The tale of the perfect crop always begins with a moist but not wet seedbed, followed by a dry period for the next 30 days.
Then the rain begins to fall for a week. It stops and no more moisture is necessary to take off a bumper crop. The plants are short but thick. The heads fill top to bottom, tillers fill, the crop doesn’t lodge and despite a greenish look to the plant at the end of August, the seed is dry and ready to harvest.
All farmers can get the perfect crop if they could control the way a plant reacts to weather. A product called Stimulate, new to Canadian agriculture, claims to perform this task.
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Stoller Enterprises of Houston, Texas has developed the product, which it says will convince plants the ideal growing season scenario is taking place, even if it isn’t. Robert Saik, of Agri-Trend Agrology in Red Deer, Alta., is distributing the product in Canada and says his company will be working with farmers in Alberta this season to prove the efficacy of Stimulate.
Certain plant hormones called auxins can be added to both seed and foliage of young plants to change growth patterns.
Auxins cause the plant to spend more energy producing roots that tend to go deeper. Controlling this new relationship and balancing those hormones with others such as gibberellic acid (thought to control sugar movement) and cytokinins (which control growth) was the toughest aspect of developing the product, said company officials with Stoller.
“We have spent years working on getting the right balance between the hormones that will alter the growth tendencies of the plant in the ways we intend,” said Tom Wilkes, of Stoller Enterprises in Texas.
Handle drought better
It is thought the proper balance of hormones in field crops will result in positive control over plant chemistry and provide better tolerance to drought through improved rooting.
“Changing plant hormones is like sticking your hand into a big, black box,” said Ravi Chibbar, leader of the cereal research group at National Research Council, in Saskatoon. “You make some changes and try it out and see what happens. Maybe you get the results you want. Maybe you don’t. Getting the right balance takes a lot of research. In the end whatever you do has to be financially viable for the farmer.”
Stoller first licensed its product in the United States in 1991. It has proven to work with some horticultural crops, but cereal grains and field crops in northern latitudes are new areas for the product.
The use of applied plant hormones has long been a tool for horticulture. Higher returns provided in the fruit and vegetable industry have made the additional costs of hormone application viable.
Plant hormone physiologist Jocelyn Ozaga, of the University of Alberta in Edmonton, said: “The use of auxins to stimulate root initiation has long been known and used. Field crops such as wheat and barley have relatively low prices that haven’t met the economic threshold for the application of these products.”
Testing of Stimulate began at Alberta Agriculture last year but no data from the trials is available. Montana State University testing of several compounds sold as field crop growth stimulants began last year as well. Results from the first year showed little change from control groups.
Researchers said it is only the first year for the study and in coming years the data derived from plot testing will provide more conclusive evidence.
“We tested a variety of growth enhancement products last year. Nuchem (a different distributor) Stimulate was one of the products. Our results showed no significant improvement over the control group of plants. It was only one year of data but we were very careful to treat all the plots equally,” said Gil Stallknecht, of the university in Havre, Mont.
But Wilkes, of Stoller, said,”in the past we have had concerns about university testing of our products. We need to have controlled conditions to make a serious analysis of any product.”
Consider all options
A senior professor at Texas A&M University has seen field crop enhancement products come and go. He said the first thing the farmer must do before looking at any growth stimulating products is to examine every other factor in growing the crop.
Page Morgan, of the Texas university, said: “There is no magic bullet. If growers want to consider using these products they should make sure they have maximized their fertilizer, bought the best seed they can afford, optimized every other area of their production and then they might want to try some of these products.”
