Bees and flowering plants have a long-standing and remarkable co-evolutionary history. Flowers and bees evolved traits that enable pollination, a process that is as important to plants as it is for pollinating insects. Bee–flower interactions rely on senses such as vision, olfaction, humidity sensing, and touch. Recently, another sensory channel has been added to the list, with the detection of a weak electrostatic field that arises between a flower and a bee.
Land plants first appeared 1.6 billion years ago, when bacteria had already been around for 2 billion years or so. For eternities, plants and pathogens (bacteria, viruses, and fungi) have been doing their ecological dance, with plants evolving to limit diseases and their impact on natural plant communities and bacteria evolving new ways to get around plants’ defenses. A balance typically is reached that maintains itself until novel diseases are introduced from other regions, usually because of human activity. An infamous example of that is chestnut blight, a fungus that decimated American chestnut trees, a keystone species in eastern U.S. forests. The fungus was inadvertently introduced by the importation of Japanese chestnut trees in the early 1900s. Then there is what is currently occurring in southern Italy, where the Xylella fastidiosa bacteria, imported with asymptomatic plants from Costa Rica, has killed millions of olive trees in Puglia.
The agriculture market has always been challenging, and maybe particularly so now, with pressures from declining market prices, the availability and cost of labor, new regulations, water restrictions, etc. Crop input prices are on the rise and regulations are restricting what growers can do going forward. Bottom line: Growers must find new ways to be successful.
Technology in agriculture, like in most parts of our lives, has changed how we do things and, maybe more importantly, enabled us to measure what we had only presumed or speculated about in the past. Back in 2008, Andaman Ag began introducing biological products to the market. It wasn’t the most receptive audience at that time. But while working overseas, I witnessed the benefits of biological products firsthand. One of the key takeaways was their ability to improve growers’ Return on Investment, or ROI, over time.
Plant metabolism basically can be divided into primary metabolism, which encompasses reactions and pathways vital for survival, and secondary metabolism, which fulfills a multitude of important functions for growth and development, including the interaction of the plant with environmental stresses.
The more we learn about fungi, the more we understand what an important role they perform in our ag work and the potential they have to deliver more significant positive impacts to the planet, including the agricultural industry.
People ask me how I define regenerative farming and I have one simple answer: it’s all about sequestering more carbon in our soils. Soil is the largest carbon store on Earth—holding more carbon than all plants and our atmosphere put together. And contrary to what was previously believed, it now appears that a considerable amount of this carbon—more than 50%—is introduced to the soil via the remains of dead microorganisms.
Plants and fungi struck a deal way back when. More than 400 million years ago, plants began trading sugar (carbon) made from sunlight for some of the soil nutrients gathered by mycorrhizal fungi. Nearly 90% of all land plants are now part of this arrangement, so scientists have estimated that the amounts of carbon flowing through underground fungi must be significant. However, they didn’t realize how much carbon was in the system until now.
Plant phenols, which are a type of secondary metabolite found in plants, can play a role in mitigating heat stress. Heat stress and plants can occur when temperatures rise above the optimal range for their growth and development, leading to various physiological and biochemical changes.
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The definition of weakness: the state or quality of being weak; lack of strength, firmness, vigor, or the like; feebleness. I see weakness as a vulnerability or as something that can be exploited. The “weakness” in agriculture is the constant mining of our soils without doing anything to offset the damage being done. The results are all too common – increased disease and insect pressure, decreasing crop yield and reduced quality, erosion, compaction, nutrient imbalance, pollution, acidification, water holding loss or logging, dwindling soil diversity, and increased salinity are affecting soil across the globe. Yet, we continue along this path without clear considerations of the medium- and long-term consequences. There may even be a point where the cost to revitalize soils becomes prohibitive given the level of damage. This is a major weakness in agriculture and demands that we start to change our approach.