by Deac Jones | Feb 2, 2022 | News
Plants are one of the most successful forms of life on earth, despite their inability to move about. Since they can’t flee inhospitable conditions, they have evolved numerous physical and biochemical coping mechanisms, enabling their own pollination and seed dispersals, combating variations in climatic conditions, deploying herbivore deterrents, creating barriers to pathogen invasions, and mitigating biotic and abiotic stresses.
Primary metabolites are involved in nutrition and the basic essential metabolic processes inside the plant. Secondary plant metabolites (SMs) help the plant adapt to changing conditions. Secondary metabolites may also inhibit the growth of competitor plants (allelopathy). Pigments (such as terpenoid carotenes, phenolics, and flavonoids) color flowers and, together with terpene and phenolic odors, attract pollinators. It makes sense for growers to promote the production of secondary metabolites to naturally make the plant more “bulletproof.”
by Deac Jones | Jan 19, 2022 | News
The DTN Fertilizer Index, a weekly survey of more than 300 retailer prices, showed dry urea averaging $873 per ton in the first week of December 2021. With 920 pounds of nitrogen provided to a crop from each ton of urea, that’s $0.95 per pound of nitrogen. With liquid UAN-32 fertilizer priced at $661 per ton and 640 pounds of nitrogen available from each ton, that’s $1.03 per pound of nitrogen.
These prices don’t seem to have any chance of declining, but there are viable options for reducing synthetic fertilizer costs by incorporating biological products into your crop program. The integration of biological products can deliver a greater ROI by reducing the cost of inputs and increasing quality crop yields.
Today’s biofertilizer market is $1.2 billion to $1.5 billion. Biologicals are projected to have a growth rate that’s two to three times faster than the traditional crop protection market. Bio-controls and bio-stimulants will have global sales of more than $15 billion by 2027!
by Deac Jones | Dec 14, 2021 | News
I’m proud to introduce From the Ground Up, a book comprised of five years of essays, organized by topic or category, about leading-edge agricultural practices. Since 2016, Andaman Ag has been sharing research in twice a month newsletters to educate the...
by Deac Jones | Nov 16, 2021 | News
Many of the biological farming practices that we are just now implementing today were very much a part of the landscape as far back as 12,000 years ago. Climate change at the end of the last glaciation produced thick forest soils. Over thousands of years the soil grew several feet thick depending on the region. Soil erosion began only after the introduction of the plow.
The ancient Greeks and Romans knew that manure spread on fields helped crop production. Early Arabic civilizations collected written knowledge about farming complementing nature. By 1815, England was importing bones from around the world, as bone meal had been recognized as a benefit to agriculture. This included many human bones, from the Empire’s brutal colonial wars. Bird droppings, known by the Spanish name guano, became popular fertilizers in the U.S. in the 1800s. Darwin discovered that worms not only helped make soil, but they also helped move it. Francis Chaboussou, an agronomist at the French National Institute of Agricultural Research, in 1985 wrote “Healthy Crops: A New Agricultural Revolution.” In reviewing numerous studies stretching over nearly 50 years, he demonstrated that the nutrient balance of crops affects their susceptibility to pests and disease, and increases in diseases were tied to heavy nitrogen fertilization.
by Deac Jones | Nov 3, 2021 | News
Mycoremediation, sometimes referred to as fungi remediation or mushroom remediation, uses fungi instead of bacteria to break down waste. Mycoremediation can be an economical and effective strategy to degrade various recalcitrant, persistent and toxic pollutants like polyaromatic hydrocarbons, antibiotics, herbicides, insecticides, antifungal drugs, algal bloom, cyanotoxins, detergents, heavy metals, and plastic.
Fungi consume organic debris that no other organism we know about will, and they create soil. They can be used in filtration systems, and in fact fungi mycelium are being released throughout burn zones in California to trap toxic waste before it reaches our waterways and to accelerate the recovery of the burn areas. Mycelium can help to structurally bind together particles, which slows runoff and helps to keep soil in place. Some fungi are so tolerant of toxicity that they even grow on the site of the Chernobyl power plant.
