Latest / Hydroponics Daily / Cold Roots, Chilled Yields: Diagnosing Root Cold Stress in Hydroponics

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Cold Roots, Chilled Yields: Diagnosing Root Cold Stress in Hydroponics · Hydroponics Daily

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  Hello there and welcome back to
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  Hydroponics Daily, your go-to podcast for everything soilless cultivation.
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  I'm your host, Dr Russell Sharp, the founder of Utrema Ltd. We make interesting
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  fertilisers, novel biostimulants and organic biopesticides.
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  And today, this afternoon, as it's a Friday afternoon, I've been out spraying
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  my local village sports field with hydroponic fertilisers.
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  A very expensive way of fertilising some sports turf normally,
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  but as a manufacturer of hydroponic
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  fertilizer it's not that expensive for me and I could just
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  put some rejected stock that didn't quite pass
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  the quality control tests onto this field
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  so hopefully they'll be growing really well because normally hydroponic
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  fertilizer is too expensive for sports turf anyway
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  I said yesterday that I'll be talking about cold stress
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  because there's a couple of aspects i haven't covered before and
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  one is that often when you get cold roots
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  that could be a particular type of stress for plants that
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  hard to diagnose and that's because you might
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  have positioned your grow room somewhere where the where the
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  floor is very cold and if you're not using sources or
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  raising your plants up off the ground you can get very
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  cold roots and you can get very cold roots
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  if you're using a nutrient tank cooling
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  system as well and you're not controlling it properly now the
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  symptoms of this and the the problems it causes are very different to just general
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  cold stress one of the things you get is desiccation so it might look like your
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  plants aren't getting enough water because they and so you get desiccation and
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  this happens in the real the real world.
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  Nature it happens in nature it conifers when
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  there's a very warm spring conifers can
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  dehydrate and die off desiccate because the soil
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  is still very cold and the air is high and
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  so the stomata are open but the the pores in
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  the roots the what are called aquaporins they're not
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  open yet and so the plant dries out so you
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  can get that you can also get a limitation in phosphorus uptake and so in legal
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  cannabis this is purpling of the stems that's a very common symptom or purpling
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  of the leaves in many other crops okay now in cucumbers and melons a lot of growers have moved to,
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  hydroponics to get away from this issue so soil-based cultivation this was one
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  of the limiting factors in that and also grafting as well grafting is often
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  used to put a cold tolerant,
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  variety on interestingly i saw a read
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  a report today that a lot of growers are now moving to grafting in peppers because
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  there's a there's a variety that's resistant to fusarium so they can graft on
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  their favorite variety on top
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  of that and get resistance to fusarium which is a big problem in peppers.
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  Now, the other big thing that I talked about was the Spanish researchers,
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  I think at the University of Barcelona, or should I say Catalan.
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  Researchers, they may not like to be called Spanish, but there you go,
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  they live in Spain, so they are Spanish, if they like it or not.
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  They published a paper in Plant Physiology, which is a very well-respected journal.
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  Scientific journal, and they found they could genetically modify
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  tomato plants to have much greater
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  cold stress but um greater activation
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  of antioxidant enzymes stress defense genes and
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  synthesis of lots of defense chemicals like
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  polyamines and things like this if they increase
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  the level of what they call or
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  what is called glycosylated steroids in the plant but
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  in reality it's basically what we
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  call cholesterol in humans sterols
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  they are what are in plants in the cell walls so
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  they're a good thing to have and if you increase them in
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  plants then increases their stress their cold stress tolerance so
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  you can have a cold tolerant tomato so the
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  great guys the researchers at the university of barcelona have
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  done this research in actual fact it will probably be
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  the growers of you
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  know scotland norway russia canada
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  argentina that antarctica that
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  will benefit from this because you could
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  have tomato crops that could grow i don't know they could maybe grow outdoors
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  it doesn't say frost tolerant it just says cold tolerant so maybe they're thinking
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  more maybe the traditional sort of almeria greenhouses but maybe in the north
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  of spain maybe it's things like that so shout out to professors albert ferrer and theresa altabella.
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  It's unusual that for Spanish researchers. Well, they have two surnames, don't they?
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  So yeah, check out that research from the University of Barcelona published
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  in Plant Physiology. That's a really interesting study.
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  You may be pro-GM, you might be anti-GM, but it's still an interesting study
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  to find that you can increase the cold resistance by increasing what is essentially cholesterol.
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  But in plants, we call that sterols or cystosterol or stigmasterol.
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  And so yeah, you can get them. They also, these cholesterol sterile type compounds
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  also occur in fungi as well.
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  So yeah, that's really interesting. What else was I going to talk about?
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  I was going to talk about another study, another, not study,
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  an interesting news story.
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  And that was that a greenhouse in Holland is no longer going to be a greenhouse.
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  It's going to be, well, I'm not sure what's going to happen with it.
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  It's been sold to Eli Lilly, which is a pharmaceutical company who have made
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  a range of different pharmaceuticals over the years in existence an american
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  pharmaceutical company.
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  And with some degree of controversy
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  and they bought a greenhouse and i'll talk
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  about that tomorrow because that makes a good news story and the whole thing about
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  eli lily and botanicals is
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  a really interesting study so it should be a good one for its own so
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  yeah check out that one tomorrow you'll have lily and their botanical
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  new botanical venture or or is it is it
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  or they're just buying greenhouses and they convert them into factories who
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  knows check it out tomorrow all right thank you very much for listening that's been
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  hydroponics daily for today if you found this
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  of any use then please leave a a apple podcast
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  click follow and then check out utreema.co.uk and you'll find some of the amazing
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  products we manufacture and have developed and invented for use in hydroponics
• 6:37
  something that you will lots and lots of products you won't find in other fertilizer
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  and nutritional companies portfolios all right until tomorrow thanks very much for listening goodbye.