Award

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) seeks to address concerns about foodborne illness outbreaks linked to irrigation from untreated surface 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 surface water used for irrigation, necessitating the sanitization of the 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 irrigation to avoid contact between water and plant leaves and to prohibit application of overhead irrigation 3 weeks prior to harvest. 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, certain engineering and efficiency challenges have prevented its use in high-volume, high-flow applications like irrigation water treatment. 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. As a result, more ozone is kept in the solution, greatly enhancing the concentration of ozone able to be delivered throughout an irrigation system. 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 II project, En Solución will develop a commercial-scale ozone nanobubble irrigation unit that will easily integrate into existing field irrigation infrastructure to provide continuous sanitization for surface water applied to field crops. The technology will be fully validated via independent university study and demonstrated at full scale in a pilot implementation at an operating farm.