Status® shows promise in Scottish vegetable trials

A blog by Chloe Freeman

During August 2023 Account Manager, Jack Hill, and I paid a visit to a selection of Status® vegetable trials in the Fife and West Lothian region.

Replicated trials conducted by a farmer-owned cooperative in Fife looked at the impact of our leading pure plant biostimulant, Status®, on a range of vegetable crops such as broccoli, carrots and asparagus.

Status® contains IntraCrop’s patented technology MTU®, combined with pidolic acid. This combination provides benefits to a wide range of crops by improving crop resilience in times of abiotic stress. These benefits include increased lateral root and shoot growth, and improved nutrient use efficiency, a buzzword that has gained considerable importance.

Overall plant response to biostimulants in 2023 were lower than average, because of fewer extreme heat or rainfall events. However, Status® still provides many beneficial effects: in healthy conditions, Status® increases green leaf retention and improves nutrient use efficiency, resulting in higher yield and quality.

Carrots

At first our carrot trials did not show any obvious differences in canopy cover and overall crop health, due to healthy rainfall and cool temperatures in the Fife region during Summer 2023. After harvest, however, carrots from this trial were assessed using the ‘supermarket test’ to examine if biostimulants had improved marketable yield and storability. Results presented a 14.8% uplift in marketable root count, and a 1.4% increase in 45+ cm root length presenting a higher return on investment due to a higher count of premium sized crops. The trial indicated an increase in yield in non-stressed conditions, by allowing the plant to retain more green leaf area and maximising establishment of longer finer roots, essential for nutrient cycling within the plant. The untreated crop provided 87.9t/ha total marketable yield, however a crop treated with Status® provided a 0.3t/ha increase in total marketable yield, and a £30/ha increase in return-on-investment value (based on a carrot selling price of £110/t). This shows that there is  a considerable benefit to growers to use Status® even when conditions are near perfect.

Broccoli

The results in the Broccoli trial were less significant due to the excellent conditions experienced and the great mineral ley soils that can be found in the Fife region. This keeps the plant stable and healthy due to the high level of nutrients already being provided to the plant. Had the conditions been less favourable and planting dates slightly earlier, the positive impact of Status® may have been more pronounced as it would have coincided with a dryer spell of weather.

Brussel sprouts

We also met some growers further south near Edinburgh trialling Status® on ‘Martinus’ Brussel sprouts across two fields. In August, we took two digs each from untreated and treated tramlines. From initial observations, we were excited to see significant effects of the biostimulants on overall root mass (Figure 1 & 2) despite the early stage of growth. Similar to the carrots, the trial did not show any obvious differences in canopy cover, as shown by the NDVI imagery. However, when the crop was harvested at the end of November, the grower explained that the treated crop was noticeably darker green compared to the untreated crops (see Figure 3 & 4 below of photos taken at harvest), and there were also slightly higher levels of leaf drop, making it easier to harvest.

 

 

The treated crops provided an increase of 1.7 buttons per stalk in Field 1 and an increase of 1.8 buttons per stalk in Field 2 compared with the untreated. The treated sprouts from Field 2 had a lower grade out (only 5.5%) compared to a grade out of 11.7% in the untreated. However, the net yield was similar in both fields because of the great growing conditions.

 

The grower trailling Status® explained that the programme used will set the crop up well to cope with any challenges that may arise during the 2024 season, by maintaining yield and increasing resilience.

To summarise, Status® showed promise in our 2023 Scottish vegetable trials, particularly in increasing yield and quality of crops on the grading line, despite the lack of abiotic stress during the growing season. This is encouraging to see and will grant considerable benefit to farmers under spells of extreme weather, particularly in the late spring and summer. IntraCrop is a science led business which is committed to demonstrating through independent trials the benefits of our products. We will continue to build a dataset demonstrating the effects biostimulants can have on a wide range of crops, including vegetables, to give clear guidance and recommendations.

To learn more about how Status can improve photosynthetic health and yield, visit our page on Status or contact the team on admin@intracrop.co.uk.

23rd January 2024