As the world’s food demand grows, agricultural food production is also on the rise. This comes with the related challenges of poor yield, drought, pests and weeds that can negatively impact both productivity and the environment.

While fertilizers and pesticides play a significant role in attempting to overcome some of these obstacles, agricultural biologicals can make a crucial contribution toward the goal of making intensive agricultural production more successful and sustainable.

Safe for the environment, biologicals make crops healthier, with improved defenses against diseases and pests, and better able to withstand abiotic stress. The crop is well-prepared for early season growth and has a good vigor, with enriched root and shoot biomass and improved nutrient uptake and use.

Boron (B) plays a key role in a wide range of physiological processes that allow plants to germinate, grow, reproduce and remain healthy. No wonder it’s the first nutrient that plants seek! 

Boron is critical to the growth of pollen tubes, germination of pollen grains and fertilization, and helps to ensure good grain fill. A deficiency can cause reduced pollen tube growth and flowering, reduced seed set and in canola, which has higher boron requirements than cereal crops, aborted flowers and pod blanks or missing seeds in the pod.

The first step in proactively managing boron is to understand some of the key aspects that lead to boron deficiency, and how to identify and prevent a deficiency to mitigate stress and preserve yield. Read on to learn more about boron and why growers should be paying attention to this important nutrient throughout the growing season. 

Soil pH is a key factor in farmland as it controls availability of nutrients, microbial activity and crop productivity. Before delving into what causes soils to become acid and the steps to take to treat and correct acidic soil, we must first establish what is considered an optimal pH for crop production.

For most prairie crops, a soil pH range of 6.0 to 8.0 is suitable for optimal growth and development. Soils with pH ranging from 5.6 to 6.0 are considered moderately acid, while strongly acid and very strongly acidic soils have pH ranging from 5.1-5.5 to <5.0, respectively. Crops have difficulty establishing and show a decline in productivity and yield in soils with a pH below 6.0.

Soil salinity can occur naturally or be caused by human activity – continuously irrigating with water that has a high salt concentration, for example. While some crops are tolerant to saline soils, high concentrations of some salts can be toxic to others. Salinity can also affect a plant’s uptake of water and absorption of nutrients.

In this blog post, we will take a closer look at the causes and consequences of salinity and sodicity, and how producers can take a nutritional approach to lower the impact on their crops.

Calcium (Ca) is the backbone of every living organism, including plants. Although a plant’s needs for calcium can be as high as its needs for nitrogen and potassium, it is classified as a secondary nutrient. In this post, we examine the importance of calcium and the factors that can limit its availability to plants.