Managing Crop Nutrition During Reproductive Periods

Good morning. Welcome everyone. Welcome friends. Welcome to the Advancing EcoAgriculture webinar on Managing plant nutrition at Reproductive Critical Points of Influence. In the conversation today, we want to talk about why plants don't achieve their full genetic potential and how we can manage nutrition at specific stages of plant development to produce much larger quantities of seed or grain or fruit and to achieve more of what the plants are really capable of. I'd like to thank the team at AEA for hosting this webinar, for putting it together, and particularly for Anna. To Anna, a big thank you to you for all the work that you do and putting these webinars together and all the great work that you do at aea. So thank you, thank you and thanks to the entire team because it is really together as a team that we're able to continue learning new things, putting new ideas together and then sharing them with everyone. So takes all of us working together and really enjoy working with each one of you. I also enjoy having hosting these webinars and the interactions that I get from all of you as the audience. So your questions and your dialogue are important to having this be a good discussion, a good exchange, and if you have any questions at any point about the topics or the points that I'm attempting to describe, feel free to type a question in the Q and A box down below at the bottom of your screen. And I'm not really able to see those questions when I'm doing a screen share and sharing a slide deck, but as soon as I get through the slide deck, I'll be doing about a 20 or 25 minute presentation and then I'll switch to Q and A and answer any questions that you might have. So thank you for joining us and I hope you find the discussion useful and helpful. I'm sure that you will. All right, so managing plant nutrition and specifically managing plant nutrition to increase reproductive health and to increase yields. We've had a number of webinars over the last few months and over the past year where we've spoken about how to manage nutrition at specific stages of plant development to influence quality. We have learned how to manage nutrition so that we can produce larger fruit, smaller fruit, fruit that where we can really delay ripening and have ripening occur days or weeks later, or we can move ripening earlier, have it happen earlier, we can produce softer fruit, we can really shape fruit characteristics and even to some degree we can shape fruit size. Is it large and flat? Long, thin? You can really shape a lot of different fruit characteristics based on how you Manage nutrition. And recently we haven't spoken so much about how you can increase the number of fruit. And so that's what this webinar is about, is to speak specifically to how you can increase the number of seeds and the number of fruit that a plant produces. So perhaps the starting point is to understand and make certain that we are on the same page about what it is that we believe at advancing eco agriculture. We believe that plants have a tremendous untapped genetic potential, and that this genetic potential is often lost because of plant stress. And we can reduce this yield loss by managing nutrition at critical points of influence. And there are three specific critical points of influence that have a significant impact on the number of seeds or the number of fruit that a plant sets and then ultimately are harvested that we will be speaking about and describing. So it is possible, I believe, and of course, there's variations on crop to crop and how fully their genetic potential has been realized. But for many of our reproductive crops, this conversation, of course, is not relevant. For vegetative crops, where we're harvesting plant vegetation such as kale and spinach and alfalfa, but for our reproductive crops, grain crops, tree fruit, and vegetables such as tomatoes, it is very common for us to observe plants that have a very strong blossom load, but perhaps only 20 to 30% of those blossoms are actually harvested as fruit. And that is fundamentally a nutrition problem. It's not a genetics problem, because the genetics are already expressing that they have the genetic capacity to set that number of fruit. The only question is, can the plant keep that number of fruit and sustain them and support them all the way through to harvest? That is a nutritional problem, not a genetics problem. So when we think about the untapped genetic potential that exists, the simplest way to measure this and to think about it for the plants, particularly for fruit crops, tree fruit, tomatoes and watermelons, cantaloupe, the easiest way to evaluate those species and specific varieties genetic potential is to look at the number of female buds and female blossoms that they set. When we think about a cantaloupe crop, it's very common for most cantaloupes today to have somewhere between 20 and 25 female blossoms per plant, but the average yield is only 1.5 melons per plant. So the plant is telling us it has the genetic capacity to produce 20 to 25 melons per plant, but we're harvesting less than 10% of that. When we think about nuts such as almonds or tree fruit, we know that we can have a genetic capacity to produce a tremendous fruit load. But then the question is, do we have the nutritional capacity to sustain that fruit load, to fill it and to size it and prevent it from being lost by June drop or whatever the case might be for the various crop that we're speaking about. So there is, there is a tremendous untapped genetic potential. And for many of our crops, we don't. When we think about increasing yields, it's not a question really of increasing yields. It's simply a question of preventing those yields from being lost, preventing those melons from those melon blossoms from, from aborting, preventing the nuts from dropping during the June drop period. These are all the different characteristics and things that we need to look at. And the same is true. I've been speaking of fruit and vegetable crops, but the same is true of grains and small grains. When you think of a wheat plant or small grains plant, you can have