Provivi’s Multi-Format Pheromone Platform for Fall Armyworm
Bridging Scalability, Sustainability, and IPM
By Thaís Andrade, Ph.D., Provivi Inc.
Agriculture is facing a fundamental challenge: How can we continue to protect crops effectively without harming the ecosystem?
This question becomes particularly urgent when dealing with Fall Armyworm (Spodoptera frugiperda, FAW), one of the most destructive and economically important pests in global agriculture. Originally native to the Americas, FAW has rapidly expanded across Africa and Asia-Pacific since 2016, becoming a major threat to food security. The pest feeds on more than 80 plant species, with corn as its primary host.
Yield losses can range from 15% to more than 50%, depending on infestation levels, crop stage, and hybrid susceptibility. At the same time, the pest’s high reproductive capacity, migratory behavior, and documented resistance to multiple insecticide modes of action, and some Bt traits make long-term management increasingly challenging. The conventional response has largely been reactive: apply insecticides, but FAW larvae quickly move into the corn whorl, where they become more difficult to reach with foliar sprays. Repeated applications can increase production costs and selection pressure for resistance.
This was the starting point for the development of Provivi’s FAW pheromone platform. From killing pests to disrupting their behavior. Pheromones offer a fundamentally different approach to pest management.
Rather than relying on toxicity to kill insects, mating disruption uses the insect’s own communication system to manage their behavior and control their population. Female moths naturally release sex pheromones to attract males. By saturating the crop environment with the appropriate pheromone signal, it becomes difficult for males to locate females and successfully mate. The result is a shift from reactive pest control to proactive population management.
The concept is not new; mating disruption has been used successfully in several high-value crops. However, its application to broad-acre crops has faced barriers: cost, formulation, logistics, application requirements, and scalability.
This was the missing piece. For pheromone technology to become a practical tool for broad-acre agriculture, it could not simply be biologically effective. It also needed to be economically viable and fit the way farmers actually farm.
Provivi’s precision chemistry and catalytic technology helped address one of the key barriers to pheromone adoption: production cost. By making pheromone manufacturing more efficient and reducing material waste, the technology created a more cost-effective foundation for large-scale agricultural applications. This is particularly important when moving pheromone technology from niche, high-value crops into broad-acre agriculture.
Building on this platform, Provivi developed a multi-format pheromone platform for FAW, combining cost-efficient pheromone production with delivery technologies designed around different farming realities. The platform includes three complementary formats:
- Eco Dispensers: controlled-release, biodegradable dispensers designed particularly for smallholder farming systems, providing season-long protection with a single installation.
- Sprayable formulations: compatible with conventional equipment and suitable for large-scale mechanized farming.
- Granular formulations: designed for ground or aerial application, providing another flexible option for broad-acre systems while reducing application frequency.
Together, these technologies make it possible to adapt pheromone-based mating disruption to different farm sizes, application systems, and operational realities.
The innovation is therefore not simply the pheromone itself. It is the combination of biology, precision chemistry, formulation, delivery, and scalability into a platform that can adapt to real-world agricultural systems.
DESIGNING FOR REAL-WORLD AGRICULTURE
Farmers face different operational realities. Smallholders may operate on small or fragmented fields, while large commercial operations may manage thousands of hectares with highly mechanized systems.
The challenge is not simply developing effective technology but ensuring it fits how different farming systems operate. This is why flexibility became a central principle of the FAW platform. In India and Mexico, Eco Dispensers were developed and tested at 25 dispensers per hectare. The dispensers were installed shortly after corn planting and designed to provide sustained pheromone release throughout the crop cycle.
In Brazil, where broad-acre production systems dominate, sprayable and granular formulations were evaluated under commercial-scale conditions. Spray formulations were applied using conventional equipment, while granular formulations provided an alternative delivery method with approximately 40 days of pheromone release in the field.
The objective was clear: make mating disruption operationally compatible with agriculture as it exists today.
FROM LAB INNOVATION TO FIELD VALIDATION
The platform has now been evaluated across different countries, farming systems, and agroecological conditions.
For Eco Dispensers, trials were conducted at six locations in India and twelve locations in Mexico during 2023. The results demonstrated strong and sustained suppression of FAW moth populations. At 25 dispensers per hectare, mean moth trap reduction reached 94% in India and 96% in Mexico, averaged over 90 days. In India, damage reduction reached 19% during the vegetative stage, 26% during the pre-reproductive stage and 50% during the reproductive stage. In Mexico, damage reduction reached 58% during the vegetative stage.
Importantly, Eco Dispenser programs also demonstrated the potential to reduce reliance on conventional insecticides, with one to two fewer insecticide applications compared with conventional grower practice in the evaluated programs.
The results were equally encouraging for the broad-acre formulations. The FAW spray formulation was evaluated in 44 trials in Brazil during the 2021-22 growing season, across fields ranging from 5 to 142 hectares per treatment.
