All growers have an interest in gaining back the yield potential lost due to abiotic stresses.
It’s proven that on the average, farmers are able to harvest only 50% of the yield potential. The yield gap can be caused by biotic and abiotic stresses with a stronger negative impact and significant yield loss due to abiotic stresses. In fact, abiotic stresses like heat, cold, salt, drought and flooding caused from 65 to 75% of the yield gap, while biotic stress only 25 to 35%.
Biostimulants are known to enhance the tolerance of plants and crops to abiotic stresses and allow to achieve a higher level of yield in situations where the environmental conditions are not optimal which will be always more common due to climate change and soil degradation all over the world.
When a plant comes under significant stress reactive oxygen species (ROS) levels can increase considerably and cause cellular damage. This damage can range from slight to severe, vary by type of abiotic stress, severity, duration, and the number of occurrences. Regardless of how abiotic stress presents itself, a grower needs to mitigate it and get crops back in a positive growth pattern to realize its full yield potential.
Biostimulants regulate phytohormones, obtaining an answer from the plant in order to improve tolerance to the stress.
To mitigate the impact of abiotic stress biostimulants can be applied in:
- Pre-stress application for plant priming (forecast the stress) is the more effective strategy to reduce crop damage and protect the critical crop stages. In fact, biostimulants act as plant priming agents. Priming is a physiological state by which a plant is prepared to respond more rapidly or stronger to a future stress
- Post-stress application for plant recovery from stress.
Increasing the use of biostimulants means reducing the gap between the potential yield and the harvested yield.
Hello Nature biostimulants have been shown to improve crop stress response by regulate phytohormones, obtaining an answer from the plant in order to improve tolerance to the stress and activate mechanisms which allow the plant to bypass or limit the impact of abiotic stresses and thus preserve yield, mainly by maintaining photosynthetic activity or the turgor of cells.