a significant influence on the number of kernels per head. Some heads are much longer than others. There's variation from year to year, depending on the environment, climate, and nutrition. And usually for most wheat crops or most small grain crops, the bottom kernels can be anywhere from the bottom two to four to six, sometimes as much as the bottom eight kernels are not fully filled and they end up not being harvested. So you're, you are losing anywhere from 10 to 15% of the kernels that that plant has already set in an average year, but wasn't able to completely fill and wasn't able to sustain. The same is true of a corn plant. When we think about tip fill, really healthy plants will be able to fill an ear all the way out to the tip. But not only are we speaking about kernel fill and grain fill, but also the capacity to set a larger number of grains, a larger number of seeds per head. So let's get into this. How do we manage this? What do we look at? The question is, why does this yield potential remain unrealized? We see that plants have the capacity to do this, but why don't we get there? It's because of plant stress at three specific periods. The sequence of these critical points of influence varies depending on whether you're talking about perennial or annual crops. Let's just say that the three important periods are reproductive bud initiation and blossoming and pollination. And then when we get to the rapid fruit fill period, so very often on perennial crops such as nuts and apples and pears and cherries, we may have good bud initiation, we may have good pollination, but then the tree isn't able to sustain the entire fruit load and we end up with a lot of fruit drop. So all of those, those three periods are. Those three points are the three most critical points that we'll be speaking about. So we understand that we have potential yields, but then the actual yields are determined by the nutritional integrity at these three critical points of influence. Particularly when plants shift from vegetative dominance to reproductive dominance. In the moment when these plants shift from vegetative mode to reproductive mode, there's a significant hormonal switch. And perhaps the best example is when a fruit tree begins blossoming and pollination happens in the spring. Pollination often happens dependent on climactic conditions. Weather conditions often happens in a very condensed period, anywhere from three to five days. And it is the equivalent of a pregnancy, the entire tree becoming pregnant. So there's this very rapid hormonal shift that happens over a condensed time period of a few days to a few weeks at the very most. And this hormonal shift needs to be supported with the right nutrition. When it is supported with the right nutrition, this tree remains very healthy and very vibrant and has low susceptibility to diseases, low susceptibility to insects. If there is not good nutrition and not good hormonal support. This is the moment when we have the greatest susceptibility to diseases, greatest susceptibility to insect pressure, and when we can also lose a lot of blossoms due to abortions, etc. So when you think about diseases and insects and the periods of peak pressure, many of the diseases and insects have evolved in the co evolutionary arms race to have their greatest impact and first begin infecting trees and plants at this moment of greatest weakness. When you think about the period of greatest susceptibility to apple scab or to fire blight, or to codling moth, it often happens during this blossoming and pollination period, because historically, over generations, this is the weakest moment for the plant. From an immunity and resistance perspective, it's possible completely shift that based on how we manage nutrition. I developed this concept that we refer to as critical points of influence that describe the shift and what is happening with implants as they move from one stage to the next. So you have these two different growth modes. You have the masculine vegetative growth and then you have feminine reproductive growth. And these two cycles can be correlated to many of the different natural polarities which occur in natural ecosystems. So you could have a conversation about acidity versus alkalinity, oxidation versus reduction, north pole versus south pole, electrical versus magnetic, the list goes on and on. Of all These various polarities, heat versus cold as well, fit into this. And so all these different pieces, this is actually interesting if some of you want to explore this a bit further. On the masculine side, on the male vegetative side, the polarities that drive vegetative growth would be oxidation and acidic pHs and hot temperatures, very warm conditions. So those are. And we can think about ammonium versus nitrate. Nitrogen, which is correlated to all of that. Ammonium would be feminine and drive reproductive growth, whereas nitrate, which is oxidized and has an acidifying effect, is masculine and drives vegetative growth. So there's a lot of interesting correlations that we can explore and pursue if we want to go down that pathway. But the, from a, from a nutrition management perspective. But the interesting part when we think about these, this shift, is that plants constantly have both feminine and masculine energy. Both vegetative and reproductive growth is occurring constantly, all the time. And our goal and our desire as managers and growers is to manage the shift from one cycle to the next to be as smooth as possible. So, as you can see here, I described that critical points of influence occur when the hormone balance shifts from reproductive dominance to vegetative dominance. This, of course, we don't have enough time to really get into a conversation about the specific plant hormones that are involved. Cytokinins versus auxins and gibberellins, etc. Cytokines and auxins are two that play a very key role in managing this shift in this interaction. But the key point here is that at the shift of, at the peak. So if we have a lack of nutritional integrity or stress at the peak moment of each cycle, that's going to sabotage yield potential. Let me give you an example of that. Let's