Five applications provided an overall 76% reduction in moth trapping, with approximately 50 days of suppression. Vegetative damage reduction reached 38.3% in trials combining the pheromone technology with Viptera corn, compared with 11.6% in conventional corn.
The granular formulation was evaluated in six Brazilian trials during the 2024-25 season. Applied once at 200 g/ha, it achieved an overall 83% reduction in moth trapping, with approximately 40 days of suppression and 24% reduction in vegetative damage.
Together, these results demonstrate that behavioral control can translate into measurable agronomic benefits under very different production conditions.
REAL INNOVATION: MAKING PHEROMONES SCALABLE
The strongest evidence of innovation, however, goes beyond individual trial results. Technology can perform exceptionally well in a research plot and still fail to become a meaningful agricultural solution if it cannot be manufactured, distributed, and adopted economically.
The commercial evidence is increasingly supporting this transition. In Brazil, Provivi’s FAW technology has been deployed across more than 400,000 hectares between 2021 and 2025, with more than two million doses applied. Commercial data showed approximately 35-50% less chemical use in the evaluated programs and around 5% yield protection associated with season-long control.
These results demonstrate a transition that is critical for agricultural innovation: from experimental technology to commercial practice.
WHAT DOES THIS MEAN FOR FARMERS?
Innovation in crop protection must create value at farm level. For growers, the value proposition of the FAW pheromone platform is built around several benefits.
- First, reducing pest pressure and crop damage can help protect productive potential.
- Second, reducing the number of conventional insecticide applications can create opportunities to lower input costs and optimize spray programs.
- Third, mating disruption provides a species-specific mode of action, offering a valuable tool for resistance management and integrated pest management.
- Fourth, the different delivery formats allow growers and agronomists to select the technology that best fits their production system.
- Finally, biodegradable delivery systems can reduce environmental persistence compared with conventional plastic dispensers, while behavioral control can minimize non-target effects from broad-spectrum insecticide use.
The goal is not to eliminate insecticides from agriculture. It is to give farmers more effective tools for IPM programs, reducing reliance on conventional chemistry while maintaining productivity, farm profitability, environmental sustainability and long-term economic viability.
SUSTAINABILITY BY DESIGN
The sustainability dimension of the platform is closely connected to its biological mechanism.
Mating disruption targets the communication and reproductive behavior of a specific pest rather than relying on broad-spectrum toxicity. This creates an opportunity to reduce selection pressure associated with repeated insecticide exposure and to support more diverse pest management programs. The biodegradable matrix used in Eco Dispensers and granules also addresses an important practical concern associated with some traditional pheromone delivery systems: environmental persistence and post-use material management.
In this sense, sustainability is not an additional feature added after the technology was developed. It is embedded in the way the technology works.
A PLATFORM, NOT A SINGLE PRODUCT
Perhaps the most important lesson from the FAW program is that there is no single definition of scalability in agriculture. Scalability means:
- Biological efficacy at the field level.
- Formulations that can be produced economically.
- Methods that fit existing farm equipment and practices.
- Solutions that can work across different farm sizes and geographies.
- Creating enough value for growers to adopt the technology commercially.
The multi-format approach addresses these dimensions simultaneously. Eco Dispensers open opportunities for smallholder systems where a single intervention can provide season-long protection. Sprayables provide flexibility for large, mechanized farms using existing equipment. Granules provide another scalable delivery route, including the potential for ground and aerial application.
Together, they create a platform capable of adapting the technology to the farmer, not forcing the farmer to adapt to the technology. ployed across more than 400,000 hectares between 2021 and 2025, with more than two million doses applied. Commercial data showed approximately 35-50% less chemical use in the evaluated programs and around 5% yield protection associated with season-long control.
LOOKING AHEAD
The Fall Armyworm challenge will not be solved by a single technology. Its biology, mobility, resistance potential and global distribution require integrated approaches combining genetics, biologicals, chemistry, agronomy and precision technologies. Pheromones can become an important component of that future.
Evidence from India, Mexico and Brazil shows that behavioral pest management can deliver strong population suppression, measurable reductions in crop damage and opportunities to reduce insecticide use. Commercial deployment shows the technology can move beyond the experimental stage into real agricultural systems.
For us at Provivi, this represents more than the development of a new pest control product. It represents a different way of thinking about crop protection:
- From reaction to prevention;
- From broad-spectrum control to precision behavior;
- From niche pheromone applications to scalable platforms;
- And from protecting crops today to building more resilient agriculture for tomorrow.
The future of sustainable crop protection will depend on innovations combining biological effectiveness with economic and operational reality. Our FAW multi-format pheromone platform is one step toward that future, bringing together scalability, sustainability and IPM to give farmers a new way to manage one of agriculture’s most challenging pests. By integrating biological tools into farming systems, the platform can support targeted, resilient and sustainable crop protection.
BioAg World Digest | Summer 2026
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