Speaker
Description
Dep. Of Agriculture and Forest Sciences (DAFNE), University of Tuscia, Via S. Camillo de Lellis snc 0100 Viterbo (I)
Nanotechnologies applied to agriculture represent a recent, innovative, and promising scientific approach able to satisfy the EU request in term of sustainability for different sectors. In the meantime, the European Green Deal respect to the reduction of waste as well as of agrochemicals request strong and green input strategies able to reach ambitious results within 2030. Circular economy concept represents a new and green alternative to deal with the challenges that the agricultural products instead a cost can become a resource. The traditional agriculture system, chemical-based, is going to miss these challenges and nanotechnology can be the answer to the failure of conventional methods by ensuring plant protection and food security in a sustainable way. Among the huge application of nanomaterials usable in crop protection, recent promising results were obtained studying the properties of Cellulose Nanocrystals (CNCs). CNCs can be obtained from agro-food lignocellulosic biomasses. All these approaches can be considered inside the Precision Agriculture ’tank’ that, during the next years, will offer a great support to improve the ratio between agricultural output (food) and agricultural input (land, energy, water, agrochemicals, fertilizers, etc.). Recent results highlighted the possibility of using cropping wastes (pruning residues, shells, stem, etc.) to synthetize novel lignocellulosic nanocarriers, such as cellulose nanocrystals and lignin nanoparticles. Here, a selection of the aro-forestry chains has been described for their valorization, developing circular control strategies against crops pests, such as bacterial and fungal plant pathogens.
