#yieldpotential

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

It is said that a picture is worth a thousand words, which seems to undervalue this photo. Does it even need any commentary? These grapes are still 3-4 weeks away from harvest. The berries will continue to size even bigger than they are now. They are crunchy, the stems are green. Notice how there are no diseases and insects present? That is not the case because of pesticide sprays. I can't resist adding the mantra, We don't really know what healthy plants actually look like anymore. Read the full article

For most crops, genetics are not the limiting factor to achieve high yields. It is very seldom, almost never, that a crop is given the needed environment to deliver full genetic potential. For agricultural crops, environment is climate mediated by nutrition, biology, and soil physics. When nutrition, biology, and soil physics are managed for optimal performance, they mitigate climactic extremes and variability to an exceptional degree, and allow plants to express themselves to deliver more of their genetic yield potential. If you want to significantly increase yields, don't just try to improve incrementally by purchasing better genetics. Improved genetics can often deliver 5% -10% yield bumps. Mediating climate by managing nutrition, biology, and soil physics can often increase yields by 20%-50% or more. Which is worth figuring out the most? Read the full article

Good cucumbers crops will have a single female blossom on every node when water and nutrients are well-managed. Average cucumber crops will have some of the nodes occupied with male blossoms or aborted female blossoms. You can identify the prior period when water or nutrients were inadequate by observing which nodes don't have a female blossom and fruit. Exceptional crops with ideal water and nutrient management can produce several female blossoms per node, and fill all the fruit to harvest size. How much higher yields do you suppose could be harvested from an exceptional crop compared to an average crop? P.S. I had an interesting conversation with Aharon Henderson on the EcoIQ podcast that released recently. You can find the episode here. Read the full article

Green beans are one of the crops we refer to as a 'multi-fruiting' crop, which is a crop that blooms and sets fruit for an extended period, and has the capacity to increase the number of buds based on health and nutritional integrity. Beans can have one pod per node or a dozen. Tomatoes can have two tomatoes per cluster, or ten. Cucumbers can have one female bud per node, or three. For these multi-fruiting crops, it is possible to produce large yield increases by increasing the number of fruit per plant when we make sure the soil has the capacity to deliver all the nutrition needed to fill the fruit load. The key to producing short tight internodes and many fruit buds is to make sure these plants have an abundance of cytokinins being produced each day. (There is a closely connected conversation about maintaining a balance between nutrients which drive vegetative growth and reproductive growth, which you can learn about in the podcast here.) Cytokinins are produced in growing root tips and cobalt is a key enzyme cofactor needed for cytokinin synthesis. The key is that a growing root tip is needed to produce cytokinins, particularly at the stages of bud initation and pollination. A healthy disease resistant plant will always be cytokinin dominant, rather than auxin dominant. This means they will always have more growing root tips (producing cytokinins) than they have growing shoot tips or seeds (producing auxins). It also means that these plants will have larger root biomass than vegetative biomass. This is a topic worth diving deeply into, particularly if you are growing these types of crops. Increasing the pod count on soybeans by more than 50% is easy. Filling those beans to produced an increased yield is where the focused attention needs to be. Similar increases are possible on many other crops. Read the full article

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