by Heather Grande
Farming Smarter is looking into how planting seeds at earlier times may benefit plant growth, especially with the increase in temperature earlier in the year.
Ultra-Early Seeding investigates the effects that global warming is having on plants and how planting seeds earlier may lengthen growing periods.
Farming Smarter, in collaboration with Agricultural, Food and Nutritional Sciences, University of Alberta, wants to show there is a strong opportunity to get on land earlier without it a negative effect on the crops. Dr. Brian L. Beres is lead researcher on the project and partnered with Farming Smarter to ensure his findings reached the largest audience possible.
In traditional seeding, there is a short time window that is optimum for seeding. Ultra-early seeding is proving that the time window to plant some crops may be larger and give farmers more time to complete seeding, without a time crunch on temperature sensitive plants.
Jamie Puchinger, Assistant Manager, leads the project at Farming Smarter. She talked about sharing the information with their audience on many platforms helps ensure people know and understand the work.
"We are just using the information generated by Brian's research and sharing it with our network. So we use all our extension tools to make sure that people know about the research and have access to the findings of study," said Puchinger.
She also talked about how it can sometimes be a struggle for researchers to showcase their information to a large audience. By working with Farming Smarter they can reach awider audience through already established communication platforms and networks.
Farming Smarter and Dr Brian L. Beres have a great working relationship and will continue to work on different research projects and share results with the largest audience possible.