The plant pathogen Xylella fastidiosa (Xf) is the causative agent of Pierces’ disease in grapevines and diseases in coffee plants, olive and peach trees. It is known that Xf forms a biofilm; however it is not clear how this is linked to the disease progression in the plant. Therefore it is quite difficult to develop treatment methods and the industry focus has been on prevention. The goal of our project is to develop insight into the mechanism of biofilm formation that may lead to treatments. We consider experiments performed in microfluidic chambers and batch culture systems. The latter provides initial data to use to address parameter fitting and sensitivity analysis. We find that one promising line of research is to use specific ions to alter the biofilm and bacterial kinetics.