Farmers are used to living with uncertainty year after year. Unpredictable weather patterns, water and nutrient availability, soil health, and unforeseen expenses are all part of the constant challenges that are largely out of farmer control, but ones that must be overcome to support the global food supply system.
To add to the challenge, farmers are trying to find ways to stay profitable while improving their sustainability and efficiency. New tools can help bring confidence to the uncertainty farmers face, bringing much needed peace of mind.
The biological industry is growing and expanding the solutions farmers can use to help manage their agronomic practices to support healthy, productive, and profitable crops. By improving a crop’s ability to efficiently use valuable resources like water, nutrients, or even the soil itself, crops can better resist stress-inducing events such as unfavorable weather conditions.
Additionally, the right nutritional support can boost performance and yield outcomes because healthier crops can better withstand stress and pest pressures. Some biological solutions can also help protect yield potential by shielding crops from pests and diseases with options that are drawn from nature, bringing novel modes of action into a farmer’s integrated pest management plan. The combination of conventional and novel management systems reduces resistance and helps keep farms more sustainable.
Biological solutions are powerful tools for agronomic success. They can be combined with innovative conventional chemistry, digital solutions, genetics and precision agriculture tools to keep farms healthy, productive, and profitable.
Biologicals can play a major role in supporting farmers’ ability to boost crop performance, build resilience to stress, and protect their yield potential. That’s because every time a crop is without proper nutrition, stressed because of unfavorable weather conditions, or under stress from hard-to-control pests, the yield that could have been achieved is lessened. With each event, a crop’s yield outcome is damaged, and once lost it cannot ever regain that potential. This difference between yield potential and actual results is known as the yield gap.
Farmers can take a proactive approach in managing the yield gap to have better end of season outcomes. This can happen by understanding some of the complex agronomic activities happening at a micro level.
Understanding that the right nutrition is essential to setting a strong base can help farmers overcome many issues, including unforeseen weather or pest pressures. This is because the healthier the crop the better it is prepared to overcome issues that arise.
Balanced nutrition helps crops have a strong start and build the right root structure to support efficient uptake of nitrogen and other essential nutrients for plants to thrive. Strong roots also mean better water use and stronger support in case of damaging winds and hail throughout the growing season.
If nutritional deficiencies are left without support, crops will naturally only reach their potential up to the point of most deficient nutrient. This allows crops to survive but leads to yield gap for farmers because the crop will not reach its genetic potential.
Proactively keeping crops healthy and balancing nutrition allows growers to be reassured that they can best overcome unpredictable events.
Building resilience begins with understanding the inner workings of a plant. Five main hormones are responsible for plant growth and development. However, some of the hormones become triggered to slow or stall growth or fruiting when a crop is stressed. The stalling of growth and fruiting is an important defense and survival mechanism for plants but leads to yield gap due to the plant shutting down reproductive processes.
Beneficial microorganisms are one way to help crops overcome this effect. These strains are selected due to their ability to stimulate growth activity, improving the absorption of nutrients, water and aiding in overall stability of the crop.
Growth stimulators or hormone regulators also play a role in managing crop performance. These solutions help farmers combat the breakdown of essential growth hormones like cytokine due to heat stress or help overcome negative hormones that are caused by stressful climates and events.
Protecting yield potential is core to closing the yield gap. Any time crops undergo pest pressure from insects, weeds, and diseases, yield is lost. Farmers know this and that is why pest management through various crop protection practices have been essential parts of their overall management.
However, hard-to-control pests that are becoming resistant to current crop protection tools and ongoing changes in consumer demand and government regulations mean new tools are necessary. This is why bio-controls can be a beneficial solution to integrate into current pest management systems.
While uncertainty in agriculture cannot disappear, we can adopt strategies to achieve more efficient and profitable production.
By integrating biological solutions with current management tools, and taking a more proactive approach, farmers can overcome unforeseen challenges to their crops, from unfavorable weather or hard-to-control pest pressures. Staying ahead of agronomic challenges also means farmers can further close the yield gap created with each stress-inducing event a crop faces, improving their farms’ profitability and sustainability.
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