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November 18, 2004 NDSU Sugar Sensor Inventors Seek Financial Partners Two North Dakota State University associate professors are exploring ways to take their invention to the next level – the sugar beet harvest. Suranjan Panigrahi and Vern Hofman, both from the Agricultural and Biosystems Engineering Department, created a sugar sensor. Growers can use it in the field to determine the sugar content in sugar beets almost instantaneously. The associate professors’ next step is to make the sensor smaller so it can be integrated with harvesting equipment. That will allow producers to check sugar content while they’re harvesting. But the inventors need one or more partners to fund their effort. “We have talked to some people already,” Panigrahi said. “It’s a process that takes time.” Possible partners include an entrepreneur, business or sugar processing cooperative, he said. The inventors also are waiting for a patent on the software component of their sugar sensor. The NDSU Research Foundation, which manages the university’s intellectual properties, such as patents and copyrights, received a patent for the sensor’s hardware component earlier this year. Panigrahi expects the software patent will be issued within a couple of months. He said that once it is issued and he and Hofman have funding, modifying the sensor won’t take long. “We have the know-how,” he said. “We know what needs to be done.” Estimating how much the modifications will cost is difficult, he said, but the good news is that the price of technology such as computers has dropped considerably. “Our goal is to make it as cost-effective as possible,” he added. The Sugar Beet Research and Education Board of Minnesota and North Dakota provided partial funding for Panigrahi and Hofman to develop the sensor. They worked on it for about five years. Panigrahi said the idea behind the sensor is to give producers a way to determine the quality of their crops. While the Midwest agricultural industry’s focus has been on increasing yield, the emphasis in the marketplace is on quality, which drives the price producers receive for their product and allows them to be competitive, he said. “Quality is going to be the No. 1 key for farmers,” Panigrahi said. “We are getting yield already.” Under the current sugar content testing procedure, producers haul truckloads of beets to the processing plant. Plant personnel test one or two samples from a truckload. If the samples happen to be lower in sugar content than the rest of the crop, the farmer is out of luck, according to Panigrahi. With the sugar sensor, producers will be able to test as many samples as they want. They also can sort out the parts of the crop with lower sugar content before taking their beets to the processing plant, he said. Alan Dexter, a professor in the NDSU Plant Sciences Department, called the senor the missing link in the sugar beet growing process. He said a sensor already is available for farmers to determine tons of beets per acre, but they still need a way to calculate pounds of sugar per acre since they are paid based on sugar content. Dexter said the sugar sensor also will pinpoint parts of the crop that didn’t produce as much sugar and the areas that did very well, which will help growers decide if they need to apply more fertilizer in some parts of a field, for instance, or if some areas need to be drained because they are too wet. Panigrahi believes the sensor also can be a valuable tool in determining the sugar content of other products, such as grapes and other fruit. He and Hofman are exploring whether other products’ producers might be interested in the sensor. ### Source:
Suranjan Panigrahi, (701) 231-7270, s.panigrahi@ndsu.nodak.edu
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