Opportunities for Enhanced, Sustainable, and Safer Agricultural Production
There is no doubt that new technology and products must continually be developed for use by agricultural producers, and present technology must be improved and used to benefit agricultural production on a wide scale. Technology that has been proven to enhance the safe use of current management practices needs to be validated to ensure its adoption in most if not all agricultural settings. This is the only way that food and fiber production will have any chance of keeping pace with the growing demand for these products that will result from an increasing world population. The following are three such developments that hold promise to make agricultural production more sustainable and/or safer.
Novozymes is a biosolutions company that has developed Ratchet, a patented, Lipo-chitooligosaccharide [LCO] signaling molecule/biostimulant that can be foliar-applied to multiple crops, including soybeans. The company states that this product can stimulate the plant to increase photosynthesis and improve nutrient uptake. It mixes easily with fungicides, herbicides, and insecticides that may be applied in-season. According to results published in the article titled “A Meta-Analysis of Biostimulant Yield Effectiveness in Field Trials” [Front. Plant Sci. 13:836702 (https://doi.org/ 10.3389/fpls.2022.836702)], biostimulants applied at the proper time using the proper methodology can improve crop yield by reducing yield reductions that generally occur under stress conditions. The results reported in this article also indicate that biostimulants are more efficient in nutrient-deficient sandy soils with low organic matter.
A recently-posted White Paper on this website titled “Carbon Credits” presents details about how producers can contract with companies to sell carbon credits that will accrue from their adoption of conservation production practices. Links in the White Paper are provided to access information about how these contracts work and what is involved in their acceptance. In that vane, Truterra LLC, the sustainability business of Land O’Lakes, Inc. [a farmer-owned cooperative], has launched Truterra Sustainability Services in an effort to encourage farmers to adopt regenerative farming practices that can provide extra income to partially offset the cost of adopting those practices. Click here to see the details of this program and how it can benefit producers who decide to participate.
To counter the production problems caused by weeds that have developed resistance to several classes of herbicides, plant breeders have developed soybean varieties that are resistant to classes of herbicides that previously would have killed soybeans if they had been applied to the crop. To make use of this herbicide-resistant crop technology, chemical companies have developed enhanced herbicides and herbicide mixes that can be applied to these varieties. However, some of these herbicides are subject to drift that can damage non-resistant plants growing away from the site of the herbicide application. This has hampered the widespread use of these herbicides to control problematic weeds in a soybean crop.
In a journal article titled “Opportunities to mitigate particle drift from ground-based preemergent herbicide applications” by Kannan and Huggins [Applied Engineering in Agriculture, 39:33-42, 2023, (https://doi.org/ 10.13031/aea.15307)], results from research conducted in Mississippi showed that the use of a hooded sprayer reduced pesticide drift by 63% compared to that resulting from using a nonhooded, conventional sprayer when applying a PRE herbicide. A PRE spray application with a non-hooded sprayer should not be made in windy or high-temperature conditions in order to minimize pesticide drift. These findings confirm that the application of herbicides that can cause damage from offsite drift should be done with equipment and in weather conditions that will minimize drift of the applied pesticide from the site of application.
Composed by Larry G. Heatherly, Apr. 2023, larryh91746@gmail.com