say. So the fruit fill period, when we are filling fruit, actually a vegetative stage, because we have growth happening and expansion happening. This is cell expansion. So cell expansion within the fruit, even though it's happening inside of a fruit which is a reproductive organ, that is a vegetative stage of growth. And if there is a nutritional stress, such as inadequate potassium or inadequate nitrogen or inadequate calcium or phosphorus, or any element for that matter, that occurs during the peak of the fruit fill period, and that is going to sabotage yield potential. But then at the transition from one stage to the next, when there is a lack of nutritional integrity at the transition specifically from vegetative to reproductive, this triggers disease and insect susceptibility. So it's, it's you. On the one side you have yield potential, on the other side, you have disease and insect susceptibility. Depending on plant timing and what is happening with physiological growth stages. For most crops, there are these five critical points of influence, Some of which are connected with vegetative and some with reproductive growth stages that have an exceptional in impact on the yield and quality of the crop that is actually harvested. These are germination, the initiation of reproductive buds blossoming and pollination, the fruit fill period, fruit fill is actually vegetative as I described, and senescence or seed fill, seed maturity. And then the three that have an outsized impact on the yield that we actually harvest is the three in the center number two, three and four. Reproductive bud initiation, blossoming, pollination and fruit fill. These are the three that I want to focus the rest of my discussion and conversation on because they're the ones that have the biggest impact and the biggest influence. So when we think about nutrition management, I put this diagram together to try to illustrate how we think about managing reproductive versus vegetative energy, managing attrition at these critical points of influence. Here's the general idea. On the left side of this chart we have all of those influences which have a which are a result of reproductive dominance. So when you have a plant that is cytokinin dominant and is dominated by feminine or female energy, then you'll have a plant that has short, tight internode spacing. You'll have leaves that tend to be very wide and relatively short. You have very strong pollination where most of the blossoms successfully pollinate, and you'll have more reproductive buds as well as larger reproductive buds. You'll have larger root systems and you'll have a very uniform reproductive bud size. This is one of the things that we've observed is that as plants become healthier and healthier and we have strong reproductive bud dominance, you'll see less size difference between the primary blossom and the secondary blossom or blossoms. So in cantaloupe and melons, we speak about the crown bloom. In apples we talk about the king blossom. There's different words that are used to describe these for different fruit. But for many fruit you have this primary or a few stronger blossoms and flowers followed by additional flowers that are not as strong. When plants become really healthy and they have very strong reproductive dominance, that difference disappears and it gets to be the point where there is very little, almost unnoticeable size difference and vigor differences between the primary blossoms and the secondary blossoms. Then on the right side of this chart, we have vegetative dominance. So vegetative dominance we have a plant is expressing itself in exactly the opposite manner of what we have on the left side of the chart. You'll have longer internode spacing, leaves and nodes that are spaced very widely apart. Leaves that are long and narrow. You'll have much poor pollination. You'll have fewer reproductive buds. The reproductive buds will have a bigger size discrepancies and a bigger size spread between the youngest and the oldest buds. You'll have smaller root systems and with significantly fewer root hairs and less root branching, you'll have smaller bud sizes. This is a plant that is dominated by auxin. Now, the key point is that I made a comment of this in passing earlier. But all plants are both reproductive and vegetative all the time. It is never 100% and 0% or even 90 10. Instead it is much closer to, let's say 55, 45. So there is both reproductive energy and vegetative energy present and occurring within the planet, within all these various plant cells all the time. Plant hormones simply shift the balance from one side of the spectrum to the other. So there's not a. There's. It's not like we're shifting the entire plant from 9010 in one direction to 9010 in the other. Instead, it's a very small balance. And that very slight balance can be adjusted based on how we manage nutrition. In particular, there are three nutrients which have very strong reproductive effect. Those are manganese, phosphorus and ammonium. There are, as well as everything else that isn't on this list. So there's this long list of magnesium and zinc and copper, boron, etc. You can come up with quite an extensive list of nutrients that we haven't mentioned that aren't listed on this chart. They almost universally have a very slight reproductive effect, but the effect tends to be very slight. These three that I've listed are the heavyweights in the ring. They have the biggest influence and they make the biggest difference from a plant hormonal perspective. On the right side, the nutrients that have a vegetative effect are nitrate, nitrogen, potassium, chloride and calcium. When you think about what this means from a commercial agriculture perspective, we can realize that typically we use nitrogen, potassium and chloride to get our growth energy. If we're growing alfalfa, we might put on applications of potassium chloride. We're growing almonds, we supply potassium chloride and liquid 32 nitrogen. So we're growing corn. We'll apply a liquid nitrogen that converts to nitrate. So typically we get our strong growth energy and our vegetative energy coming from either nitrate, potassium or Chloride, that