Overview #

The fastest way to get rid of crop residue is to burn them. These residues - stub­ble upon burn­ing, re­sult in var­i­ous dele­te­ri­ous ef­fects. With our so­lu­tion we aim to bring an al­ter­na­tive, sus­tain­able method for stub­ble man­age­ment that works through en­gi­neered bac­te­ria which pro­duce an ar­ray of en­zymes in­volved in de­grad­ing the stub­ble in-situ or in biore­ac­tors.

This prod­uct will be avail­able di­rectly to farm­ers or could be in­tro­duced through var­i­ous gov­ern­ment schemes for stub­ble man­age­ment. The fi­nal bac­te­r­ial mix­ture can be sold as dry mixes that farm­ers can ac­ti­vate on-site us­ing low-cost cul­tur­ing meth­ods be­fore spray­ing it onto the field. We in­tend to in­clude a kill switch for safety pur­poses that will in­ac­ti­vate the bac­te­ria as soon as the de­com­po­si­tion is done.We aim to make our prod­uct eco­nom­i­cal, sus­tain­able and eas­ily avail­able so that it is prac­ti­cal for farm­ers to choose it over burn­ing. Furthermore, we com­bine stub­ble degra­da­tion with bio­plas­tic gen­er­a­tion. This gives a means of al­ter­nate in­come for the farm­ers as well as, if prac­ticed on a large scale through in­dus­tries, gives the op­por­tu­nity for em­ploy­ment and en­tre­pre­neur­ship across the coun­try.

Lets know Stubble a bit more #

The cell wall of stub­ble is very re­cal­ci­trant which makes it hard to de­com­pose. It con­sists of cel­lu­lose, hemi­cel­lu­lose, lignin, and pectin. November to April and May to September are the two grow­ing sea­sons. Rice is typ­i­cally sown in May while wheat is typ­i­cally shown in November. After har­vest­ing their rice crop, many farm­ers will sim­ply burn the re­main­ing plant ma­te­r­ial to quickly pre­pare their fields for the wheat crop. Stand­ing stub­ble can burn quickly, reach­ing tem­per­a­tures of 300°C, but this is a very tran­sient process. In com­par­i­son to lower tem­per­a­tures, very large stub­ble loads can reach 600°C, re­mov­ing more soil or­ganic car­bon.

The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODISR) on NASA’s Aqua satel­lite passed over Punjab in India on October 30, 2014 and cap­tured this im­age of the burn­ing of paddy stub­ble from farm­ers’ fields for use in the forth­com­ing wheat crop.

Challenges of Stubble Burning #

The ben­e­fits of stub­ble re­ten­tion are nu­mer­ous, but man­ag­ing the chal­lenges calls for an in­te­grated “systems” ap­proach. The farm­ing sys­tem as a whole must be taken into ac­count, in­clud­ing agron­omy, graz­ing man­age­ment, ma­chin­ery setup, and guid­ance sys­tems. It must also be noted that our pro­ject fo­cuses not only on stub­ble degra­da­tion but also the for­ma­tion of bio­plas­tic out of it.

• Lack of com­mu­nity aware­ness

  • We have con­ducted sur­veys in and around our cam­pus among all com­mu­ni­ties where 72% peo­ple are aware of stub­ble burn­ing, and 45% peo­ple suf­fer­ing from acute breath­ing prob­lems are not aware of al­ter­na­tive to stub­ble burn­ing

• Impact on en­vi­ron­ment

  • It causes loss in soil fer­til­ity, and soil mi­cro­biome. The burn­ing also re­sults in bio­di­ver­sity loss.
  • It causes se­vere air pol­lu­tion, smog and also leads to ac­ci­den­tal fire events

Challenges of Stubble bio-de­com­po­si­tion #

Efforts have been made to bi­o­log­i­cally de­com­pose stub­ble us­ing mi­cro­bial sources. These so­lu­tions pro­vide an ap­proach for a sus­tain­able stub­ble man­age­ment.

• These mi­crobes are en­gi­neered to ex­ude en­zymes specif­i­cally to de­grade the cell wall com­po­nents of the stub­ble. However, many such prod­ucts use mul­ti­ple mi­cro­bial strains which might re­sult in al­ter­ing the soil mi­cro­biome and hor­i­zon­tal gene trans­fer to other mi­crobes. Hence, biosafety is a con­cern.
• Also, these strains might not be vi­able to main­tain the en­zyme ki­net­ics in dif­fer­ent cli­mate con­di­tions.

Despite the ex­is­tence of al­ter­na­tive stub­ble burn­ing so­lu­tions, the ex­trac­tion of vanillin from de­graded straw to pro­duce bio­plas­tic hints at prospec­tive in­dus­trial av­enues of our prod­uct.

Plastic pol­lu­tion has been a ma­jor con­cern to en­vi­ron­men­tal haz­ards. It is nec­es­sary to have al­ter­na­tives to chem­i­cal plas­tics that are detri­men­tal to the en­vi­ron­ment. Our al­ter­na­tive to pro­duce bio­plas­tic from de­graded straw opens en­tre­pre­neur­ship op­por­tu­ni­ties in the mar­ket.

We have an in­no­v­a­tive dual so­lu­tion

• We have en­gi­neered a sin­gle bac­te­r­ial strain ,Bacillus sub­til­lis 168 with mul­ti­ple cell wall de­grad­ing en­zymes en­hanced with se­cret­ing abil­ity. Hence, the in­cor­po­ra­tion of a sin­gle kill switch takes care of the biosafety as well as soil mi­cro­biome sta­tus.
• We have de­signed a pro­to­col to form bio­plas­tic from the de­graded straw.

Commercialization of Bioplastic #

The de­tailed cost analy­sis of our prod­uct shows the abil­ity of our bio­plas­tic as a more eco­nom­i­cal al­ter­na­tive to other avail­able bio­plas­tics. We are in the process of in­volv­ing in­dus­trial sources to learn about the pro­duc­tion of straw de­rived bio­plas­tic at a larger scale.Dis­cus­sion with pol­i­cy­holder is must for our prod­uct to be re­leased in the mar­ket.

Timeline #