Root systems and stem diameter needed to achieve yield potential
There are a number of crops where the plants express a large untapped genetic yield potential. Well managed cantaloupe plants will regularly pollinate, set, and begin sizing over 20 melons per plant until they are about 2 inches in diameter. Then most of them will abort. Exceptional yields are 10,000 melons per acre from 4000 plants or 2.5 melons per plant. Grape tomatoes can have as many as 150 blossoms per cluster, yet only produce 35-50 marketable fruit per cluster. Tree fruit and nuts can set many more fruit than they can fill to marketable size. We expect 'June drop' as a common phenomenon where trees abort many of the set fruit embryos. (How much calcium and trace minerals are exported from the tree when these fruitlets drop after the cell division stage?) We know the significant factor that limits the realization of yield potential for many crops is environmental/nutritional stress. There is another significant factor that is less well understood, partially because many of us have not observed 50+ years of plant breeding work, and the gradual evolution of changing plant expression. Most modern varieties of the crops I have mentioned, and other crops, have the genetic predisposition to develop many blossoms and set a lot of fruit. And they lack the root system and stem diameter to supply water and nutrients to fill all these fruits. Read the full article


