is mainstream agriculture. The interesting part is that you can achieve the same quantity and the same speed of vegetative growth with calcium as you can with the other three elements. So if you use calcium to supply your vegetative growth energy, you can get the same speed of growth, same speed of shoot growth, and the same quantity of biomass, same quantity of leaf production, etcetera, as you can with these other elements, but with one very significant difference. All on the left side of the chart, Manganese, phosphorus and ammonium all have a symbiotic relationship and a, I should say a synergistic relationship with the plant hormone cytokinin. On the right side of the chart, the nutrients listed, nitrate, potassium, chloride and calcium, all have a synergistic relationship with auxins, with one exception. The exception is calcium. Calcium actually has a synergistic relationship with cytokinin. So when we use calcium to produce our vegetative growth, we get the same speed and quantity of vegetative growth. But now we have a cytokine and dominant plant that gives us very tight internode spacing. And in the case of, if we're speaking about crops such as hops or soybeans or apples or cherries, then internode spacing is very important because the node spacing determines the quantity of our future crop potential. So we can actually achieve very rapid shoot growth. But instead of having nodes be six or eight inches apart, we can now reduce that to having nodes three or four inches apart, which gives us double the yield potential on the same vine length or on the same branch length. So this is a very important characteristic of managing plant nutrition. For higher yields on all these various crops that reproduce at the nodes or on. On spurs that are produced at the nodes, this is such an important piece. I believe that if growers did this one thing, if they began producing crops using calcium to get their vegetative growth energy instead of nitrate or potassium, they would reduce their insect and pest pressure by greater than 50% and they would increase yields by greater than 20% by doing nothing else. If they just managed calcium differently. And the key to managing calcium effectively is that calcium needs to come from the soil. You cannot produce this effect with foliar applications. Calcium needs to come from the soil and flow up into the plant through the xylem, which means that we need to have good soil supply of calcium every single day, every 24 hours through the growing season. And if one day the calcium supply is not adequate, that's the day that the entire system starts falling apart. And we get greater disease and insect susceptibility and potentially reduced yields as well. So let's think specifically about some of these critical points of influence and specific nutrients that are required. Nutrients that are required for reproductive bud initiation. The critical point of reproductive bud initiation we haven't the time to describe. I know we have growers here on the webinar and many who will be listening to it who have a broad range of different corn, small grains, soybeans, berry crops, tree fruit, nuts, etc. You need to know when the reproductive bud initiation period happens for you and for your crop, because it's completely different for these various crops. On some crops, such as cantaloupe and melons, it happens when it happens. First of all, it happens much earlier than most people realize. So on a cantaloupe crop, it happens when the seedling forms its second true leaf. So between the first and the second true leaf. And for many growers, unfortunately, if seedlings are being transplanted, they're still in the greenhouse at this point. They're still in the cells and plug trays. So the initiation of the crown blossom for a cantaloupe plant or for watermelon plant happens very, very early. For a corn plant, the first bud initiation, reproductive bud initiation for ear development occurs 9 to 11 days after germination. So it happens very early. So the nutrition at that very early stage is going to have a significant impact on the quantity and the size, the vigor, the robustness of reproductive buds that are developed at that point, the nutrients that are required. This is obviously this reproductive bud initiation is triggered by the plant hormone cytokinin, or the group called cytokinins. And the nutrients which facilitate and drive a greater quantity and greater vigor of buds are manganese, zinc and boron, calcium, phosphorus and seaweed. Now, I deliberately put seaweed on the bottom of the list instead of on the top of the list. Many people use seaweed at this point. They understand the influence that it has. It has a significant influence, but it doesn't have nearly the influence that these trace minerals do. And I'll describe in just a moment why that is true. When we shift to think about pollination, what nutrients are required for strong pollination? These nutrients is the exact same list as before. Manganese, zinc, boron, calcium, phosphorus, seaweed with the addition of copper. Copper is required for strong pollen tubes, for strong pollen germination and vigor. So these are the nutrients. When you have an adequate supply of these nutrients, if you have, if you're working with a crop such as Regina Cherries or crop that is known to produce a tremendous amount of blossoms but not set a lot of fruit, this will fix that problem. Managing these nutrients will fix the pollination problem to a point where you can rapidly set a very large fruit load on a plant that doesn't, that is known to not yield very well or not to set a lot of fruit. Simply managing attrition will fix that profile and fix that historical behavior very, very quickly. And there's specific reasons for the functions of all these various trace minerals and elements within the reproductive process. That's too much to get into for the moment, but they each has its role to fill, and the absence of any one of them is going to cause a reduction in bud initiation or reduction in pollination. Now, I listed seaweed at the bottom of the list. Often today there is growing awareness of the impact of cytokinins and auxins and