Dogs Are A Grower's Best Friend

If you’ve ever seen a drug-sniffing dog in action, you know how good their noses are. Dogs are used to track people, diagnose illnesses, and find drugs, bombs, truffles, and cadavers.

Additionally, recent research shows that dogs can sniff out crop diseases, too!

Trained dogs can detect diseases that aren’t immediately visible to growers, such as ones that affect plants’ roots.

These studies show that dogs are almost flawless at detecting brown root rot and club root.

Dogs can also discover these diseases early on, so that growers have a chance to correct and control the problem before it gets out of hand. Researchers say that dogs are better at early disease detection than any technology we have created so far. Using dogs to detect diseases is much quicker than sending samples to a lab, while still being just as accurate. You can’t outdo mother nature!

Dogs have an especially easy time sniffing out diseases in greenhouses because there are fewer distracting scents than there are outside, and the controlled weather of indoor operations minimizes complicating elements such as wind and rain.

Employing the use of these expert-detectors could be greatly beneficial to growers who want to catch otherwise imperceptible diseases early on.

The USDA is a big funder of detector dog programs. They adopt dogs from shelters, train them to sniff out diseases, partner them with a handler, and put them to work

The findings of these recent studies prove that the agricultural industry is always moving forward in unexpected ways. Using canines to detect greenhouse diseases is a way to expand our capabilities as growers and envision what the future of indoor agriculture could look like!

Want to keep moving forward alongside the industry? Contact our expert growers and CEA engineers and technicians to explore the possibilities of indoor growing.