São Paulo company named among the most innovative worldwide

Fast Company magazine names Bug Agentes Biológicos, funded by FAPESP, as one of the world’s 50 most innovative companies on a list headed by Apple, Facebook and Google.

By Elton Alisson

Agência FAPESP – A company located in Piracicaba, São Paulo, is among the 50 most innovative companies in the world, according to a ranking released by the U.S. technology magazine Fast Company.
The company is Bug Agentes Biológicos, a start-up founded by graduate students at Universidade de São Paulo’s Luiz de Queiroz Agriculture School (USP-ESALQ) and funded by FAPESP’s Innovative Resarch in Small Companies (PIPE).

The U.S. magazine named the biological control company the 33rd most innovative worldwide in a list headed by tech giants such as Apple, Facebook and Google. Bug topped the list among Brazilian companies, ahead of Petrobras and Embraer.

Fast Company highlighted Bug’s mass production of wasps to combat larvae and beetles that impact plantations of sugarcane and soybean, two of the largest and most lucrative agricultural crops in Brazil. In 2011, the company began to perfect the way it releases the wasps it produces in sugarcane plantations in the same manner that insecticides are applied to fields from crop-dusting planes.

“Brazil is the third largest agricultural exporter in the world (behind the United States and the European Union) and recently surpassed the United States as the largest consumer of pesticides. Bug has the only alternative to insecticides approved by the ministries of Agriculture, Environment and Health,” affirms the magazine.

Bug develops solutions based on one of the oldest methods used by humanity to control agricultural plagues – the mass production of insects programmed to reach and control their natural prey or hosts in the field, avoiding infestations and damage to crops.

The company is outstanding in the biological control sector because it produces specific parasitoids to control the eggs of pests, an approach that is not usually represented by the insects produced at the other, largely foreign companies in this sector.

“Generally, the other biological control companies produce parasitoids that control insects such as caterpillars that have hatched and are attacking plants and that will only be controlled from that point on. We produce parasitoids that control the eggs of the caterpillar or beetles, impeding them from even being born and causing crop losses,” comments Alexandre de Sene Pinto, a founding partner in the company, in an interview with Agência FAPESP.

The company began its activities producing Cotesia flavipes microwasps – a parasite of the Diatraea saccharalis caterpillar, known as the sugarcane borer – and Trichogramma galloi, which are parasitoids of the eggs of the same pest.

According to Sene Pinto, the technique has been used to control sugarcane borers in Brazil since the 1970s in one of the world’s largest biological control programs. Because Cotesia flavipes was not effective in certain crop-growing areas in recent years, insecticides were used in these areas.

“This had never occurred in sugarcane growing, which has traditionally always utilized biological controls and gave little space to agrotoxins. But suddenly, insecticides began to gain space,” he said.
To slow the advance of chemical products in sugarcane growing, Bug began to produce and utilize Trichogramma galloi wasps, which had not been used before for crops.

Today, according to Sene Pinto, the sugarcane planting area in Brazil in which insects are used for pest control has increased exponentially, reaching 500,000 hectares. “It is the only biological control program that is moving toward being one of the largest worldwide,” he said.

Exports

In addition to producing insects for controlling sugarcane pests, the company has begun to produce Telenomus podisi and Trissolcus basalis wasps, parasites of the eggs of a beetle that attacks soybean. Brazil is the world’s largest producer of soybean, with a larger planted area than that of sugarcane.

These wasps had been produced in small quantities since 1980 by the Brazilian Agriculture and Livestock Corporation (Embrapa). Bug began to raise the insects on a larger scale and make them available to farmers. “The small quantity that we produced in the beginning was not enough to meet demand,” explains Sene Pinto.

According to the researcher, the research group that he coordinates at the company has improved the insect release technology developed by Bug over the years.

The group studies, among other issues, the effects of the microclimate and microenvironment on the efficiency of parasitoids, the quantity of insects per release, the radius of dispersion, the permanence of control organisms in the field, their associations with other organisms and different forms of release.

In addition to selling to Brazil, the company exports insects to Europe and the United States, where it entered the market by selling eggs sterilized with ultraviolet light (UV) to produce an inert strain for raising Trichogramma.

“Today, Bug has some investors, such as the Brazilian Development Bank through the Criatec Fundo, and has transformed from a limited-liability corporation to a joint-stock company,” comments Sene Pinto.

For more information on the company: www.bugbrasil.com.br