various plant hormones, gibberellins, etc. Many growers are applying these products and they're applying various plant hormonal products, but with very different results and very different degrees of effectiveness. Sometimes a grower will apply a product and see a tremendous crop response and then apply the exact same product on a different field in a different variety, get very limited or no response. Why the difference? The exact same product was applied at the exact same time, but we get completely different results usually. And there, of course, are genetics differences and varietal differences as well, which play into this. But usually the differences in performance of plant hormone products is a result of differences in plant nutritional integrity. Because plants have the capacity to synthesize all of these different compounds on their own. They can synthesize their own cytokines, they can synthesize their own auxins as long as they have adequate levels of zinc and manganese and copper and boron and cobalt and all the key enzyme cofactors that are required to synthesize these hormones. So let's say you have a plant, you have one crop, one block, one field that has a generous supply of all these trace minerals, and all of this has a strong nutritional foundation. You put on a hormonal application there and you get a tremendous crop response. If you then have a second field which perhaps doesn't have enough zinc or perhaps doesn't have enough manganese, you can put on a hormonal application of cytokinins, for example, or seaweed, what will happen is the plant absorbs the seaweed, absorbs the cytokinin, it uses some of it, and it produces a partial cytokine response. But then the plant may not have enough zinc or manganese to sustain all that cytokine and allow it to function, allow it to work. So it degrades it, it metabolizes and degrades the cytokine, where to such a degree that perhaps only 20% of what you applied actually remains as cytokinin within the plant after a day or two, and the rest of it has been metabolized and degraded. So you have applied a lot of plant hormones, but you actually haven't gotten the plant response to the plant hormones, not because the plant couldn't, could not have utilized the hormones as such, but because they didn't have the nutritional foundation to support the hormonal response and to support the hormones function. So this is a very important piece. This is why, when we think about managing nutrition at these critical points of influence, the important pieces are actually to manage the mineral nutrients themselves rather than to constantly being applying plant hormones. The hormones are effective, yes, but their effect can be amplified many times when they are properly supported with the correct nutrition that is needed as enzyme cofactors to support their functions. One of the keys that I mentioned earlier is how early bud initiation happens for the reproductive buds, how much earlier it is than we often expect. And the same is true for blossoming and pollination. Obviously we can see that happen visually, so we generally know when that is happening. But if we want to manage hormonal support and nutritional support at these specific stages of plant development, it is critical that we apply nutritional support or seaweed applications or applications of these elements that I've been describing and talking about early enough. If we miss the window by 24 to 48 hours, the effect goes down dramatically. It is very important to apply any foliar applications that we apply early enough that they can have an influence on the at these various stages for reproductive bud initiation, for blossoming and pollination, all of this. I've given you the concepts and the principles that we use in our consulting work at Advancing Eco Agriculture. When we think about helping growers to produce higher yields and higher quality, and we historically would often make recommendations for a combination of different products, we would recommend seastem and rebound manganese, rebound boron, zinc, trace minerals, etc. Applications at these specific stages to produce this nutritional support effect that we were looking for. And we got very strong responses from that. When you manage the application timing correctly on plants that have the capacity, like soybeans for example, or hops, we know that these plants have the capacity to produce a lot more buds than they often do because they're not supported with the right nutrition. I shouldn't say buds say that they often produce a lot of buds that they don't keep. The blossoms abort or the fruit aborts, the pod drops off, whatever might be happening. In the case of soybeans, we've been able to observe anywhere from a 30% to an 80% increase in the number of pods per plant from a single foliar application that was applied early enough. If you apply it too late, and early enough on beans, in this case is about the third trifoliate. Between the third and fourth trifoliate, if we apply it later, we don't get nearly that effect. But what occurred is we set out to produce a blended product that was one product, one container that would be easy for growers to use and to apply. And that was the genesis of the product that we call accelerated. So Accelerate is designed along the lines that I described, to provide nutritional support and hormonal support at these critical points of influence to ensure that we get good pollination, that we get good bud initiation, and that we don't lose those to abortion. So there's a lot of information available about Accelerate on our website and would love to have you connect with our team at Advancing Eco Agriculture to learn more about how to use it, how to apply it, when. And of course, you can take the information in this webinar and try to use just some of the individual minerals themselves directly, and that will certainly have an effect. But what we've learned is that the combination of Accelerate tends to have a much bigger effect than the individual products on their own. So I want to say thank you to all of you for attending so far. I hope this information has been useful and productive. I'm going to switch to Q and