Glacier FarmMedia – Do plant growth regulators reduce lodging in wheat?
They had an impact, but not a huge one, in an on-farm field trial done this year.
“What we’ve seen is that they are not a silver bullet when it comes to lodging,” said Jeremy Boychyn, agronomy research extension manager for Alberta Barley and Alberta Wheat.
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“They will mitigate some moderate lodging, but not all severe lodging.
“It’s important for a producer to understand potential responses of that variety in their region. The value of these is really in intensive, higher yielding, higher rainfall, higher nutrient environments.”
In the Plot2Farm program, the cereal organization partners with interested farmers to conduct scientifically valid trials under real-life conditions.
In this case, a product called Manipulator PGR was used on spring wheat variety AAC Wheatland. The trial, on the farm of Willingdon producers Greg and Jeff Porozni, was replicated in the field five times in a randomized manner, with Manipulator applied at growth stages 30 to 32.
“That’s the ideal timing for a PGR application on wheat with Manipulator,” said Boychyn. “It was applied under normal conditions using the producer’s sprayer. All the management practices the producer would normally implement were there. The only difference was that we applied this PGR in replicated, randomized strips.”
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Rainfall at the site was slightly below average during the growing season.
A challenge for this type of on-farm trial is getting good data on how much lodging actually occurs.
Boychyn turned to a couple of experts at Olds College: Alex Melnitchouck, the school’s chief technical officer for digital agriculture, and Felippe Karp, a PhD student from McGill University who is conducting other research at the college.
Walking the field is “a hard activity, and very time consuming,” noted Karp.
“You can be biased because you see something here, and then you see something else, and you’re not sure if they’re different,” he said. “That’s when the use of the technology comes in.”
A drone took pictures of the field and then Karp used machine learning to identify what was lodging and what was not.
“We were able to come up with the locations where the lodging happened in the field,” he said. “We were not only able to provide that, but to classify it in a subjective way where we have major and minor lodging in the field. You could clearly see what was major and minor.”
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He then used software to calculate the amount of lodging.
“Based on these results, we could calculate this area and compare it to different areas where the plant growth regulator was applied or wasn’t applied,” he said.
The plant growth regulator decreased the amount of major and minor lodging .
“With the application of Manipulator, we saw an increased percentage of total standing crop,” said Boychyn.
However, there’s a major caveat that goes with the results.
“AAC Wheatland is responsive to Manipulator. Not all varieties respond the same way to Manipulator or to any PGR,” said Boychyn.
But it’s still a valuable study.
“Understanding that the variety responds is a good piece of information for producers, who may be producing in a lodging prone area or in lodging conditions,” he said.
“Lodging in cereals is a very important problem, especially … where we have heavy rains and thunderstorms,” added Melnitchouck. “It’s almost guaranteed that a certain part of the field will have some lodging.”
There was a difference in yields but it was small and not significant, said Boychyn.
“The reduction in lodging that we saw in the drone imagery with the application of Manipulator is reducing the result of negative impact on yield, likely in those more severe areas.”
Boychyn said the trial may be done again if there is producer interest.
The trial also broke ground on the tricky job of determining how much lodging is occurring in a field. Melnitchouck said that while analyzing drone imagery is common, the techniques that Karp used are new and a significant step forward.
Alberta Wheat and Barley began its Plot2Farm program in 2020 with two on-farm trials, did eight more last year and a dozen this growing season. Farmers who are interested in collaborating on an on-farm trial in 2023 can find more information at www.albertawheatbarley.com/plot2farm. Descriptions and locations of this year’s Plot2Farm trials can be found at the Alberta Wheat and Barley website.
– This article was originally published at the Alberta Farmer Express.
