Flashback to San Francisco, October 2017, I’m on the stage for the Terra Rabobank and Rocketspace Cohort II kickoff in front of about 200 Agriculture and Food stakeholders.
These 10 minutes, on-stage presentations are not my favorite, but this time it is about a pilot and a business opportunity for Vibe with a big corporation in the grain supply chain. The presentation went OK, the same with the first questions and answers session.
“I have a question.” Someone at the last row raised his hand. “Can you test for Mycotoxin?”. I had heard this name before and even read about it, a harmful toxin for humans and animals, produced by a fungus, and it can cause disease and death, but now on the stage, I couldn’t even pronounce the name when I replied. “I don’t know, we need to test it first, but if it is visible, we can.” The comment “aha,” followed by “interesting” made a visible warmth of embarrassment spread across my face.
Fast forward to a year later, I’m visiting a government facility in a remote area of Canada with heavy snow at 7F (-13c). I’m running the first few samples with an expert researcher who invited us to demonstrate the detection of DON in wheat, also known as Mycotoxin. It was an excellent visit. We had so many samples to test, the opportunity to work very closely with an expert in her field and validate our results’ accuracy.
Six months later, the USDA /ARS (United States Department of Agriculture, Research Service) Issued a sole vendor tender for the Vibe QM3i Grain analyzer after a few weeks of work with a distinguished professor and researcher. She rented the instrument and ran several thousand samples to detect DON in wheat and the validation of results.
The quotes below are from two research papers, part of the US Wheat and Barley Scab Initiative. One compared Vibe to the traditional laboratory results. The second compared Vibe and several Instruments to human inspection results.
"... Results suggest that grain imaging data can come close to reproducing the accuracy of DON predictions generated.”
“... The Vibe QM3 data had a stronger positive correlation with manual FDK values than other phenotypic platforms.
Ron Hadar, Please feel free to contact me directly at ron.hadar@vibeia.com
Happy 2021 New Year