Professor Liu Tong's team at the School of Plant Protection, Hainan University, has used tropical agricultural waste to produce cassava spore powder, achieving from laboratory optimization to large-scale production and application. The research has made important progress in solid fermentation of Xylella spp. On April 6, Liu Tong's team published an article entitled "Rapid mass production of cassava peel biopesticide Xylella spp. T069 using a newly established solid fermentation bioreactor system" in the Journal of Environmental Management.

Xylaria is one of the most widely used biocides in agricultural production, accounting for more than 60% of registered biocides worldwide, however, the raw materials, cost and methods of production limit its being promoted and applied on a large scale. There are many agricultural wastes that can be used as solid fermentation materials in the agricultural production process, which are usually discarded freely, causing great waste of resources and environmental pollution.

In this study, cassava peel residue was selected from five tropical agricultural wastes (coconut shell, banana pseudostem, cassava peel, sugarcane bagasse, pineapple peel) as fermentation substrate, and the fermentation conditions were optimized by single-factor and response surface design, so that the fermentation of Mycobacterium avium was completed in only 3 days under laboratory conditions, and the spore concentration reached 9.31×109 spores/g.

In order to expand the scale of fermentation, the team researched and designed a bioreactor with ventilation and stirring system, and implemented a low-cost, large-scale, and highly automated way to produce cassava spore powder in a factory, converting cassava peel residue into cassava biopesticide for the first time, providing a new solution idea for recycling tropical agricultural resources and contributing to the development of tropical efficient agriculture.

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