A, so if you have any questions that you would like for me to discuss, you can please type them into the Q and A box below. And. And I'm going to go through these, see that some are already coming in. All right, so we have a question from Jim Porterfield. Hi Jim, glad to see you here. For corn is the 9 to 11 day critical point of influence after germination or after emergence? Jim, it's been a long time since I read the white paper. I believe that it is after emergence and I believe I misspoke earlier. I said after germination, but I believe it is actually after emergence. Thank you for catching me on that. That's a great question. Shawn Greenbaum. Hi, Shawn. You mentioned the importance of calcium uptake from the soil as opposed to a foliar. How do you ensure this supply of calcium from the soil? With biology. With the gypsum application, is there a role for foliar application of calcium? Awesome questions, Shawn, and the answer is yes, yes and yes. So we need calcium supply from the soil in adequate volume to sustain high yields and high quality, largely a function of biology, particularly bacterial digestion. So we do work a lot using biological inoculants and biostimulants through the season and irrigation systems where that's appropriate and possible to facilitate a constant steady release of calcium. We also use a lot of gypsum applications. Putting gypsum applications on the spring I mentioned this in a prior webinar few months ago. Forget exactly what was what it was titled where I spoke about thinking about the timing of calcium released from gypsum or from other nutrients and other fertilizers as well. But if I recall correctly, gypsum usually has a peak release about 45 days after application to 90 days after application. So depending on the crop that we're growing and the reproductive period, the fruit fill period, then we want to time our gypsum applications to get the greatest calcium release at the same, in the same time window as the period of greatest plant need. And then is there a role for foliar application of calcium? Yes, as a band aid, if you don't have enough coming from the soil. And obviously we need, when we're, particularly when we're dealing with higher value crops, we do need to produce high quality fruit. And so you can overcome some of the limitations with, with foliar applications of chelated calcium. But given the sheer quantity and the sheer volume of calcium that plants require, foliar applications are a significant second best. They are valuable, they're useful, we use them a lot. But our goal and our objective is to get soil health and soil biology and soil calcium supply to a point where we no longer need or are not dependent on foliar applications of calcium. Very good questions. Ido Aviani asked a question. Hi Ito, what is the best way to apply calcium through fertigation? I'm not quite certain what you are asking in terms of form. We have growers that I think perhaps the most common to apply significant quantities of calcium is to suspend gypsum or solubilized gypsum and put that into the irrigation system. So that is I think the most common. And then of course in some cases we also use calcium nitrate, although that isn't. We don't really consider that to be A calcium fertilizer because it doesn't increase calcium concentrations within the plant because of the nitrogen content. I'd say gypsum is the most common source. And then we also use our holocal in fertigation systems, which is a micronized and suspended calcium carbonate that has been chelated and is no longer calcium carbonate by the time it is finished interacting with humic substances, etc. Question here from Murray. Does accelerate work on corn as well as on beans or just on soybeans? And the answer is yes. Accelerate works on all crops. So it will work on corn, it'll work on small grains, it'll work on beans. You'll have an effect on all those crops. Now the key however is the key question is when do you need to apply it to produce the crop response that you're looking for? And typically on corn your significant yield responses happen in. There's, there's different stages but they happen at. There's one at V3 through V4 up to V5 and then a second at V8 to 10 and then again after tasseling, both during tasseling and then after tasseling at about R1. So we have some of this information available at AEA about when the specific windows are for the greatest response. Now the key of course with corn there's a significant difference between corn and soybeans is that with beans you have what we refer to as a multi fruiting crop. It will blossom and pollinate over an extended period of time and there's bud initiation that happens over an extended period of time. With a corn plant or a small grain crop or what we refer to as a single fruiting crop, all the fruiting happens in a very condensed window. In one window, it's one shot and done. So you have much less opportunity for a yield response with corn or with small grains than you do with soybeans. So it's much more challenging to get the significant yield response that we're looking for. David Widman asked the question do you use trace minerals in furrow during planting? And the answer is absolutely yes. In all of our recommendations we put in trace minerals in the firoap planting for corn and beans and small grains to facilitate this response that we're looking for. Lydic Fogel asked the question, any comments regarding the rapid fruit field stage? I spoke about the importance of those three stages and then many of my comments were focused on the two stages of being bud initiation and pollination blossoming. And the reason I didn't describe the fruit fill stage more is because I've already spoken about that quite a bit in the past on other webinars. But the key is managing cell division versus cell expansion period, managing the interactions between calcium and potassium and manganese and boron, etc. Which I've already described at length in other conversations which are available on YouTube and then other places on the podcast as well. Thanks Lighty. Thanks for asking that question. Glad to see you. James asked the question I've had SAP analysis performed