No Longer Business As Usual It’s no longer acceptable to take a “business as usual' approach to agricultural practices. Whether you’re a believer in manmade climate change or not, high temperatures and drought conditions are issues we’re increasingly having to...
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Helping Crops Beat the Heat
It’s not just humans and animals that suffer when the mercury rises. Plants feel the heat, too. Heat stress is a major issue in agriculture, as it can significantly reduce crop yield and quality. Even small increases in temperature or short episodes of high...
Get Your Plants Off The Couch!
“Viruses seem to be parasites by nature. So one would conclude, therefore, that their ability to reproduce must be affected by changes produced in the metabolism of the host plant caused by variations in nutrition,” Bawden and Kassanis (1950). This makes a lot of...
Foliar Applications – Essential to Any Crop Program
Soil applications of nutrients are necessary and the most common practice in crop fertilization, but it has many limitations with respect to nutrient bioavailability for plants. Plants use different inorganic nutrients in addition to CO2 and water for their growth and...
The Plants Are Talking …
Plants produce all kinds of chemical signals in response to their environment. These signals, both airborne and through the soil ecosystem, can be picked up by like plants or even eavesdropped on by other plants, especially when the plant is under attack by insects or...
The Inevitable Downfall of Glyphosates
There continues to be a considerable amount of controversy associated with the use of glyphosates like Roundup. The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has reportedly found traces of glyphosate in many common foods, according to agency emails obtained by The...
Plant Metabolism and Disease Reduction
In both animals and plants, susceptibility to disease is the result of metabolic problems. As we mentioned in last week’s newsletter, the overwhelming majority of chemical pesticides are nitrogenous and often chlorinated as well. The traditional balance between...
Practical Alternatives to Chemical Fungicides
Some fungicides known to be effective in vitro against Erwinia amylovora,the first bacterium proved to be a pathogen of plants,turn out to be wholly ineffective against Fire blight in orchards. What we’re learning is that many anticyptogamics, or anti-fungus agents,...
Getting Pest Control from Healthy Plants
The nutritional balance of the soil and its unique micro community work together to keep plants healthy. It’s no different with human beings - you can take all the supplements in the world, but if you’re not healthy to begin with then they will have a negligible...
Soil Stability = Crop Insurance
If our bodies were small enough to enter the tiny passages in the soil, we would discover a world populated by a wild array of creatures, all fiercely competing for every leaf, root, fecal pellet and dead body that reaches the ground. We would also find predators of...