and/or to apply spray irrigation only when harvest is greater than 3 weeks away. Current, but infrequently employed, sanitization solutions include treating irrigation water with environmentally damaging chemicals like chlorine or implementing cost prohibitive technological solutions. En Solución proposes a cost-effective, easily implemented, chemical and residual free irrigation water treatment system that utilizes ozone nanobubbles to neutralize pathogens. Ozone, in both its gaseous and aqueous phases, is generally recognized as safe by the FDA and has been shown to effectively reduce microbial contamination in waste water; however, operational inefficiency and environmental safety concerns have precluded widespread adoption of aqueous ozone by the agriculture industry. Unlike traditional macro-sized bubbles from existing technologies, the nanobubbles produced by En Solución’s technology have the remarkable ability to remain stable in high concentrations for months at a time and allow for high gas infusion rates and retention times. Environmental safety is greatly improved as the ozone does not outgas to the environment, but rather, reverts back to oxygen while in the solution. En Solución will deliver a fully automated system that removes the requirement for specialized workforces necessary to deliver today’s irrigation sanitization solutions. The technology developed by En Solución also has implications on plant productivity and soil health, as hyper-oxygenated water (a byproduct of the decay of ozone nanobubbles in the irrigation water) has been demonstrated to stimulate plant and root growth. During the Phase I project, En Solución will develop a field-scale automated ozone nanobubble irrigation system and fully validate the technology via pilot implementation at an operating farm and comprehensive third party microbial testing.