at almonds two weeks ago to determine nutrition during bud initiation. To my surprise, my phosphorus levels in the SAP were excellent. Should I still consider adding phosphorus now or post harvest? I still plan on another full year prior to harvest that will include manganese, zinc, copper and boron. James, if you already have enough, I definitely would not advise adding any more because far too often the challenges that we observed, the challenges that you may be observing with low levels of manganese, low levels of zinc, low levels of copper may actually be contributed or that they may be a result of having surplus levels of phosphorus. So so adding more of something that you already have enough of should not be necessary at all because you run the risk of having an antagonistic reaction antagonistic relationship with other nutrients that are in the system. Judy Frankel asked the question, does temperature affect CPI timing? I think we are having skewed fruit set fruit ripening timing due to wetter cooler temperatures. Judy the answer is definitely yes. So the foundational thought behind the entire idea of epigenetics is that environment determines genetic expression. So in agriculture, when we think about plant expression and environment, environment is really climate mediated by nutrition. So yes, climate is going to have a significant influence. And that influence, the climate is having cooler, wetter temperatures, hotter temperatures, drier, et cetera. That can all be mediated and balanced out and smoothed out with nutrition. So nutrition can increase the effects of weather or decrease the effects of weather depending on how we manage it. Lady Fogel asked the question what is the earliest application window for accelerate on peppers and tomatoes? Lyde have conducted some experiments where we applied accelerate on tomatoes. I have more experience on tomatoes than I do on peppers in this regards, but we've applied accelerate on tomatoes within a within seven days of transplanting, and that is within seven days of transplanting seedlings that were about 4 inches tall. So our desire was to put on an accelerated application early enough to influence bud initiation for the first cluster of tomatoes. So that happened. I would say the seedlings were approximately they would have had the fourth true leaf at that point between the third and the fourth true leaf was when we put on the first application and we did get a very nice response from that. A number of additional questions here. Let me see. Michael Grove asked the question for red danjo pears, eastern tent caterpillars appearing. Now that fruit is filling. Is this a level 3 or 4 of the plant health pyramid issue? Actually, it's neither. It is level two, because whenever you have larval insects feeding on a plant, that is a signal that you do not have good protein synthesis. That would actually be level two on the plant health pyramid. Elliot van Pesky asked the question. Hi, Elliot, in the case of pasture production, would you be concerned that some of these reproduction stimulating substances would cause excessive hitting as opposed to vegetative growth? How would you approach this? This is an excellent question and the answer is yes. Reproductive minerals and substances can produce earlier reproduction on these vegetative crops. For this reason, you want to be cautious about applying large amounts of, let's say manganese and phosphorus and seaweed, for example, on alfalfa, because they will cause the alfalfa to begin blooming earlier. So obviously you don't want the deficiency either. For these crops, you need enough. You don't want to have a deficiency, but you also do not want to have a surplus or on the higher side of the range such that you trigger strong reproduction. So that's a very great question and great observation. We need to manage these nutrients completely differently for the vegetative crops. And of course, if you have a situation where you already have, let's say you have an abundance of phosphorus, for example, the way to manage that is to balance it out with other nutrients that have a strong vegetative effect, such as calcium or such as nitrate or potassium? Rodrigo asked the question when talking about calcium, what are the differences between limestone and gypsum in terms of reproductive vegetative effects and oxidation versus reduction, nutrient balancing, etc. From my understanding, I believe that gypsum, particularly mined gypsum, calcium sulfate anhydrite, is relatively neutral. It doesn't have a strong reductive or oxidative effect. I think it's slightly reductive, but only very slightly limestone. However, calcium carbonate, very strongly oxidizing because of the presence of oxygen in the bicarbonate. So the bicarbonate tends to have a very strong oxidizing effect and of course would have a vegetative effect as a result of that. Malcolm asked the question, can you determine the critical points of influence through SAP testing and monitoring and adjust the nutrition on the fly or would that be too late? So, Malcolm, the answer is that yes, you can use SAP analysis to manage nutrition at these critical points of influence. However, you need to be very proactive. So we know that these critical points of influence happen very early and happen at different stages, of course, for different plants. But you need, you will need to conduct your SAP analysis about three to four weeks before that critical point of influence occurs. So that gives you time to get the report back and to put on an application of any nutrients that might be necessary. The answer is yes, you can use SAP analysis, and it's a very valuable tool, but you need to use it well in advance. And this is actually, this is one of the aspects that really attracted us to initially begin using SAP analysis is because the SAP analysis observes nutrient imbalances three to four weeks earlier than a tissue analysis does. So a tissue analysis with the SAP analysis, you can see what the nutrient imbalances are going to be and what they would be visually expressing three to four weeks later. With a tissue analysis, it's already too late. You don't have the sensitivity and