Spray on Crop Protection
A new innovation from Washington State University offers a solution for an ancient problem; how to protect crops from frost damage at bud break.
The issue is that, as spring brings warmer weather, plants awake from dormancy and begin flowering as a first step to producing fruit.
But weather can be unpredictable, and a sudden cold snap for even a single night can kill those buds before they have a chance to grow. A report from the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization says that, “in the USA, there are more economic losses to frost damage than to any other weather-related phenomenon.”
That’s where a new invention from WSU scientists Xiao Zhang, Matt Whiting and their colleagues Qin Zhang and Changki Mo comes in. The team is using cellulose nanocrystals, or CNCs, to protect grape, cherry and other flowering crop plants during frost events.
Cellulose, the most common polymer on the planet, is a remarkable substance with myriad useful properties. The WSU team wrote in a recent paper that CNCs are stronger than steel in a strength-to-weight face off, capable of being drawn into thin film-like layers and, best of all, offer extreme insulation values.
In a recent field study, the researchers concluded that a single CNC application “improves cold-hardiness of sweet cherry and grape buds by about 2–4 °C compared to non-treated buds.”
That thin protective layer is just enough to keep baby buds snug until the cold snap gives way to the warmer spring weather which triggered the new growth in the first place.
Zhang and Whiting have now formed a new company, Pomona Technologies, and hope to see their first product commercially available in 2022.