Entomological Infrastructure
M3 Agriculture Technologies builds the infrastructure to deploy biological pest control at orchard scale, starting with codling moth and expanding across specialty crops.
Codling moth is the key pest of apples and pears across the Pacific Northwest. Decades of organophosphate reliance built resistance and drew regulatory pressure, pushing growers toward alternatives that don't yet exist at scale.
Sterile males released into the field mate with wild females without producing viable offspring. Every generation, more of the population's matings are wasted — suppression compounds across seasons rather than resetting each spray cycle.
The value isn't a single pest. Mass rearing, irradiation, cold-chain handling, aerial release, and field monitoring are a reusable toolkit. Codling moth proves it; each additional pest that responds to the same toolkit extends the same infrastructure to a new market.
High-value specialty crops where fruit quality and packout drive grower economics, and where codling moth is the defining pest problem.
Area-wide SIT is priced per acre, so the platform's economics scale directly with treated area. Navel orangeworm is the shared pest problem across these ~2.2 million acres.
The Okanagan-Kootenay Sterile Insect Release Program has run continuously since 1991 across four regional districts in British Columbia. It reports a 94 percent reduction in wild codling moth populations since inception — proof that area-wide SIT is not a lab result, it's an operating program.
Figure sources
94% reduction, program since 1991 — Okanagan-Kootenay SIR Program (oksir.org)US apple crop ~$2.8B and Washington >$2B — USDA NASS / U.S. Apple Association (2023–2024).US pear crop ~$301M (2024) — USDA NASS Noncitrus Fruits and Nuts Summary.CA tree-nut bearing acreage (almond 1.38M, pistachio ~488K, walnut 370K, 2024) — USDA NASS / ERS.