you don't have enough time to respond to what you see happening and going on. So SAP analysis has been a powerful tool for us in that regard. It's a great question. Anthony Granatelli. Hi, Anthony, glad to see you here. I've observed that when I've used some of the AEA products like Accelerate, I have had extraordinary results in increasing yields on tree fruit plants. However, sometimes the trees have been so overloaded with fruit that the trees become stressed and didn't leaf out properly. How can I do a better job of dealing with this? Some of these trees lost branches from dieback. That certainly sounds like being a victim of exceptional success, Anthony. I sympathize with the effects that you had. Obviously pretty great effects to some degree, but then having negatives behind that. So I have a few thoughts on this. One is that when you have an existing tree and you begin managing nutrition differently, once that tree is more than four or five or six years old, and you are often dealing with historical wood that was developed before nutrition management changed. And I'm making some assumptions, of course, but typically when we begin managing nutrition differently, one of the things that happens is often calcium levels and carbon concentrations in the new wood increase pretty significantly. And that's just one way of saying that often older wood is weaker. So when you have a tree that from an early age is supported with the right nutrition and has an abundance of a surplus of calcium, has a very high carbon Content, what we call high carbon wood, it'll be a lot stronger, have much tighter cells and be able to sustain a heavier fruit load. So it's possible if you really heavily loaded up trees that were already that already had wood that was weaker in the past, and they may not have been able to sustain that new level of production, that is certainly something that can happen. And then the other consideration is that when we do have these very heavy fruit loads, you can obviously in some cases, the branches may need to be physically supported themselves to prevent them from breaking off, which is something that we do some of our commercial orchards actually happens quite a bit on stone fruit and so forth. And then you can ensure that you still have good leaf out and have good vigor by making sure that the tree has enough nutrition for fruit fill, has a surplus of nutrition for fruit fill. So at this point, this is again a vegetative stage. And this is when the trees will have a tremendous requirement, just physical quantities, physical pounds, a lot of it, of calcium and potassium and nitrogen. So when you supply those in adequate amounts, you should be able to fill all the fruit and you may need to support the branches to prevent them from breaking off, but you should be able to fill all the fruit and still have good leaf vigor the following year and also still have good reproduction the following year, not have a down year where you have biennial bearing. So I'm happy to hear about the success that you've had and I hope that we can continue to compound that and not have the trees stressed out from such a heavy fruit load. Olivier asked the question on in a SAP analysis, when calcium is too low on potatoes, what are the elements that we can manage to remediate the problem? For example, how can we limit the absorption of potassium or ammonium to promote the calcium? Olivier, I answered this question very thoroughly in an earlier webinar on managing fruit quality. The brief answer is that you can limit the absorption of potassium by making sure the plants have an abundance of manganese and you can promote calcium absorption by making sure the plants have an abundance of boron. That's kind of a simple answer, but I answered that question much more in depth in that prior webinar, which is on YouTube. You can find it on YouTube. Barbara asked the question while talking about calcium. You said that peak release of calcium carbonate is 30 to 40 days. If gypsum is calcium sulfate, what is its rate of calcium release? Okay, if, if I did say calcium carbonate, I misspoke earlier. I was thinking about gypsum, calcium sulfate and the calcium sulfate peak calcium Release is from 45 to 90 days. That is what I intended to communicate and sorry if I misspoke. Bogdan asked the question, does good nutrition management or can good nutrition management suppress or prevent erwinia fire blight? And the answer is yes, it certainly can. We have observed that have done that successfully in a number of commercial orchards both on the east coast, particularly on the east coast where we have a lot more rainfall and a lot more challenges with fire blight and although Washington, Oregon certainly have had a tremendous challenge with fire blight in the last couple of years. So the answer is yes, you absolutely can and we have observed that successfully. We have one last question. James asked the question following up on previous question regarding phosphorus levels. A tissue analysis is showing low levels compared to SAP numbers. I'm guessing the SAP is a true indication of what is happening. That is an interesting observation because phosphorus is not an element that usually shows a significant discrepancy between tissue and SAP, like calcium or some of the cations would. But in our observation and in our experience, SAP has always been the more reliable and more accurate indicator of what is actually happening. Let's say that it correlates very precisely and very consistently with field observation of how the plants are actually doing where tissue analysis has not. So we've developed a tremendous confidence in the SAP analysis and I would expect that if we were to dig deeper and do multiple side by side comparisons, we would find that the SAP analysis has been more accurate than the tissue analysis. Those are all the questions that have come through. I want to thank all of you for participating. I hope that you found it useful and enjoyable and I look forward to speaking with you on our next webinar. Have an awesome time growing out in the field. Enjoy the sunshine, enjoy the rain. We'll speak with you soon. Thanks everyone. Bye.