Having tools that can be adapted to changing conditions — and used in a system to help enhance and maintain productivity in those conditions — has become key in a world rocked by climate change.
When we think of climate change, we often think of global warming. It’s much more than that; climate change means unpredictable weather, more extreme weather events and weather variability. Drought, floods, and hot and cold temperatures are all part of the climate change “package”.
Climate variability means more abiotic stresses, which can rob yield even more than pests and diseases, in part because there are fewer tools available to manage those. As those stresses become more prevalent, it becomes more difficult to grow a crop. Increasing costs and lack of availability of inputs add insult to injury.
Growers need sustainable solutions that will be viable over the long term. One of those tools comes in the form of biostimulants — specifically, seaweed extract. It provides consistency in results at a time when achieving such is becoming more challenging using synthetic chemistry.
Biostimulants, like seaweed extracts, stimulate natural processes in plants to enhance nutrient uptake and efficiency, crop quality, and tolerance to abiotic stress, benefitting both plant yield and vigour. This ensures that plants have good baseline strength and health, making plants less vulnerable to stress, pests, and other threats, including climate shocks.
At Acadian Plant Health, we know that not every natural product has this consistency. There is published work showing variability in claimed bioactives of other biostimulants on the market, depending on harvest season and storage temperatures/timings, which can lead to variability in the product efficacy in the field. This is definitely not desired and is likely part of the reason why some biostimulants haven’t been as readily adopted as they could have been. Seaweed extracts are helping change that.
Starting with consistent raw material is key for us. We harvest seaweed year-round and process it into extracts. Because seaweed is seasonal, we actually will adjust the manufacturing process throughout the year to ensure that the bioactives which are extracted and created in the extraction process are the same regardless of the time of year that the seaweed was harvested.
I recently met with a central California grower who showed me an area of a tangerine field where he had carried out a trial of our seaweed extract. He took me out into the field and said, “OK, tell me where I used your product.” We walked through different blocks of the field and what we found was, in a certain set of the blocks, there was less fruit drop taking place.
This was a little bit after bloom, and it had got very hot quite suddenly due to increasing climate variability. The plants had not acclimated to that high temperature yet, but what we were able to see was that there was more fruit on the trees that had been treated with our product — less had fallen to the ground due to that heat stress.
The difference was night and day between the treated plants and the control plants. That type of testimony from the grower — where he wanted me to see the dramatic difference between the two plots — really hit home with me.
Biostimulant products can help farmers adapt their agricultural systems to an increasingly volatile climate while enhancing food production sustainability, thereby contributing to a climate-smart farm model for the future, which is both resilient and flexible.
Ultimately, showing that benefit in the field to a grower is what matters. That can only be done by demonstrating the power of innovative technology like Acadian’s seaweed extracts. See my next column for insights into how seaweed extract makes for a healthier, more self-sustaining plant.
